Why Things Might Actually Be About To Get Better

Reasons For National Optimism

Catch-up service:
Seven Underrated Forms of Diversity
Why Margaret Thatcher Didn’t Jump
The ‘Both Sides’ Problem
The Good Enough Trap

Poor Rishi, at the mercy of the great British weather. So unpredictable, isn’t it? I mean it’s not like it had been raining every day of the week or anything.

I’m still trying to understand what was going through their heads. Granted, most of the people involved in staging Rishi Sunak’s setpiece would have had little time to prepare for it. But however much time they had, it was more than Keir Starmer’s team, who nonetheless landed on the ingenious idea of having their leader speak under a roof.

My best guess is that a macho, quasi-Churchillian spirit took hold in 10 Downing Street that day, and that nobody wanted to be Chamberlain appeasing the weather gods. Perhaps an aide nervously raised the problem of rain drenching the PM, only to have her objection swept aside by Sunak: “Nonsense, I’m a leader for all weathers!” Cue cheering and applause and five hours later he’s standing out there, soaked as a ferret, thinking This is totally fine and When will my nightmare end?

When Sunak and his senior aides start looking for new jobs after the defeat they are pretty much guaranteed to endure in July, I expect we’ll be hearing lots about how tough it was, what an impossible position they were put in by their predecessors, by the party, by the media, and so on. Anyone who hears some version of this sad story should nod sympathetically - since much of it is true - and then ask, so how the hell did you manage to make everything so much worse than it needed to be?

Anyway: for those of you who haven’t been following British politics, Rishi Sunak has called an election for six weeks’ time, which is several months earlier than most people expected. In the UK, the government gets to spring this kind of surprise. This gives the party in power an advantage, because they can plan their announce- look, you’ll just have to believe me, it is usually an advantage.

The above tweet is funny because it’s true. Starmer’s ability to look like a serious Prime Minister-in-waiting has been greatly enhanced by the incompetence of Sunak and the others who have led the country since he became Leader of the Opposition. It’s also been enhanced by the clown who preceded him in that role. Starmer is lucky in his opponents, even if that means bad luck for the rest of us.

I won’t dwell on Sunak because I already wrote about him here. Sam Freedman and Duncan Robinson both do a good job of reminding us that he and his team are not just comically bad at politics, but terrible at policy too - short-termist, scattergun, impulsive, fad-driven.

In fact, this week’s decision to go to the country early was an unusually brave one. Yes, it’s probably just because he’s sick of the job and wants out, but whatever the motivation was it took considerable resolution to see that, contra to his accidental soundtrack yesterday, things were never going to get better for him and were probably going to get worse. As Danny Finkelstein says, this was the last true act of volition available to him. It was, in its way, an admission of his own uselessness. Self-insight comes hard.

Sunak’s decision is also, lest we forget, good news, the first good news in politics for an age. The country has been stuck for what feels like forever with a zombie government which switches heads now and again but remains fundamentally impotent and incompetent. For years now we’ve been in stasis. The political news, even the big news, has seemed trivial and meaningless. But a change of governing party - that’s an actual event.

I do not sense much excitement about the prospect of a new, Starmer-led, Labour government. Perhaps that’s a good thing, since it’s better to be pre-disappointed than disappointed. But I’d say there are reasons to be cautiously optimistic about the next 5-10 years.

Let’s start with politics. While Starmer may never be anything but underwhelming as a leader, he will at the very least be a reasonably able, grown-up, hard-working, politically mainstream Prime Minister, atop a united party, and, if the election goes well for him, a sizeable parliamentary majority. Simply by being who he is, and being in that position, he will therefore in all likelihood be the most effective Prime Minister, leading the most stable government, for a long time - eight years, at least. Starmer will also be working alongside a Chancellor who will be better at the job than anyone who has done it since 2010 (as even the Mail might agree). Yes, the bar has been set depressingly low, and we haven’t even mentioned what a Labour government might do or all the problems it will inherit. But these basic truths should not be easily dismissed or overlooked.

Back in 2021, in a rare fit of prescience, I predicted Starmer would recover from what turned out to be his lowest ebb. The logic, which you can read in my thread, was similar to the one I lay out above. In politics, as in investing (so I hear), people generally pay too much attention to news and not enough to fundamentals.

We also exaggerate the permanence of the moment we’re in, and under-estimate the possibility of change. Since we’ve been stuck for so long in what you might call the post-Brexit moment, we’ve come to take it for granted that the national malaise is never going to lift. You don’t need to be planning a trip to the South Bank for the morning after election day, in your Starmer mask, to see that this isn’t necessarily so. Countries which appear to be structurally, irreversibly challenged can and do confound gloomy predictions. Even if you think Britain is in a weak economic position now, you’d probably agree that it’s stronger than Greece or Italy ten years ago. Those countries were two of the fastest-growing economies in Europe last year.

Economic and political sentiments which seem entrenched can change quickly and decisively. That kind of vibe shift was never going to happen during the Tory fin de siecle but under a new government it just might. It’s not that our decaying public sector will spring back to life in July, or that everyone will start building houses and power stations, or that overseas investors will start pouring billions into British companies. But it may be that people at home and abroad feel that the country is moving in the right direction, and that this feeling becomes self-fulfilling. Momentum is not nothing. The existence of the hot hand is disputed in sport; in macro-economics it’s real enough.

I was pondering all this on Thursday, and posted a question to Twitter: “What are the best, most plausible reasons for optimism about Britain over the next five years?” I received a whole bunch of fascinating replies from lots of very smart people. I even got a reply from the current Chancellor. Without necessarily finding all of the answers equally convincing, I started feeling more cheerful about Britain’s future just reading through them. I’ve put together a digest of the best and most persuasive answers after the jump.