Do we have what we need to do great things? It’s a question you could ask of Britain. Do we have what we need at all?
In raw terms, yes, probably. The country’s geography, which made it a safe haven for European money, a fine petri dish for experiments in science and self-government, has not changed overly. Quite a lot of the American west coast just burned down. That’s not going to happen to Manchester. It simply rains too much for that. Britain’s still close enough to the continent to hoover up rootless talent, far enough away to avoid cultural or military contagion, even in the era of the ICBM.
But do we have the means? Do we have the muscle? Those are questions that must also be asked. The peoples who make up Britain are different now. Sixteen or more percent born abroad. Some of them will be molecular chemists. But not all. Let’s not kid ourselves. Rishi Sunak did that; he thought the country could derive most of its immigration from former Soviet holders of doctorates in mathematics. And look how well that dream worked out. Look how well that dream worked out.
But I digress. Back to attention.
The British state used to be small and it used to be efficient. Look at how William Pitt the Younger was permitted to run the country: using a small group of men he knew well, at least by reputation, he spent aggressively on favoured outcomes, backed winners independent of some judicial oversight which would have kneecapped those best placed to bid for contracts.
He put criminals in prison, too, and sent some to their deaths at Newgate. Now that was radical. And Pitt and his governments primed the action. For the eventual defeat of Napoleon. And they built the world’s largest empire (considered A Good Thing in those days) and grew the economy precipitously.
All this was possible because attention — that fickle thing, that currency — was not all lost. It could be maintained. It could be directed to grasping detail — and getting big things done.
What do we have today? A state that is so immense, so sprawling, that its functions cannot be understood, let alone gripped, by anyone. Departments and services and agencies which employ millions. Layer upon layer of precedent, of convention. All of which appear to amount (at least according to members of our legal-civil-service-NGO-professorial regime), to as good as a declaration — a declaration that you cannot build anything, can’t make anything new, can’t improve anything lest someone be made worse off, some favoured group lose their court-mandated rights, lest someone, somewhere have a claim for judicial review.
The state, more powerful than ever before, more all-seeing in theory than ever before, cannot marshal its resources. It cannot focus attention on anything, anything at all. At least so far as doing anything big, anything good.
One theory leaps to the front – stands, I fear, to attention. It’s because of who staffs the state and what they’re like. The civil servants know they are permanent. They’re going nowhere unless they get another job or a better offer. Sure, they’ll be moved around the regime’s bureaucracy. Often from one job with very specific responsibilities to another which has no overlap. But that’s fine, the regime believes, because civil servants ought to be interchangeable. They ought to think and do the same things. They ought to be no better than each other. It’s fine to farm our stars out. They must learn to play nicely with the other children.
The state can act this complacently because it is a distributed network, its attention never slacking, an all-seeing eye focussed squarely on the main job: getting nothing done.
It is for politicians that the difficulty emerges. They arrive newly in office, having worked hard to come up with ideas for change — plans to grow the economy, for instance. How novel!
But now their attention is scattered to the four winds. They are assailed by trivia. What were once priorities become inclinations, then things of interest but not daily importance. The media circus takes over, the departments stymie your legislation and write new bills themselves, the courts say you can’t build anything. The permanent state stays where it is, sitting pretty.
You need attention to save a country. Does anyone in Britain have what that task requires?