This article is taken from the November 2022 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

What went wrong with Liz Truss? How did the clear winner of the first Tory leadership election of 2022 throw it all away? It was by being in office when the music stopped. To see how Truss failed is more than a story of her personal incompetence, it is to appreciate that she squandered no great and glorious inheritance. For the disastrous rule at the Treasury of George Osborne and Philip Hammond and Rishi Sunak (and before them Brown and Darling), left her nothing to fritter away. For a generation Britain has refused to face up to its problems. Now it can no longer look away.

Covid has pushed this situation to crisis point

No doubt the reaction of the markets to Kwasi Kwarteng’s swiftly aborted “fiscal event” was skittish to the point of hysterical. The strange cult that says market sentiment must be divined then deferred to sits oddly with ideas of public policy and democratic desires. But whatever the reason the market finally lost its temper with Britain, the key thing is that it could not be resisted. The country was not strong enough to do so. This is the fault of Truss and Kwarteng’s many predecessors going back well into the last century. 

How did we become this vulnerable? Everyone realises at an intuitive level that Britain isn’t working: that in some deep, fundamental way, an irreversible rot has set in — of leadership and management, of institutions and methods. 

The cumulative effect of these decades of failure has been that we have lost state capacity: the basic ability to do the things politicians promised would be done. How else do we explain the litany of broken promises on immigration, NHS waiting times, education, Brexit, Northern Ireland, crime or any of a dozen other supposedly urgent priorities? It is too despairing to think that politicians actually wanted their words to be so hollow, and their actions so futile. Something has gone wrong, and it keeps on going wrong.

Truss’s disastrous month in power, and the sudden u-turn on her growth agenda, have simply been a fast-forward replay of previous failed Conservative governments from David Cameron to Boris Johnson, set to the Benny Hill theme. 

This loss of capacity is not just a structural or cultural failure, but rather a dangerous compound of both. British institutions have lost a sense of the national interest as being the legitimate end they serve. Instead of their duly-appointed political masters having the mandate of heaven, civil servants follow a self-interested and self-perpetuating agenda of their own. We thus have the worst of both worlds: a big bureaucracy but a pathetic state.

Not only do many British institutions and organs of state simply not want to comply with the policy goals of elected governments — whether, for example, Brexit or immigration — they couldn’t carry them out if they so desired.  

Rather than policies sloganised as “austerity” or “outsourcing” having shrunk the state, these measures have conscripted much of what we laughably describe as the private sector as auxiliaries of the state, whether in propagating progressive diversity agendas, or complying with the ever-growing mass of regulation pouring forth from parliament. Thus the already incapable British state is weakened still further as it swells ever larger. 

Realism and history reveal this grim truth

Covid has pushed this situation to crisis point, with sections of public sector Britain seeming to have all but given up. All with official encouragement by so many others whose salaries are taxed out of those who remain in private employment. Much of the media has been shy to give due coverage to this collapse of the public service ethic as if doing so is somehow unpatriotic or poor form. 

Woeful productivity figures and a weakening pound tell us the grim truth in statistics and graphs, but it’s also staring us all in the face. Around 30 per cent of the British workforce still allegedly works from home, including in the public sector, where 29 per cent are working remotely full time, and 62 per cent are working remotely at least one day a week. 

In a system of administration where accountability is already hopelessly confused between politicians, civil servants and private contractors, we have added the additional chaos of endless Zoom calls, absent colleagues, and fractured schedules. The once very real bond of work has become virtual — if any real work is being done at all.

Evidence of malaise, laziness and outright indifference are everywhere in British policy. We learn that 30 former British military pilots had been successfully lured by China to train her armed forces as to how best fight Western ones. Ministers and officials scrambled to check if this sort of thing was allowed. 

Apparently, despite the sheer statistical improbability of something not being against the law in modern Britain, it was entirely legal. Yet it occurred to no one who had taken an oath to serve that something was plainly wrong here.

“Decline is a choice” is ultimately trite optimism: all too often nothing can be done. Realism and history reveal this grim truth. But decline was a choice in the sense that our current wretched state is the outcome of all those wrong choices we long ago made. The least we can now choose to do is to wake up to the mess we are in.