Prosperity or decline

Not single spies, but in battalions. It is extraordinary to watch, in our time, the postwar settlement beginning to crumble. First slowly, then all at once. As a star collapses into a Black Hole, an entire Establishment is being sucked in. 

Where to start? The crises that mass immigration is now triggering in Britain cannot be ignored. Harming the shared trust built over centuries by shared norms, it is upending the political settlement. The claim, repeated by our political elite, that there is no alternative for growth, is turning out to be a con. The economic case for mass migration has collapsed, as the data increasingly shows that low-skill, low-wage migration has made us poorer, not to mention making houses harder to buy, so families harder to start. 

For years, a multiculturalist political class hid the fact that mass immigration from profoundly incompatible cultures had resulted in the organised mass rape of British children. Our leaders are growing strangely quiet now, but the edifice they have created is beginning to resemble a failed state. 

We see this too in the relativism that has taken control of the academy, and in the Net-Zero groupthink that will decimate Britain’s industry, which once made the world prosperous: its supporters cannot point to any significant impact on the world’s climate, because rival nations are simply ignoring this allegedly “global” effort. 

The process now underway is beginning to overwhelm the British state. Its structures are unprepared to deal with the political change that began in the 2016 Brexit referendum, then accelerated after the collapse of Theresa May’s attempts to hold back the tide. Yet many of the crises it is facing were caused by the postwar constitutional vandalism of an ancient settlement, which, having evolved from early Mediaeval times, was a political construction perhaps uniquely successful in human history. 

The most intensive phase of vandalism, after 1997, installed a bureaucratic class beyond democratic control. It is now making sure that no area of national life is beyond its reach. Freedom of association, speech and thought are at risk, as every business and institution is made to dance to the same ideological tune. The state once did a few things well; now it does everything badly. 

Britain is now reaching an inflection point. More than his first election victory, the inauguration of Donald Trump this week sees our English-speaking cousins begin to dismantle the farcical woke state. American companies are ditching the ideological DEI commissars; they are unleashing the market to provide abundant energy and, ultimately, wealth. But in Britain, we have punitive taxation, virtually the most expensive energy in the world, and regulatory overload. We will soon feel increasingly exposed to poverty-by-choice. 

Britain and the West can, and will, rejuvenate prosperity by rediscovering its origins

The moral, cultural and constitutional settlement Britain created in the millennium up to the Industrial Revolution unleashed the greatest increase in human prosperity ever seen. Having ditched it, we now are getting poorer. The symptoms of malaise have something in common: they are in large part the result of jettisoning a unifying Judeo-Christian culture. If we thought the relativism that took its place would give us a gentle grove of rational debate, instead, the void is being filled by a violent new paganism: feuding tribes (i.e. multiculturalism), child sacrifice to medical trans-mutilators and foreign gangs, and economic potlatch to placate vengeful weather gods. Nature abhors a vacuum, and human nature, red in tooth and claw, is filling it.  

What comes next? For a time, the widening gyre. But Britain and the West can, and will, rejuvenate prosperity by rediscovering its origins. As a culture, we have done something similar before, when Wilberforce and his allies reformed a hedonic political culture into the one that reshaped the world. 

At the Prosperity Institute, known until this week as Legatum Institute, we work to rediscover some historic truths, the ways that work: the sovereign nation state, free markets, low taxes, the primacy of the family, the roots of the nation in a people with a shared and demanding culture. This means rediscovering the values that created prosperity in Britain and the English-speaking world in the first place, including the Judeo-Christian foundations, common law and constitution. On these, it is becoming clear, all our civilised norms depend. For so much of history, Britain has been a beacon to others, and in Brexit it launched a new era of renewal. The process is incomplete, but a new generation is emerging, carrying a simple but vital understanding for our country: to thine own self be true.