Great Britain is failing because it’s no longer behaving like a serious country

Every nation suffers from a fatal character flaw. France has struggled to shake off its relish for insurrection ever since the Revolution. Germany’s industriousness has always been tarnished by a certain dogmatism (as reflected in its reluctance to break ties with the Kremlin). Italy is plagued by a parochial insularity. America – the land of dental veneers, neoclassical architecture and deranged conspiracy theories – is tortured by an aversion to hard distinctions between the real and the fake. And then there is Russia: the country responsible for the world’s greatest literature, but also the world’s highest rate of alcoholism, has become trapped in the treacle of its own romantic nihilism.

Britain, meanwhile, suffers from a fundamental lack of seriousness. The late journalist AA Gill argued that what distinguishes us is a “simmering, unfocused, lurking anger”. In fact, we are cursed by a callow, shambolic sloth. George Orwell was on the money when he described the English as an essentially “gentle” but “sleep-walking” civilisation plagued by utter “thoughtlessness”. Britain is, after all, the country that invented not just the steam engine and the spinning jenny but also fake politeness and pretty much every sport in existence. Our tendency to seek escapism in triviality borders on a national sickness.

This British lack of seriousness has been on stark display of late. Take the paroxysms of elite nausea unleashed by the Prime Minister’s proposals for pupils to continue studying maths until the age 18. True, Rishi Sunak brought some of the mockery on himself, by allowing it to be understood that this plan was somehow his solution to all of our national woes. Still, the remorseless waves of cynicism that crashed down on this perfectly sensible policy are an insight into Britain’s flippant prejudices against STEM subjects.

Commentators like The Guardian’s Sir Simon Jenkins declared that “a cult of maths” is brainwashing schools, arguing that the idea that the nation’s future might rest on “a universal teenage mastery of complex and abstract concepts” was absurd. It wasn’t just pundits, either. Millions seem to be in a state of total ignorance about the skills that are required in the modern world.

There was a time when the British could indeed make a virtue of their horror at abstract thinking, refashioning it into a preference for all things “practical”. During the Industrial Revolution, this country showed that it then had a peculiar genius for adapting technologies and breakthroughs that had originated elsewhere for actual use. However, there will be no getting away from the need for abstract skills this time around. Maths, being the secret recipe to coding, is central to preparing this country for the fourth industrial revolution. Our increasingly 'intangible economy' requires less of the routine production skills associated with the factory floor and more of the theoretical problem-solving skills (dubbed 'symbolic analysis' by the American professor Robert Reich) which have always underpinned trades like plumbing but are crucial to the likes of software engineering and robotics.

Not that anyone seems all that bothered, though. Indeed, Britain today seems to suffer from an alarming ignorance – not simply of the future of the global economy, but also our national strengths and weaknesses. Culturally, we still like to imagine that we are a country of incremental tinkerers – and yet, as our woeful productivity suggests, our SMEs have become poor at seizing on new practical innovations. Meanwhile, we ignore, or even disdain, areas where we are truly world leaders – from quantum physics to genomic healthcare. 

Certainly, we make almost zero effort to capitalise on them. Basic science funding remains woeful. Without a pip of protest, and despite the vast success of Dame Kate Bingham’s vaccine taskforce, the Government has dismantled the entire vaccine manufacturing infrastructure built during Covid. Such jaw-dropping idiocies are only possible in a country that has no idea of what it is truly capable, mainly because it has never seen any cause to give it a second thought.

Similarly, nobody appears to have given any serious consideration to how to capitalise on Brexit. It is incredible that the Government still does not have a concrete strategy for regulatory divergence, so that it might be used to bolster areas in which we are strong. Gene editing and data rules would be a good place to start, and yet the Tories continue to push their performative “Brexit Freedoms Bill”, with its hubristic aim of scrapping EU regulations merely for the sake of scrapping them. Leaving the EU was meant to be an act of conscious national renewal. Instead, it has descended into a shallow exercise in headline generation that is only proving the Remainers’ point.

Then there is the country’s wilful refusal to get to grips with our most immediate crises. Take the NHS. Even as it stands on the brink of collapse, the public’s reverence for the health service is as profound as it is superficial. With the rise of celebrity culture, we have anthropomorphised it into a “national treasure” that can do no wrong. Due to a fatal intersection of Leftist activism, corporate branding and rising secularism, the NHS has become a religion, intimidating and slick in equal measure.

That’s why there will be no serious attempt to reform it – even if Labour is now making some sensible noises. An Ireland-style system, where the health service exists as a safety net for the poor, with the better-off either going private or making contributions to their treatments, should surely be on the cards. But if we do end up at that point, we will have stumbled there in an ad-hoc, chaotic manner, with the middle class simply abandoning the system out of despair. Knee-jerk collective “loyalty” to the NHS brand – with its soothing logo the same Pantone Blue as Pepsi – dies hard.

We’re not being serious about the strikes, either. It is extraordinary that amid all the brouhaha over the salary entitlements of nurses, teachers and train drivers, hardly anyone has questioned whether they should be allowed to strike at all. The police and the Army have no such legal right, for the obvious reason that in no properly functioning country is it ever justified to allow criminals to run amok or national security to be jeopardised. And yet it apparently doesn’t occur to us that those who care for the sick, educate our children and run the transport infrastructure that underpins our economy should forgo the right to strike as a condition of their employment as well.

It betrays the mindset of a country that isn’t particularly dedicated to keeping itself going, let alone improving itself. This is a truly great nation of endless potential. We need to start acting like it.