Posted on 6th January, 2026 in Blog posts
THE BEDROCK OF OUR CIVILISATION AND HOW TO REVITALISE IT
In several articles and a book, WHO ARE WE? I have argued that if the British want to save their open society and its influence around the world, they must redevelop the economy, which has been the foundation of our cultural and social achievements, since the Reformation released us from intellectual sclerosis.
In WHO ARE WE? I suggested that Britain (or rather, the WISE, as I term Wales, Ireland, Scotland and England) face unpleasant futures unless we restore ourselves in our own eyes and that of the world so that we can be seen to have the moral authority of the most beneficent polity. This requires affirmation of our identity as the inventor of freedom, but also that we see ourselves as a developing economy, not a declining one. As Larry Elliott puts it, we should emulate Taiwan.[1]
‘The lesson of history is that a country that achieves technological innovation and profitable geopolitical expansion can grow its way out from under a mountain of debt.’[2] Though the likelihood of success is not great, it is the only way out of our predicament.
By relaunching our economy, we should ensure that Britain can survive in a perilous world. We will only be able to deal with the other challenges—the funding of the health service or defence, improving education, raising living standards, going green, inequality—if we do so. What’s needed is development, democracy and diplomacy. A Sixth Revolution in thinking. Here I describe what I mean by development.
Development
What we need are: A development mindset, a strategy for national economic reconstruction, a sense of community and equity between generations and regions.
WISE politicians have been indifferent to the transfer of our industries to foreign countries and allowed the good jobs of the commoners to go elsewhere. They have abandoned the former industrial areas, the coastal resorts and fishing towns. They have been indifferent to our growing reliance on two service industries for our export earnings. They have damaged us immensely by allowing, deliberately, our energy costs to become 52% higher than the average of the advanced economies and three times higher than the USA or Canada[3] . The consequences are not only further relative decline but ever-greater social polarisation between rich and poor.[4]
Our political class has been indifferent to the immense changes in the world, especially to the rise of Asia (and what it means to us) and the damage that globalisation has done to the commoners. While the pols have been playing their silly ideological competitions or helping their friends make good, WISE influence has eroded. Adapting Mahbubani’s evocative phrases, in the past, the West drove the growth of the Rest; now, the Rest drive the West. Our leaders should be making a careful appraisal of the new global economic order and working out how we can find opportunities for ourselves.
Development Mindset
We need action. The whole agenda of politics has to change, from trying to please particular lobby groups or special interests, and from making off-the-cuff decisions about important issues for temporary political expediency, to a clear focus on the revival of the economy, reduction of dependence, reducing debt. Political parties should be vying to proclaim better ideas on raising GDP (sustainably) rather than exposing each other’s peccadillos. We need a development mindset.
Policy Directions
- Development cannot be achieved without major changes of attitude: investors must invest in Britain;
- enterprises must not be sold to foreign competitors;
- our infrastructure should be controlled from home.
- Local governments need to be liberated, motivated and empowered to rebuild their local economies.
- Large social organisations should be broken up so that responsibility can be clearly assigned in their units; in human affairs, small is almost always best.
- Central government must provide the framework and incentives for economic revival but not micromanage it.[5]
- Every public policy should be judged by its likely effect on development, whether diversity legislation, immigration, constitutional reform or education.
National Economic Reconstruction
National economic reconstruction has two aspects: economic nationalism and industrial strategy.
Economic Nationalism
While the term sounds aggressive, economic nationalism, as Attlee and Wilson appear to have conceived it, is no more than putting the interests of the commoners above the fantasies of Mrs Jellybys, the cupidity of investors or (today) the ambitions of politics careerists, who are members of a transnational political class.[6]
Policy Directions
- Identify essential industries, the lack of which renders us dependent on others, for rebuilding and/or renationalisation.
- Implement state-led re-industrialisation of left-behind areas by incentivising and mobilising local governments to see themselves as catalysts for enterprise. We should go well beyond the current Levelling Up Programme.[7]
- Domesticate investment and prevent the selling off of UK companies by introducing rules and restraints that prevail elsewhere (for example Germany and the US).[8]
- Reform the taxation system: disincentivise selling enterprises to foreigners and ensure that foreign corporations pay properly, instead of sheltering in tax havens.[9]
- Reduce dependency and ensure food and energy security.
- Enforce a growth mandate for local governments – if they can be mandated to impose diversity, they can be mandated to create sustainable growth.
- Procurement must follow the example of other countries and ensure preference for local supply.
- Reform public servants – incentivised to promote growth rather than implement ideology.[10]
- Provide tax-raising powers to local authorities who should compete with each other to raise the GDP of their area and provide the best environment for the least expense.
- Devolve powers over education, health and welfare to local authorities on the Swedish model, making them responsible for raising most of the funding (yes, the central government would still redistribute) and introducing competition.
- Complete the reform of state education with reference to the experience of other countries whose outcomes are superior.[11]
- Identify fields for UK specialisation and direction of resources into them.
Industrial Strategy
The urgent need for an industrial strategy has been recognised by a few of our politicians, but ideologists oppose it. They do not see the UK from a global perspective or realise how we have been damaged by a laissez-faire attitude.[12]
Innovation has long been the main driver of growth and is increasingly also the determinant of geopolitical status.[13] However, with few exceptions, British politicians have rejected the idea that the government should involve itself in promoting innovation, preferring to rely on ‘free markets’.
While the US government also trumpets the superiority of free markets, it practises favouritism and subsidy. In the USA, it is widely understood that one of the roles of the government is to lower the risks facing innovators. It provides systematic help to businesses, especially in high-tech, on a scale which is not understood by those who take American free market rhetoric at face value. Elon Musk not only received federal funds to build his business empire but also state funds, totalling about $7bn.[14]
Here, far from promoting innovation, policymakers stymie it. The Competition Commission vetoed the BBC and ITV working together to create a kind of Netflix (Project Kangaroo) in 2009.[15] Eventually, a successor, BritBox, was launched in 2017 after the US had already come to dominate global content streaming services. 5G was to be our opportunity to get ahead through the Huawei/Vodaphone alliance. When the USA decided to destroy Huawei, we obliged by wrecking our own options, in doing what US politicians commanded. Our government did not help UK industry get into the UK offshore wind sector, so Danish companies succeeded, subsidised by their government. In 2019, our politicians allowed one of Britain’s R&D powerhouses, GKN, to be bought by an asset stripper. There are many other examples of how indifference has damaged our prospects.
The recent head of UK Trade & Investment, Andrew Cahn, writes, ‘We need to put in the intellectual effort to analyse where Britain can gain an advantage, where we must act to remain competitive, where we are not keeping up with the competition. This means doing planning work over an extended period of time and then facing up to the conclusions.’
‘We do not learn from our competitors,’ he goes on. ‘The most successful, such as Singapore, New Zealand, Canada, now the USA, have higher levels of productivity and innovation than we do. We should be prepared to learn from them how to do industrial strategy.’[16] French, German, Chinese and Scandinavian governments all have well-established modes of protecting and promoting their industries and innovations. We must take lessons.
The National Security and Investment Act 2021 listed 17 areas of vital national interest. We must get moving. Taiwan teaches. In the 1980s, scared of a future without modern industry, the Prime Minister in Taipei called up a scientist in the USA and asked if he’d come home and start a computer industry from scratch. Today, Taiwan leads the world in the design and manufacture of semiconductors, 60% of all worldwide and 90% of the most advanced. [17]
Alex Brummer can’t see why the UK shouldn’t do the same. ‘With the energy, willpower, imagination and the resources of corporate Britain and the government, anything can be achieved.’[18]
Policy Directions
- Identify key technologies where we have a comparative advantage and which should be backed with public funding.[19]
- Concentrate higher education funding on Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) areas.
- Re-orientate the FE sector to become an expert and prestigious provider of technical and professional education – if necessary, recruiting instructors or curriculum designers from more advanced countries such as Germany or Japan.
- At last, create the technical and professional schools envisaged 60 years ago.
- Re-introduce selection by aptitude into state schools (now, selection is by wealth).
- A world talents programme, to recruit the leaders in those areas of development identified as vital to our future, to come to work in WISE.
THERE IS MORE TO SAY ABOUT HOW WE MIGHT UNITE ALL OUR PEOPLE AROUND A PROGRAMME OF RE-DEVELOPMENT, AND THE POLITICAL PROCESSES THAT MAY BE NEEDED TO EFFECT THIS; BUT FOR THAT, PLEASE READ WHO ARE WE?
[1] https://www.briefingsforbritain.co.uk/we-think-of-britain-as-a-world-beating-economy-we-would-be-better-off-thinking-about-taiwan/, accessed 221122. Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson predicted the downward spiral of the economy ten or more years ago in The Gods that Failed, Going South and Fantasy Island. A few months before completing this book, I asked Larry Elliott whether he stood by his books. He looked very unhappy as he said ‘Yes’. In 2010, Elliott and the then Archbishop of Canterbury published Crisis and Recovery: Ethics, Economics and Justice London: Palgrave MacMillan, a collection of essays on our economic life with an Anglican perspective.
[2] Ferguson (2012) The Great Degeneration, p147
[3] Timothy, Nick (2024), citing the International Energy Agency, in High energy costs are a choice – and an act of national self-harm, in Daily Telegraph, 190224. Matt Ridley argues that energy–abundance, affordability and reliability of energy–is fundamental to a successful civilisation. ‘And I see our climate obsession, and consequent abandonment of reliable and affordable energy, as a symptom of blinkeredness rather than a solution to it.’ (email communication 300623) ‘The combination of having to buy more expensive natural gas from Qatar and the United States losing access to China’s lucrative market for European cars, machinery, and luxury goods could cause Europe to deindustrialize.’ Sikorsky, Radek: Europe’s real test is yet to come. Foreign Affairs, July–August 2023.
[4] Milanovich, Branco: the great convergence, global equality, and its discontents. Foreign Affairs, July–August 2023.
[5] I have emphasised the maleficent results of the centralisation of powers in this book, but here, I want to propose beneficent ones. John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge give some good examples of the valuable use of government power in (2020) The Wake-Up Call London: Short Books, e.g. p56.
[6] The quintessential transnational pol must surely be Rishi Sunak, not because of his Indian origins but because he had, until recently, a US green card and is married to a multinational business empire which pays very little tax to the UK.
[7] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/levelling-up-the-united-kingdom, accessed 090523.
[8] David (Viscount) Hanworth, has made proposals to control financial sector, where it is inimical to WISE interests. See Hanton, Angus (2024) Vassal State, p39.
[9] Much more on this is at Hanton, Angus (2024) Vassal State, p222.
[10] Dominic Cummings, adviser to Prime Minister Boris Johnson, made some telling criticisms of the civil service but, in Leninist style, seemed to want to abolish it rather than re-engineer it. https://www.ippr.org/events/the-hollow-men-whats-wrong-with-westminster-and-whitehall-and-what-to-do-about-it, accessed 230523. As every leader should know, if you want people to improve their performance, you have to work with them, rather than insult and diminish them. Cummings may have been unaware of this principle.
[11] The universities need attention if they are to give priority to resuming the tasks of intellectual inquiry as well as providing vocational and professional training. See Craig, David and Openshaw, Hugh (2018) The Great University Con Bournemouth: The Original Book Company. On ideology, see Heffer, Simon (2022) ‘Defund woke universities to defeat the new totalitarians’ in The Daily Telegraph 20/11/2022. Allison Pearson notes that many UK universities have turned into international businesses and marginalised their national role: (2023) ‘British universities no longer want British students. They’re hooked on Chinese money’ in The Daily Telegraph 18/05/2023.
[12] Advances were made when Ministers Vince Cable and David Willetts were in office, but Sajid Javid and Kwasi Kwarteng tried to reverse the moves towards an industrial strategy on ideological grounds.
[13]Schmidt, Eric (2023) Innovation Power: Why Technology Will Define the Future of Geopolitics in Foreign Affairs, March April 2023
[14] Elon Musk hates government subsidies, but his companies love them, Grid News, 300422
[15] For this section, I am indebted to David Willetts and Andrew Cahn in particular.
[16] Email communication from Andrew Cahn, 280423.
[17] Conway, Ed (2023) Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Our Future, London, ch2
[18] Brummer, Alex (2020) The Great British Reboot Yale: Yale University Press, p315
[19] Former Minister for Universities and Science, David Willetts, has pleaded for this over many years. He has all the right ideas, but will any government make a serious attempt to implement them? See Willetts, David (2023) The Eight Great Technologies 10 years on, An Industrial strategy? London: Policy Exchange.