The Gossamer Elite and the New Britain

What decline looks like on the page

We can find ourselves as creatures of excellence and intelligence and skill.

-Richard Bach, from Jonathan Livingston Seagull

It is an interesting dilemma as to whether, if you are going to be ruled by a government to whom you are politically opposed, it is better for that government to be competent or incompetent. Good governance is a virtue in itself. But a competent government can also do lamentable things much more expediently than an incompetent one if it has the wrong aims or objectives. It may in the end be better to be governed by a buffoon than a genius if either way they are going to be motivated by dangerous ideas - although really of course it is a distinction along the lines of the difference between being stabbed or shot. All things considered, one of those options is probably slightly better than the other, but both are going to hurt and the only thing to hope for in either scenario is that the wound won’t be fatal or turn gangrenous and necrotise.

I had call to reflect on these matters recently while reading the Labour Party’s now somewhat infamous A New Britain: Renewing Our Democracy and Rebuilding Our Economy. This document, a report of something called the Commission on the UK’s Future (set up by Sir Keir Starmer after becoming Labour leader) was issued in 2022, but is now being read with serious attention for more or less the first time, since it seems very likely that Labour government is imminent. In brief, the idea is more or less to create a written constitution for the UK in all but name, through the passing of a New Britain Act (a ‘constitutional statute’ - more on that in a future post, perhaps) that would reform the House of Lords, devolve power to regional and devolved assemblies, entrench new social and economic rights, provide a mission statement for the United Kingdom, and so on.

The prospect of the report being implemented has, it seems fair to say, thoroughly spooked sections of the conservative commentariat. Peter Hitchens tells us that it is a ‘plan to make it impossible for Parliament to overturn [Labour’s] left-wing revolution’; David Starkey warns it will ‘eradicate our traditions of parliamentary government’; Tim Stanley thinks it means ‘the Left will remain in power forever’; J Sorel labels it a programme ‘to reduce Parliament and Downing Street to constitutional ciphers and end majority rule’; Andrew Collingwood meanwhile settles on calling it ‘revolutionary’.

No doubt there is a great deal in A New Britain that would be concerning if it were indeed put into effect (and it is important to mention that although Sir Keir Starmer endorsed the document early in 2023, very few of its recommendations appear in Labour’s manifesto). But I would like to focus here on an element of the report that has not been widely reported on - if at all - and which I think reveals something important about its authors, about the incoming Labour government, and by extension about our political class as a whole.

And it is simply this: setting substance entirely to one side, the report is shoddy, slapdash, riddled with grammatical and syntactical errors, and in places incoherent. It is not by any means the Federalist Papers, or anything that comes close to shining the Federalist Papers’ boots with spittle and shoe polish. It is a thin tissue of notions resembling ideas, written in the breathless style of an undergraduate student project by somebody who is gamely aiming for a decent 2:1 in Political Science, and who will ask his mum to proofread it for him before he submits. It is simply not what one would expect from purportedly intelligent people who have thought deeply about the subject of constitutional reform and who treat the matter with sufficient weight.

I ought to provide some examples, and these are found on almost every page. Sometimes there are slips of the finger that can be attributed to a basic failure to pay attention to detail (‘We have been in touch with the Welsh governments [sic] own commission…’; ‘so that people across all four nations feels [sic] represented’; ‘our own systems and governance cannot continue to be a barrier [sic] to our future success’; ‘[M]ost people see that the pound sterling as a UK asset [sic] and that the central state should manage the macro economy for the whole country’; ‘We take the view that these purposes should clearly and explicitly stated [sic]’, etc.). And throughout we find oddly spliced commas that interfere with careful reading (‘This we believe, can be achieved by….’; 'This will, help bring a fractured and divided country back together’; ‘The common desire for more local control should be reflected in a legal requirement, to require decisions to be taken…’).

There are also chunks of bizarrely inept and clumsy phrasing, which reinforce the feeling that the report was written in the fashion of a humanities student’s ‘all-nighter’:

Because, for too long, we have developed only some of the potential of some of the parts of our country, not of everyone, everywhere in the country.

…

The individual changes that we recommend are in our view, common sense reforms that have widespread support across party and geographic lines, but taken together they add up to a radical blueprint for the significant and serious change that people the length and breadth of this country have told us that they want to see. [The places where there are accidental double spacings are real, and appear throughout the document - at least a few times on each page.]

…

We recommend strengthening the powers that deliver self-government in the devolved nations of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland - based on the principles that devolved self-government should be permanent, expansive, and each elected body held in equal esteem.

At times, this slips into a sort of quasi-English, which almost parses, almost makes sense, almost convinces the reader that the author has a glimmer of an understanding of what he or she is in fact trying to say:

So while many of our immediate economic problems can be fixed by pursuing better policies, by stopping the race to the bottom in our economy, Britain, needs change that runs much deeper - giving the people of Britain more power and control over our lives and the decisions that matter to us.

…

The alternative we put before the people of Scotland and Wales is better than either costly and destructive independence and a stagnating status quo: change within the United Kingdom that can entrench self-government in Scotland whilst improving shared government across Britain and we believe that our recommendations offer not just faster and safer change, but fairer change.

…

For this transformative agenda to succeed, we will need to draw on the best resource Britain has: its people. In that way, we will be able to face the challenges of the coming decades with confidence, and the recommendations in this report will help it [what??] do so.

…

Climate change and protecting our environment also clearly transcend national boundaries within and beyond the UK and require action at the UK level, and greater cooperation between different levels of government, as we set out later.

No, I’m not making any of this up; this is actually how the report reads - like somebody making a game attempt at coherent English expression simply by throwing together various phrases that sound as though they ought to go alongside one another. My favourite example of all comes on page 68 of the report, in the section which - given my professional interests - I focused on must closely, pertaining to constitutional reform. Bear in mind as you read the following sentence that this is billed as being the zero draft of an overarching constitutional ‘mission statement’ for the UK that should be embodied in law:

The UK is a group of nations, peoples and places and which have come together in a shared Parliament at Westminster to provide together what can be better provided together than separately.

Just read that out loud to yourself and then go and compare the result with ‘We the People of the United States…’, if you can stomach doing so.

A New Britain is not, in other words, a serious document, and the people who wrote it (I doubt Gordon Brown, notionally the Chair of the Commission, has even read it) are patently, on this evidence, not serious people. They are playing at government. They inhabit a world of platitudes and feeble intellectual gestures. They don’t really think; they gesticulate at ideas that they believe sound nice. They can’t even be bothered to proofread a document which they suggest should be the foundation for a new constitutional settlement for a mature democracy like the UK; they don’t appear even to know that MS Word will do some of it for them. They are contemptuous and disrespectful of their audience, and of the country which they intend to make anew, and they behave as though the most serious politico-legal matter of all, the rearranging of the constitution of a nation, is something about which it is permissible to write drivel.

This all sends two paradoxical signals. On the one hand, while it is appalling and horrifying, it is also somehow reassuring: Labour’s constitutional project, such as it is, will be drawn up and ‘inspired’ by people of the profoundest mediocrity. I would therefore be very surprised if the forthcoming Labour government will have anything like the wherewithal to get close to actually implementing the plan; I think it much more likely that it will end up being the constitutional equivalent of HS2 - an expensive megaproject that should never have been started, leads nowhere and achieves nothing except to demonstrate that the country’s political class as a whole are patently ill-equipped to govern.

On the other hand, the message sent by the way that the document has been prepared and presented undoubtedly is appalling and horrifying: I tremble for my country when I reflect that these frivolous, lightweight people are apparently the best that we have to offer by way of political decision-makers and that it is their ideas which will be informing the honest-to-goodness rewiring of the constitution of the British State. We all of us can tell, intuitively, that our political leaders, journalists, media commentators and civil servants are like a pack of squabbling compsognathus in comparison to the tyrannosaurs of the past, but it is another thing to be confronted with the malaise so starkly and brutally as in A New Britain.

And this of course raises a much wider set of concerns. No doubt you will have noticed, as nobody can fail to have noticed, that our culture - and this is by no means limited to Britain, though I think it is most noticeable and pronounced here - has largely abandoned the notion that excellence matters. Everybody will have their own stories for illustrating this and their own theories as regards to why it has happened. It is a long, sad tale that would require too much time and space to really delve too deeply into here. But it is important to observe that the rot has gone so deep that it has even seeped into matters as serious and important as constitutional reform: those who have taken upon themselves the task of remaking the relationship between the people and the State do not even think it necessary to pay sufficient attention to detail to ensure that their recommendations are intelligible, let alone that their report should have been done well.

In light of this, the problems that confront the country - the swollen pile of national debt, mass migration, the housing crisis, the failure to police the borders, the failure to deter and punish crime, deteriorating public services, the looming crisis in social care and pensions provision, the breakdown in civility, and the impending financial collapse of universities, to name but a few - take on an entirely different hue. It is common for conservatives to attribute these problems to malevolence or at least misguided design. But might it simply be the case that the people who are notionally in charge do not have the capacity to effectively govern? Might it just be that they do not know what they are doing - an ideology of plain nincompoopery rather than a ‘long march through the institutions’?

What, in any event, does one say about the future of a country like this? The image that increasingly comes to mind when I dwell on these issues is one of an attic in a dilapidated country house, dusty and mildewed, with many old spider webs strung between the rafters. Brittle and frail, these strands of gossamer still somehow cling to the physical realm, and to physical existence, because the still, stale air does not contain quite enough movement to dispel them into nothingness. But all it will take is one decent breath of wind, one strong draft from a suddenly opened window somewhere else in the house, for them to be swept away forever.

That is how I envisage our political class and the chattering classes which surround them. They are of such thinness and intellectual fragility that they could be knocked over by a feather, and all we are really waiting for is to find out where the coup de grâce will come from and whether it will be economic, social, military, or something else entirely. To return to a different analogy, the feeling is increasingly one of wondering not whether the future is going to hurt, but how much - whether it will be equivalent of a knife or a bullet wound. We’re coming to the end of something, and we all know it; in this respect the promise of a ‘new Britain’ does seem somehow to be prophetic, although one strongly suspects that ‘renewing our democracy and rebuilding our economy’ are unlikely to be on the cards for a long while yet.