What Britain gets right
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In the wrong hands, a column sticking up for Britain becomes a twee list. Baking. Queues. And so on and so cloyingly on. 20 years have passed since “America, Fuck Yeah”, a song that recited the glories of US life (“Porno! Valium!”) at a time of Iraq war-inspired anti-Americanism. I don’t want this to turn into “Britain, Gosh Yes”, and not just because the great feats of this island — the Victoria line, 1992 Nyetimber Blanc de Blancs — scan less well.
So, how might a grown-up case for the UK go?
Well, one fact has got lost of late. Britain is about to choose between a centre-left candidate for prime minister and a centre-right one. Compare that to America (where Donald Trump is favoured to return as president), France (where the hard right could hold national office this summer) or Germany (where it might take the political cordon sanitaire to keep them from federal government next year). Or populist-run Italy. Or the Netherlands. What is this, innate common sense? No, after the last decade, no one will accuse Britain of that again. But it does suggest a nation that can learn at speed and right itself.
Here is a proxy test of civic health. Has a country of similar importance to Britain been so unconflicted about supporting Ukraine? So immune to hard-left and hard-right dissent? Britain’s main parties are as one on the subject. Boris Johnson, who might have pandered to the Nato-blamers, never has. If this is our era’s Abyssinia crisis — an ordeal for one nation, a test for others — Britain’s near-consensus will be remembered well. Both-sidesing the issue is a marginal sport, even after Nigel Farage did it last week.
A planning system from hell. A frivolous media. A vague but ineradicable belief that nowhere else has universal healthcare. The defects of British public life are so well-aired now that a moderately well-read person 10 time zones away can name the main ones. But this is a country with a per capita income somewhere between France and Germany in current US dollars. Its capital is still the preferred destination for world talent, according to a BCG mega-survey. Britain must have made some shrewd bets.
One is its economic specialism: professional services. These don’t count on cheap energy or Chinese demand. Even countries in a protectionist fever don’t mind importing, say, financial advice. So, what seemed a frothy way of earning a living after the 2008 crash now stands out as a sensible hedge in a volatile world. Nor did Britain fluke its way to the best set of research universities outside the US. It took smart funding and a focus on science that is hard to square with the cliché of a nation in thrall to drawling classicists. The British state needs remaking from first principles. But at its most challenged, mid-Brexit and mid-pandemic, it achieved the Aukus pact, that fusion of technical finesse and geopolitical vision.
Mark the theme here: a certain ease with the modern. Britain isn’t “traditional”. It trailed the continent in art for centuries but not in social change. It was quick to evolve a commercial middle class. (Hence all those German-Austrian composers in 1700s London, serving paying audiences, not some blockhead aristocrat back home.) It industrialised first. Much of the built environment, to the distress of first-time tourists, is new and utilitarian. The worst of way of understanding such a protean place is through costume dramas of the Downton Abbey ilk.
And so we mustn’t end without mentioning the ultimate beneficiary of Britain’s openness to change. This isn’t the only country in the west that would elevate a non-white head of government. But it might be the only one where it would stir so little discussion. Even I, having grown up with kids called Rishi, never guessing that I would one day surrender taxes to someone of that name, don’t much care, and I am paid to overthink. The Tories might soon swap one leader of east African-Asian provenance for another. Or they might vary things and elect a Nigerian-raised one. In either case, the identity implications will be examined in, what, the first weekend’s papers? If that? A quiet miracle is still a miracle.
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