I’m bullish about Britain. You should be too

Credit: X/@RobertJenrick

There’s been too much doom in our politics of late. Too much fatalism about our future.

So, why then, am I bullish about Britain? My confidence isn’t due to a lack of awareness or complacency about our present malaise. I see it, like so many Telegraph readers, and it pains and motivates me.

The record high taxes, government spending, and debt interest payments. The highest industrial energy costs in the world. The 7 million people on the NHS waiting list. Or one in five students actually earning less for having gone to university. That’s not to mention the record shoplifting and court backlogs, broken borders and the endemic, so-called “petty” lawbreaking.

Our present malaise is explicable. In recent decades, those in charge have traded out the fair, decent and efficient instincts of the British people as the guiding force behind our policy for their own supposed “rationality.”

All too often they disparage public opinion as “populism”, choosing instead to work against the grain of sentiment of the British people. At times our political and bureaucratic class would even say one thing in public to placate the public, but do another in practice.

We’re confronted with manifestations of this madness on a daily basis. A foreign terrorist’s right to stay here trumps the public’s right to walk safe streets. We won’t drill in the North Sea and instead we will import oil and gas from Norway – who drill from the exact same sea. We’ll trade a car made in Sunderland, for one made in China. We’re for free speech, but Islam should get its own blasphemy law. We must give-away the strategically important Chagos Islands to Mauritius to preserve our reputation at international law conferences.

Those are the results of the so-called rationality of those in charge of our country. It’s a joke – and the joke is on us.

But – and this is the crucial thing – we’re not a patient who’s ill and the doctors can’t understand why. We’re not a patient whose treatment requires the invention of some complex new drug. We are poorly, but the medicine we need is clear.

Most of our challenges stem from a relatively small number of very big things we are getting wrong which are compounding each other. If we start to get them right – like we have for so much of our history – we can turn things around.

We have built homes and infrastructure quickly and cheaply before. We have harnessed cheap and reliable energy to power forward British industry before. We have operated a lean and efficient state before which attracted the very best and took pride in our country. Before the turn of this century we mostly had sensible, controlled migration. The answers have not changed: we have proved before they are possible and within reach.

The times are changing. The old order is collapsing – and its architects like Tony Blair are yesterday’s men and women. Keir Starmer doubled down on our failed consensus, tinkering here and there, and his political honeymoon has ended faster than ever. After a wasted year he is in office, but increasingly not in power. The public’s patience has snapped and they will no longer tolerate politicians and parties that fail to act on the frustrations voters feel.

We live in a political interregnum, the period of stasis between two orders. What follows is often reinvigorating as latent, suppressed creativity, entrepreneurship and innovation suddenly flowers and lifts the whole nation. In the words of George Orwell, “nothing ever stands still. We must add to our heritage, or lose it. We must grow greater or grow less. We must go forward or backward.” We have no choice but to advance.

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