Britain Post Brexit

A Practical Guide to Moving On

Peter McGarrick

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780750989961
• eBook ISBN:
  9780750990301
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

What will happen when the ties are cut? Whatever view you take on Brexit, innovative ideas are needed to thrive. The UK needs to get itself into shape. This book suggests how. We consider radical ideas to reform the voting system, transform the economy via a whole range of initiatives, including a sovereign wealth fund, drastically improve health, welfare and education provision and secure Britain's place in a fast-changing world. Most commentaries criticise what others do. Britain Post Brexit spells out what needs to be done.

What is government for?

Someone alone on a genuinely isolated desert island would not need law at all. He would be his own government. Add just one other person and the situation is transformed. Our two people have to find ways of coexisting by developing rules of behaviour. Most of the things that we regard as crimes become possible. Matters not covered by criminal law, such as a contract or marriage, become possible. How are they to decide what rules to follow? What happens if they disagree? Or if a rule is broken?

Our islanders are now grappling with issues of law and governance. It only takes two people to generate the need for this. Consider modern society. The world has billions of people in it, with their own personalities, beliefs, hopes, fears, qualities and faults. Often, they are crowded together in quite small places. This certainly applies to the UK, and in particular England, which, if viewed as a country, is one of the most densely populated in Europe. Given the complexity of the modern world, government is not going to be easy.

Government can be viewed as a system of creating law, in order to deal with the problems facing society. Using the force of law, an administration can be effective in implementing the policies of the government. References to ‘the government’ often embrace the combined functions of law making and administration. In other words, the ‘they’ referred to when people say, ‘they ought to do something about it’.

Government cannot exist in a vacuum. It needs to serve a defined group. There can be different levels of government (with subdivisions by region) but ‘the government’ usually refers to the one running a nation state.

Although they sometimes come and go, as a result of historical forces including conquest, subdivision and merger, nation states provide the stability required for government to work. Successful nations have characteristics that bind them together. Typically, these include some or all of established boundaries, shared culture, shared history, shared language and a general, if hard to define, sense of national belonging. Countries lacking key unifying characteristics tend to be very unstable. Law making and enforcement, and thus government and administration, become difficult.

The world as it is now

Government is about the management of people. There are plenty of them. The world population has more than doubled in the last fifty years and is predicted to grow to 9.6 billion – an increase of over a quarter – by 2050. In the UK the population has grown from 55 million in 1960 to 62 million in 2010, and is expected to be 77 million by 2050 and the largest in Western Europe.

The allocation of available resources to serve the population is a complex matter but, as we will see, one that is widely regarded as something in which governments should be actively involved. The number of people to be catered for is clearly of central importance. The relative lack of attention to this by many governments is therefore striking. Population growth and the associated pressures on resources of all kinds represent some of the world’s greatest challenges.

Where efforts have been made to deal with population growth (notably in the case of China’s long-standing one-child policy), the problems of sheer numbers have been supplanted by issues of demographics. China and, for other reasons, countries like Japan, have rapidly ageing populations. The relationship between the generations has the potential for tension in all societies, but especially those where the proportion of working-age individuals is low.

While population grows, in many ways the modern world continues to shrink. Distance is much less relevant than it was and almost irrelevant to the electronic communication that drives much of the modern economy. Even in relation to the transfer of goods, distance is much less significant than it was. Many high-value items (such as smartphones) are readily transportable by air. Even very bulky materials can be easily moved by sea.

Partly as a result of this effective shrinking, the tectonic plates of the world economy are shifting very rapidly. The West (which includes, rather quirkily, such countries as Japan and Australia) continues to thrive, but is being rapidly caught up by major countries, notably China, with other big ones, like India, following in its wake. Many of the developments are positive, with hundreds of millions lifted out of extreme poverty within a generation. Almost all regions of the world have shown signs of economic progress, including parts of Africa (where population growth remains a major challenge as millions of extra citizens have to be catered for each year). Someone in a hut with a smartphone and solar panel is in a very different position to someone with just a hut. The results of the change are likely to be dramatic.

It is thought that about 90 per cent of the scientists and engineers who have ever lived are alive today. One unsurprising consequence of this is ever-faster technological change. The internet, which provides the information transfer essential to modern life, did not exist a generation or so ago. In almost every field of activity, technological advances are making transformational changes. Their impact on work patterns and people’s way of life is likely to be profound.

War between nation states has not disappeared, even though formal declarations of war have become rare. Conflicts can be initiated by stealth, as happened with the incursions into Ukraine. Divided loyalties among the resident population can be used to grab territory (as happened in the Crimea and, somewhat earlier, part of Georgia). Civil wars are distressingly common and, as in the past, often vicious. Terrorism takes many forms and always seems to be with us. In recent years it has had a notably religious component.

Real pessimists can point to the possibility of world-changing natural disasters. The eruption of the Yosemite National Park in the USA is one of the favourites. An asteroid strike is another one.

And there is always the threat of disease. The Spanish Flu outbreak at the end of the First World War carried away about 100 million people. A modern plague, resistant to all treatments, would kill many more than this, in our interconnected world of routine jet travel. The associated disruption would surely lead to a very different world to today. The world may have had a narrow escape recently when the Ebola outbreak was contained with some difficulty.

There are clearly many things for a responsible government to worry about. Governments are essential. But where should they come from and how, if at all, can they be influenced or replaced?

What is legitimate government?

Government can be imposed on a population. The power of a state’s internal control mechanisms can be so strong that dissent and resistance is effectively repressed, sometimes for generations. There are many past and present examples.

Strong rule from the top, passed down within families from one generation to the next, used to be the rule, not the exception. This was how monarchies operated. Some powerful old-style executive monarchies survive, notably in the Middle East, but hereditary despotism is not confined to them. North Korea takes it to the extreme, regarding its ruling family as semi-divine. Even in some theoretically democratic societies, efforts to keep the succession to power within a family can be successful.

Imposed rule is undesirable because it is dependent on repression and, as a result, is unlikely to be responsive to the needs of the people or the injection of new ideas. The benevolent dictator who uses his power to rule wisely is theoretically possible, but there are no obvious examples. Sadly, Lord Acton’s comment that ‘power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely’ is borne out by experience.

Legitimate power springs from the people. Applying this principle to create a good government is far from easy. Some selection system based on the popular will is required – in practice, this requires the use of some sort of voting system. This cannot be perfect. Winston Churchill’s well-known comment, ‘Democracy is the worst form of government apart from all of the others’, hints at the difficulty.

There are all sorts of problems. If an effort is made to link representation to a particular area, it is extremely difficult to subdivide a country so that each vote carries the same weight. The evolution of competing parties is virtually inevitable and the support that they enjoy is likely to be uneven across a country, due to all sorts of factors that make different places different. But, if no effort is made to link elected representatives to an area, there is a strong danger of them becoming remote from those who elected them. Unsatisfactory features of the UK system illustrate how many of the problems occur in practice. We will come to these in the next section of this book.

For a democracy to work well, the voters deciding who they want to represent them need the tools to do a proper job. This requires a good flow of information and imposes a considerable obligation on the media who provide it. There are all sorts of problems here. Genuinely dispassionate coverage of political issues is very hard to find. Even organisations that try to achieve this, such as the BBC, can, consciously or otherwise, create bias via their selection of what news to cover. Many people choose to stay in their comfort zone by reading newspapers and online material that is sympathetic to the views that they already have. Tunnel vision can be the result.

The voting process itself has to be fair and trusted. Unless it is, each government is prone to being undermined by claims that it is not legitimate. Electoral fraud (e.g. ‘vote early and vote often’) is a concern.

Once a government is elected, what then? Is it legitimate for it to do everything that it wants? After all, the public have voted it in. Or is some measure of compromise still needed? If so, what and why? Even an elected government loses legitimacy with the passage of time. Over the years the voting population changes. Events can mean that policies become out of date.

Government is difficult. It can involve attempting to select the least bad of several unattractive alternatives. The opposition, correctly, can then point out the disadvantages of what is decided, and the popularity of the government can decline. Governments wear out, and elections need to occur often enough to refresh, but not so often that they destabilise.

Current political and economic systems

Political approaches

Persuading large numbers of people to turn out and vote for you is not easy. It is usually beyond the abilities of even the most charismatic of individuals. Very occasionally someone, with help from friends, manages to get elected. Martin Bell, the TV journalist, did this some years ago. Such people are curiosities when they get to Parliament, but they are unlikely to wield power.

The ability to form a government is dependent on being able to make laws, which is, in turn, dependent on being able to control Parliament. Under all systems, this means being able to win enough votes within the Parliament. This can only be done by co-operation, which leads to the creation of political parties.

Members of a party are unlikely to completely agree with each other about everything. If they are to work together effectively, some compromises are required. A member who feels she has to compromise too much and too often may eventually conclude that she is in the wrong party.

Parties prominent enough to have a chance of forming a government need to establish a strong public following by devising attractive policies. These can evolve. A party that has just lost an election may decide to change its tune somewhat in the hope of better success next time.

Some glue is needed to hold together a party, and this usually takes the form of some sort of political theory or philosophy. There are plenty of ideas around, so much so that they are badly served by the limited political vocabulary applied to them. This is two-dimensional in a three-dimensional world.

A key distinction (in two-dimensional speak) is between left and right. On the left, towards the extreme, it places communism. A linear progression to the right shades, by degrees, into more dilute forms of ‘socialism’ then to centre-left social democracy (which is more receptive to market mechanisms) until some sort of centre divide is reached. Oddly, almost no parties seem to reside in this notionally precise middle bit. Continuing rightwards, we have views increasingly placing emphasis on producing conditions suitable for wealth creation and less emphasis on welfare and state involvement.

Many commentators put fascism at the far right of the scale. This attracted much support in some countries in the twentieth century, inspired in large measure by the supposed efficiency of Mussolini’s Italy in making the trains run on time. Fascism is an example of repressive government – elections stop and the secret police hunt down those who object. The state is in unchallenged control of events.

It is interesting to compare and contrast fascism with communism. Compared to fascism, theoretical communism has a much more respectable parentage. It derives inspiration from the teachings of Karl Marx in the nineteenth century. Working away in the library of the British Museum and assisted by his wealthy fox-hunting friend Friedrich Engels, Marx sought to explain the development of events, and in particular economics, with reference to mechanistic forces. In essence, there was an inevitable struggle between the bourgeoisies, who were the owners providing capital, and the proletariat (workers), who did the production. Conflict between these very distinct classes would result in the triumph of the workers over ‘capitalism’ (a word that Marx popularised). This would produce a society controlled by the workers, placing emphasis on the communal good, via communism.

Marx has been hugely influential, although not in the way that some of his devotees think. Before Marx the interpretation of the course of history revolved around the actions of kings and princes, generals and admirals, and their associated alliances and battles. After Marx it has become accepted that economic forces drive history. The Roman Empire (and the British, for that matter) sprang from economic power. In the case of the British Empire, this was fuelled by technological advance.

Many are attracted by the apparent purity and coherence of Marxist thought. The brief Communist Manifesto published by Marx and Engels in 1848 is relatively accessible, even today. More determination is required to tackle Marx’s long and impenetrable Das Kapital, which may rank as one of the most spoken of and least read works these days. Nonetheless, notions like ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his need’ have enduring force.

Particularly if explained attractively, communism/socialism has considerable intellectual, moral and emotional appeal. Its principal drawback is that it does not work.

Far more than fascism, communism/socialism was thoroughly road-tested, in different forms and in different countries, in the last century. There is not a single example of it having worked well and it has been discontinued almost everywhere. It still limps on in a few places. Much hope was invested in two of these – Cuba and Venezuela. They are disappointments. The allegation that they are corrupt, poverty-stricken dictatorships is hard to shrug off.

The failure of communism may stem from the fact that pure theory, untempered by pragmatism, does not work well in politics. Communism might work splendidly in a society of angels. It appears to have worked reasonably well in special situations, such as the early kibbutz movement in Israel, where the community involved was small and cohesive...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Challenges
• 2 Solutions
• 3 Key Government Functions
• 4 The Future
• Sources and Further Reading