END OF TERM ENNUI

The spigot of daily UK “news” wound down this week as Parliament headed towards recess (Commons – 22^nd July, Lords – 24^th July.) “The Grid” is, it seems, an effective news management system: about 75% of what we think of as news turns out to be just propaganda.

The British Malaise

As the Starmer government’s first year mark card came out on 5^th July,  Press and Public alike were clear that this has been a failing grade. Labour’s 2024 majority of 174 was achieved off the back of just 34% of the popular vote and this lack of underlying popularity at election time has quickly fallen further as the unifying target of getting the Tories out has been replaced by voters, with no prospect of making their opinions known until 2029, telling pollsters what they really think. Which seems to be:

Reform on 28%, beating Labour on just 22%, by 6points with the Tories failing to capture any of the post-election rebound. This is an extraordinary fall from grace, but one that any Tory would be only too familiar with. The business of governing has been shattered by institutional constraints that actively prevent the country being governed.

What is at the root of so many stories of British policy failures, not just in 2024/5 but in the broader sweep of the first quarter of the 21^st century?

Having come to this conclusion with an absolutely conventional cork-popping “Eureka” moment, it becomes clear that others got there long ago, viz Dr Madsen Pirie’s explanation, still entertainingly available on YouTube, in which he concludes “The Target Should Be Improvement.” To which one must respond with a resounding Hallelujah.

• Minor relief road held up by multi-million pound need for measures to safeguard bats?
• Illegal immigrants’ relocation scheme scuppered because Rwanda is not safe enough?
• Leasehold reform plans delayed by complexity of compensating Freehold owners?
• Infected Blood compensation scheme not distributing compensation because not all potential recipients identified?
• Wimbledon expansion delayed by imperfect provision of golf alternatives?
• HS2’s seemingly infinite cost increases to accommodate endless local complications?

In every case political (or popular!) answers have been delayed because our legal system is asking the “wrong” question: not whether some policy might improve things, but whether the policy has the best possible outcome. In this debate and delay costs rise, action is delayed, the problems they seek to answer escalate exponentially to the point that the proposed solutions would no longer work. The result: policy inaction and national decline.

The Rwanda scheme, as contentious as it was, is one of the best examples of this Nirvana problem. Rather than asking whether flying illegal asylum-claiming arrivals to Rwanda would represent an improvement on those asylum-seekers circumstances in war-torn Syria, intolerance-dominated Iran or famine and repression-hit Eritrea, courts right the way up to the Supreme Court preferred to ask whether Rwanda would represent the best possible destination for these asylum seekers to be housed. The court were asked an inappropriate question an answered it without a basic logic check. Thus are huge errors made new realities.

What’s the solution? Well, clearly not setting down incrementalism rather than perfectionism in legally-enforceable terms that could itself then become emeshed in legal debate. But establishing that short-term improvements are better policy objectives than ever-unobtainable perfection must be set as a legal hierarchy of judgment if the UK is ever to return to the path of progress.

Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien
I meglio è l’inimico del bene
The perfect is the enemy of the good

Whther you take your original insparation from Voltaire, Montesquieu, Mestastasio, or Shakespeare this fallacy should turn policy attention to the courts and the legal process which is causing seemingly eternal delay and ever-increasing costs. But the underlying issue has been ineffective, ineffectual UK political leadership over the last quarter of a centure. If policy and projects were explained in terms that garnered more popular support, even after contentious discussion, the legal process would be forced to accept and implement the developments that every legal sinew is currently strained to prevent.

Progress or Perfectionism, that is the question.
(As Hamlet didn’t quite say.)

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