Financial Crisis Looms as Britain Faces Imminent Bankruptcy

The ever-increasing weight of officialdom is dragging our country into a pit that even the boldest growth plan can’t escape

A pedestrian walks along the Southbank of the River Thames, with the Elizabeth Tower
Credit: HENRY NICHOLLS/AFP

Who will get the blame when the inevitable enquiry is held into Britain’s immiseration? At the start of the twentieth century, ours was a rich country, attracting talent and investment from every continent. Now, we are being overtaken in per capita terms by Slovenia.

Our fragile post-Covid recovery has turned into a recession. It has not yet shown up in the figures, but it is upon us. Indeed, if we discount immigration and look at GDP per head, it already registers in the data. Companies are reacting to the coming hikes in National Insurance and the minimum wage with recruitment freezes.

When those rises come into effect in April – to say nothing of Angela Rayner’s full-rights-from-day-one scheme – we will see the start of a sustained rise in unemployment, something Britain has not known for a generation. Fewer people will be paying taxes, more will be claiming benefits.

Taxes are already at a postwar high, yet we still need to borrow more than a billion pounds a week. Why? Because Labour, now at 25 per cent in the polls, knows that its remaining supporters are overwhelmingly beneficiaries of state spending, whether as government employees or as welfare dependents. The last thing it will do is cut it.

To repeat, who is to blame? Is it Rachel Reeves, who is testing to destruction the theory that, if you take money from productive people to give to unproductive people, you end up with fewer of the former and more of the latter?

Or is it Ed Miliband who, in pursuit of pre-industrial carbon emissions, seems quite prepared to return to pre-industrial poverty levels?

Both deserve their share of censure. But there is a third culprit, less well known to the public, namely Lord Hermer, a former colleague of Sir Keir Starmer’s who, after a career representing Britain’s bitterest enemies in court – Mau Mau insurgents, Irish republicans, Islamists and others – is using his role as Attorney General to ensure that elected ministers do what they are told by lawyers.

Other ministers grumble that, by tilting the balance back towards departmental legal advisors – Suella Braverman had reduced their power – Hermer is ensuring that nothing gets done. One of his colleagues complained that Hermer was causing a “freeze on government”.

The default setting of our legal establishment is anti-growth. Or, more precisely, it is safetyist, pro-DEI and eco-obsessive, which amounts to the same thing. As long as we are governed by human rights lawyers, prosperity will elude us.

Consider, as an example, the question of a third runway at Heathrow, first promised in 2003. Reeves is reviving the idea, as Chancellors do when they want to sound pro-business, yet campaigners don’t sound in the least alarmed. They know that they need only go to court claiming that additional flights would breach Britain’s emissions targets. Our state machine is primed to stop things being built.

Look at what happened in Edinburgh on Thursday. A judge ruled that the Rosebank oilfield off Shetland – the largest, on some measures, in the North Sea – could not be exploited. The British state sided with a gaggle of anti-capitalist protesters who were seeking to win from the bench what they had lost at the ballot box.

Thirty years ago, such a case would not have come to court. The question of whether to extract oil was seen as a political one. You might think Britain should show global leadership; or you might think that, since hydrocarbons will still be needed during the transition, we would do better to start by phasing out dirty fuel from dirty regimes rather than shutting down our own industry. Either way, it is a matter of opinion, to be decided democratically, not a matter of fundamental rights to be determined by the judiciary.

Since Donald Trump’s inauguration, a lot of people, by no means all on the Right, have been asking why Britain seems so insipid and paralysed by comparison with the US. Why can’t we sack our state-funded diversity consultants? Why can’t we deport illegal immigrants? Why can’t we remove swathes or regulations at a stroke?

The answer in almost every case is that such reforms would be blocked by our legal and administrative apparat.

Now you might think this a poor excuse. A determined government, you might say, would tear the state machine apart and rebuild it along democratic lines. It would withdraw from the ECHR and the UN Refugee Convention, scrap the Supreme Court, roll back judicial review and eliminate quangoes.

Perhaps it would. But let’s not pretend that these things would be easy. The nomenklatura would be defending, not just their beliefs, but their mortgages and school fees. Their attempts to overturn Brexit would look like a Nerf gun battle in comparison.

In any event, none of this is going to happen under Labour. The guiding principle of Hermerism – or Starmerism, come to that – is that human rights lawyers know best. Ministers keep repeating their strained and tautological claim growth is their “number one priority”. But, even as they intone those syllables, they hire thousands more civil servants, and strengthen quangoes like the OBR. On one calculation, they have created a quango a week since taking office. Economists call it “revealed preference”.

The reason quangocracy is bad for growth is not just that officials cost money, nor that they represent a diversion of resources (just imagine what they could be doing in the private sector). No, the real problem is that most officials spend their time hampering the activities that generate revenue.

The primacy of globalist human rights lawyers and officials impels us to decarbonise back to the Stone Age, regardless of whether any country follows. It requires us to expand the machinery of racial grievance-mongering. It encourages us to pay foreign countries to take our territory and to invite talks about reparations for slavery – reparations, that is, from the country that ended the slave trade, not those that took the slaves.

Don’t think that any of this is about human rights, by the way, at least not as we commonly understand that phrase. The only occasion that I have lived through a large state-perpetrated abuse of human rights in Britain was in 2020, when people were condemned to house arrest without evidence, and when our rights to free movement, free association and free speech were curtailed. Yet, the one time these Doughty Street and Matrix Chambers types might actually have been needed, they were cheering on the lockdown – a lockdown that Starmer did not want to end.

The Telegraph: continue reading

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