Stagnation nation: Is the UK’s decline unstoppable?

The Lowdown with Prof Jonathan Portes

I was delighted to interview Jonathan Portes for the Lowdown. He was a senior civil servant. Now he is Professor of Economics and Public Policy at King's College, London, and one of the leading thinkers on the state of the nation.

There is no better person to talk to on the UK’s decline and whether it can be reversed.

You can listen on Spotify, Apple, Android, and every other podcast host.

Topics discussed include

• The great stagnation in living standards

• The failure of political journalism to explain the consequences of Brexit

• And what hopes we can have of a new government turning the country round.

One of the themes of the podcast and of my recent journalism is the inability to face reality.

Specifically, I have looked at how the failures of Brexit have sent much of the UK right into a dark world of conspiratorial fantasy. I explain how and why in the piece below. Please consider signing up as a paid subscriber. You get all kinds of goodies and the warm satisfaction of knowing that you are allowing me to carry on writing. (There’s a free trial for the nervous among you, too!)

Brexit and the emptying of the Conservative mind

The right cannot face the mess it has made of Britain

August 2023

Daniel Hannan promising in 2015 that the UK would stay in the Single Market. We didn’t, of course

Conservatives once pretended to be tough minded. Leftists might fall for communism and other insane utopian schemes. Bleeding-heart liberals might babble sentimental dross about the inherent goodness in all people.

Conservatives knew better. They understood the truth of Kant’s warning that “out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.” They saw the world for what it was, not as we would like it to be. Reality did not frighten them.

In the late 20^th century, right-wing papers such as the Daily Telegraph, Times and Wall Street Journal prided themselves on having news reporters who told hard truths to conservative readers who, whatever their prejudices, were tough enough to take them.

Following that honourable tradition in the 2010s, the Daily Telegraph hired Peter Foster, one of the best-informed trade and business journalists on what we used to call Fleet Street, and made him Europe Editor. Foster’s great story both at the Telegraph and when he moved on to the Financial Times was Brexit, of course.  Foster did his duty as a journalist and described its failures.

Rather than accept the world as it is, the Brexit right has turned on him.