[Danieru]

Everyone appears to agree that Britain is broken. The author recognizes that the issue is not a lack of taxes, but lack of care at where the money goes.

Sadly the author I think is getting distracted by specific issues. Focusing on school or social costs. Or specific large project over runs.

While I do not agree with him on many things, I think Dominic Cummings's treatment of the subject digs deeper: https://dominiccummings.substack.com/p/q-and-a

You need to read through a ton, but it paints a picture of a government chasing newspaper headlines. And an overall ineffective method of running a country from the top down.

How could it be that an act of parliament is being held up by local councils? Parliament's orders used to be the law of the land. Now it is but one of many.

Often treatments of British decline read as if the authors wished Britain had been fire bombed to smithereens, and benefited from the Marshel Plan. Yet this undersells the British people. They know how to build new houses. They know how to build trains. Yet Britain as a whole is still searching for that win-win. The path to fixing problems without compromises.

Meanwhile Britain's managerial and governing class is so incompetent, it is hard to imagine replacements who would perform worse.

[pjc50]

Dominic Cummings got to be inside Number 10 and entirely blew it with Brexit and everything else. He belongs in the "discredited" pile with the Trussnomics lot.

[mytailorisrich]

No, actually his plan for Brexit was the most coherent, and Truss/Kwarteng were on the right track but executed appallingly badly.

If you go for Brexit the "hard way" as the country did then your way forward to compensate and to create growth is to find new competitive advantages and there are not many options apart from going low tax low regulations.

This never happened. Truss/Kwarteng made a bad and short-lived attempt and that was it.

I am not saying Brexit was a good idea but this is one of those massive changes of course that require "going big or going home" instead of trying to keep things as they were when that's impossible, and slowly fail (it does not mean that it would necessarily succeed but at least you're going for it).