It’s the Broken Society, stupid

British politics used to be dominated by the country’s relentless economic decline. Long before James Carville’s mantra for Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential election bid — ‘It’s the economy, stupid’ — it was the economy which determined British general elections and alternative economic policies which most divided the parties.

I spent most of my early career as a journalist chronicling this economic decline and commenting on it. I travelled to Germany, Scandinavia, even Italy to bring back stories of how Continental companies were more efficient, their bosses more impressive, their unions more reasonable, their products, from cars to fridges, far superior. Most of the serious media did this sort of thing: the aim was to shame Britain into upping its game; but for a long while it seemed as if we were wasting our time.

By the mid-1970s, Britain’s relative economic decline had become so engrained in the national psyche, so impervious to solutions from either the Left or the Right, that parts of the British Establishment had effectively given up: senior Whitehall mandarins and leading opinion-formers began to talk quietly about the ‘civilised management of decline’. It was a measure of how hopeless things had become that accommodating decline had become a more realistic prospect than reversing it.

Today, as a new Prime Minister steps up to the plate, all that seems ancient history. The economic question no longer dominates British politics or separates the parties (indeed, I would be hard put to tell you any major difference between Labour and the Tories on economic policy) and economic decline no longer permeates our political discourse.

A combination of the Thatcher reforms and the decade-long Blair–Brown duumvirate has achieved what was once deemed impossible: Britain has stopped declining. The British economy might not be quite the modern miracle Gordon Brown claims, but it is no longer the basket case it once was.