Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Sunak and Truss have no answer to the big problem facing the West

Britain's high turnover of prime ministers is a sign of trouble

(Credit: Getty images)

You will never measure the depth of our troubles if you listen to the contenders for the Tory leadership. Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss talk as if the 21st century never happened. They cannot see how the world has changed. Like the devotees of an ancient cult, they imagine that it is possible for a prime minister in the 2020s to follow the programme of Margaret Thatcher from 40-years ago. Their lines sound so antiquated because they have no plausible vision for creating a modern, united country. Then, who does?

Rather than watch the contest, I have been reading the best modern historians as they struggle to find order amid the confusion. Phil Tinline’s The Death of Consensus covers how the UK tore itself apart in the 1930s, 1970s and 2010s, and tried to put itself back together. Gary Gerstle’s The Rise and Fall of the Neo-liberal Order performs the same task for the United States.

Non-fiction writers yearn for a solid structure. It drives their narratives forward and gives their books the coherence of a good novel. I imagine both authors setting out with a clear idea of how their work would flow from beginning to end. They tell the same story of birth, destruction and rebirth until they run into the 2020s and stare at the mess of the western world without the smallest idea of where rebirth will come from.

The plotline begins with the great depression of the 1930s and the rise of fascism. The determination that never again would we return to mass unemployment and appeasement built the post-1945 social democratic order. From the 1940s until the late 1960s, Labour and the Conservatives in the UK, and Republicans and Democrats in the United States, agreed that they must run economic policy to guarantee full employment, and provide a welfare state to protect against poverty.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in