I just spent ten days in India, where the cloudless blue above contrasted sharply with the grey sky-lid that greeted me on my return. Living in Britain is like living inside Tupperware, Bill Bryson once said.
But it’s not just the weather that is different in the two countries. For all its poverty, India is brimming with startups, innovators, confidence and ambition. Britain seems economically stagnant, steeped in gloom, increasingly grumpy and obsessed with trivia.
We are behaving as if improvement from here is neither necessary nor possible. We rational optimists – I used the phrase as a book title 15 years ago – do not think the world is perfect. Quite the reverse. We think the spectacular improvements in human living standards that have happened are just the beginning, and the best is yet to come.
The percentage of the world population that lives in extreme poverty has fallen from over 50% when I was born to just 8% today. Nobody has lived through a transformation of living standards as dramatic as that. But there is still an enormous amount of misery and want in the world so we must do it again in the lifetime of a baby born today.
And then again after that. There is no practical limit to how high we could raise people’s wealth, health and happiness, or how low we could drive poverty, infant mortality or disease. Infinite growth is indeed possible on a finite planet, whatever the greens say, because growth means doing more with less.
But we have to at least try. It’s increasingly hard to be optimistic about Britain, a country resigned to apathetic despair. For the first time in my life I can imagine the United Kingdom becoming poorer than not just Italy and Poland, but India and even revitalised Argentina. Not because we go backwards but because others go forwards.
The challenge is to awaken the British people to the astonishing opportunities that exist in the years ahead, to shake our governing classes out of their comfort zone of managed decline. That is why I have joined the advisory board of a relaunched think tank called the Prosperity Institute, formerly known as Legatum, which under the direction of Radomir Tylecote, is going to try to jolt us out of our lethargy as a nation.
I have been banging on about the need for reform to encourage innovation for years, in print and in parliament, and have been ignored by the blob. Our hope at the Prosperity Institute is that things have now got so bad here that people might listen at last.
And it is also why I have written an essay on innovation for a new book published next week by ARC, the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, called The Best of Our Inheritance. In it I argue that it was innovation – a love of delivering change that benefited ordinary people — that turned a foggy island into an economic superpower.
Two centuries ago this year, not far from where I live, a humble genius called George Stephenson opened the Stockton to Darlington railway. For the first time in history people and goods began to travel faster than the speed of a galloping horse.
Whence came the entrepreneurial spirit that Stephenson embodied? The very same factors were critical, I would argue, that enable Elon Musk to catch a spacecraft on a gantry today. Here are just three.
Number one: cheap energy. Stephenson had heaps of coal lying about, so this is where he forged his boilers, wrought his rails and ran his engines. Britain now has the most costly electricity of all developed nations, twice as high for industrial users as France, thrice as high as America, four times as high as China.
This is not an accident, it was policy: we transformed our energy industry into one that serves the needs of the producers of energy, rather than the consumers. And boy have the crony capitalists taken us for a ride with their costly, unreliable wind and solar farms, their futile heat pumps and useless electric cars. They have killed our oil, gas, steel, chemical and car industries and are well on their way to strangling our artificial intelligence industry at birth.
Number two: light and nimble regulation. Stephenson needed an act of parliament to build his railway but after that there was nothing to stop him. He built the whole thing in three years from start to finish without a single bulldozer. The first train was meant to take only goods but six hundred people climbed aboard for the ride and the world changed.
He did not have to worry about newts or pronouns or net zero; or the interminable delays of planners and mountains of meaningless e-paperwork. The country of Stephenson has now taken three decades to fail even to decide whether to build a strip of concrete for planes to land on near London. This endless growth of bureaucracy has not made the country much safer if at all; it has certainly not made it wealthier; but it has made the lives of bureaucrats more comfortable.
Number three: freedom. The freedom to try, to fail, to try again, to change direction, to back a hunch, to speak and meet, these are the ingredients of innovation and always have been. New ideas sparked prosperity in other parts of the world in the past, and always because of freedom: in Abbasid Arabia, Song China, Renaissance Italy.
In every case, within a few centuries, some combination of superstition, bureaucracy, corruption and war trampled the blooms into the dirt. In Arabia, machines were broken, and books were burned. In China, Ming mandarins demanded ever more intrusive control of inventories and activities. In Florence, Genoa, and Venice, a dead weight of corrupt tax eaters bankrupted the innovative city states. Sound familiar?
Prosperity comes from the bottom up, not the top down. Successful economies do not pick winners, they open doors.
As J.D.Vance told his audience at the AI summit in Paris this week, we need to liberate the innovators. That the European Union is even more zealously devoted to regulating innovation to death is no comfort, although there is a glimmer of hope in the fact the British government refused to sign up to the Macron-vonderLeyen AI communique this week with its emphasis on regulation rather than innovation. That China is heading back into autocratic central planning should be a spur to us to seize our chance and get back to being the workshop of the world.
It’s not the contempt of our enemies that stabs me to the heart these days, it’s the pity of our friends. As Jordan Peterson, one of the founders of the ARC conference that gathers next week, put it to Piers Morgan this week:
“I don’t know if you guys in the UK understand how sad it is for us in Canada, and in the US, to watch what you’re doing to yourselves, to watch you guys spiral yourselves into the ground, it’s so sickening, it’s so demoralising. It’s almost unspeakable. We all hope and pray that you get your act together.”
A successful entrepreneur friend recently told me he is pulling cash out of Britain and putting it into India, where there’s a chance of it growing. How sad.