Optimism At Last

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There is an optimism in Britain that I haven't felt for a long time. That should sound weird - the world is going to pieces, the transatlantic alliance is in tatters, there are some dire British economic statistics - even YouTube is full of "Britain is broken" videos. To hell with it all. Content creators have niches and dunking on countries is one of them, alliances change and statistics can tell any story you like. Yes, I say that professionally.

I wrote a while back that the only societal metrics that matter are health indicators. My reasoning is that unlike money, health indicators are directly related to ordinary people's quality of life. Less stress, for instance, lowers rates of cardiovascular illness, happy people drink less alcohol and well-fed children grow taller. But such metrics take a long time to become apparent, and Britain's current metrics show the rot of the last decade, not the situation at present. Luckily, there is something much simpler and more visceral we can use as a national well-being yardstick - do people feel like tomorrow will be better than today? I think Brits are, at last, beginning to.

Politics is the obvious reason for this. It feels like Westminster is finally coming out of an awful run. Not uniquely awful, it must be said - Britain's woes over recent years were the same as our peer nations'. We chose economic growth at the expense of equality; we priced working people out of housing; we let wage shrinkage happen among key workers; people have been financially forced to delay parenthood; food costs more; and so on. We just coped worse than others. I blame the timing of the 2008 crash, particularly its arrival at the low point of our simple political cycle.

In British politics, a party - invariably the Conservatives or Labour - wins a majority government (meaning it can pass legislation regardless of whether the opposition likes it) and uses its five-year mandate to get things done. That's the high point of the cycle. Normally, that party wins again, and possibly again, until it runs out of ideas and goes stale - the low point. The next election sees the other party take over and the cycle restarts. Simple.

In 2008, our government was very stale. The Labour Party had been in power for eleven years without much change in its policies, then in 2010, we got the worst of all electoral outcomes - a coalition government (meaning the governing party has to work with others). It's difficult to explain how disastrous working with others is to British politics, but imagine a system with no constitutional mechanism to break deadlocks and no political will to stop arguing. It's a stalemate, essentially. Then Brexit happened.

I won’t open the Brexit debate - remain lost, narrowly, that’s it. But I'll say two things: 1) Brexit did not need to happen, and 2) it could have been, and still can be, successful. Two vaguely similar European nations - Norway and Switzerland - have made themselves high-functioning members of the European continent without being members of the EU. Britain made itself a troublesome member of the EU, and then an antagonistic ex-spouse who wanted the house, the kids, the car, the dog, all the kitchenware and a bonus pony in the divorce settlement. This was an unnecessary choice made by a stale Conservative government looking to keep hardliners onside. And it poisoned relations with our most important allies.

Nobody thinks that poison will be easy to remove, and even fewer thought Keir Starmer would be the one to begin the process. Brexit's driving force was the populist Nigel Farage, its chaotic implementation was led by the über-populist Boris Johnson, and the chief opposition through the era was the "other side of the coin" (read socialist) populist Jeremy Corbyn. Britain was moving away from boring and competent leaders at light-speed, and rushing toward anyone who would prostitute themselves to the whims of an electoral base. Somehow, we've autocorrected.

Keir Starmer isn't just the most boring and competent leader Britain has chosen in over thirty years, he's arguably the most boring and competent leader on the world stage right now. And his performance in Europe, particularly his quietly majestic partnership with Emmanuel Macron, is ticking every box it needs to. For Brussels, it feels like London is a partner again - like Brussels always wanted. For remain voters, it feels like Britain is European again. And for Leave voters, it feels like Britain is independently important again. An unsquarable circle has thus been squared.

Now come the thorny details. Reversing almost a decade of acrimony will require real-world give and take, something doable when both sides see themselves gaining and virtually impossible otherwise. Military technology is an obvious area of mutual gain. Europe knows the US has abandoned it in all but treaty (and Trump withdrawing from NATO is far from unlikely) so reliance on American military equipment is being questioned along with reliance on direct American protection. The problem is that as enfeebled as Europe's armies are, its military production is even weaker. The continent must boost its own arms industries if it wants to stay safe, and Britain is one of the few European economies with any kind of baseline to work with, or technology to share.

The first step in this new era of weapons collaboration is to agree a UK-EU defence and security partnership. You might think something like that would take years of negotiation before failing to happen - and it normally would - but thanks to the current climate, it is expected to happen in about eight weeks time. The world is spinning fast.

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