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Comment by monus21 | Hacker News Reader

> It’s not clear to me _why_ this has happened

I always assumed it was a combination of WW II, collapse of the Empire and then a series of terrible governments since the 1960s.

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Single common thread has to be poor governance. Certainly in politics and the civil service and also, from what I hear, amongst business leaders. They are mostly selected from a very small pool, ie public schools via the class system, so it makes intuitive sense that those chosen would on average be less talented / capable (and even motivated) than other countries. Certainly many of those I know who went to private school were not as competent as their grades or standing would suggest. Add to that a lack of life experience (career politicians, sheltered lives, oxbridge bubble) then it’s hard for them to even know what the real problems are, never mind caring or have a vision for fixing them. Simple examples: the productivity gap, the state of infrastructure, chronic underinvestment in the north at the expense of where the upper class live, etc Fallback has been decades of “managed decline”, which is actually - kicking the can down the road to maintain the status quo for as long as possible before people realise the state of things. Thatcher saw the city and selling off national assets as a quick fix, Blair pumped student debt into the regions to borrow from the future. Combine that with infighting and the Tories’ destruction of industry and local government for class war purposes. I don’t see a way out beyond a revolution, but that will take surely many more decades of decline. Best hope is break up of U.K. perturbs the political sufficiently to open it up to the rest of the country. Things are realistically ok for most people (but not for millions living in poverty and literally relying on food handouts to live), but far more worrying is the trend. It’s plain to see things will get very very bad without wholesale reform and long term vision.

>Single common thread has to be poor governance.

I think a structural issue is aging demographics. Lots of welfare policies were enacted when the ratio of workers to non workers was much higher. For decades now, this ratio has been getting smaller and smaller, hence the constant political dilemma of which benefits to cut and how much and for who.

The UK seems like it will especially struggle with delivering universal healthcare promises, as well as pension benefits. Not only are fault lines along rich and poor, but they will be more and more along old and young.

An ageing population and a pensioner class that vote solely for their interests are definitely problems. Notice that pensioners were, once again, the only group protected in the recent statement. They don’t even seem to be aware/grateful for this.

We could avoided a lot of the economic cost of Covid by asking the over-65s to shield and kept the wider economy more or less going, but that was unacceptable to them and instead we shut down everything for their benefit and now they aren’t even willing to contribute to the cost.

> Single common thread has to be poor governance. Certainly in politics and the civil service and also, from what I hear, amongst business leaders.

Strongly agree. I used to work in the civil service and there are many good individuals but the management structure is poor (though I think generally very effective at line management) and plenty of duffers get promoted. Many ministers are really very mediocre.

Good ideas and techniques are very slowly adopted, but then things like Agile are cargo-culted in an inappropriate way. To be fair, plenty of tech firms do this.

Dominic Cummings has lots of interesting ideas on this on his Substack. When Truss’ mini budget nearly broke pension funds, he pointed out that not only No 10 not know how leveraged they were, but nobody seems to care that they didn’t know. Surely central government should be able to pull together all the data it gathers?

Unfortunately he turned out to be not very good at governing.

Happen to know a couple of people who have worked with Cummings and Boris.

Cummings seems like a reasonably intelligent guy, if ethically dubious and difficult to work with (putting it mildly). What is shocking is that he looks like a genius when compared to those around him. He has basically read around a bit, thinks for himself, and is open to contrarian ideas. He’s just a reminder of how poor our governance is.

I think the reality is most of our govts are not just incompetent but actively harmful in terms of national interest. Obviously a hard Brexit, which Cameron and Johnson created as a byproduct of their own political schemes, is the greatest symbol of this.

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