By Charles C. W. Cooke
Monday, June 22, 2026
Keir Starmer has fallen. Long live Andy Burnham! Or
Angela Rayner or Wes Streeting, or Yvette Cooper, or whichever other poor,
downtrodden sod manages to finagle the job of prime minister of Great Britain
and Northern Ireland for a few sweaty and bruising months before this
interminable game of political hot potato chooses a new victim or, if
interrupted by an election, lands in the lap of a different party. At this
point, taking the reins of the British government is a little like becoming the
drummer in Spinal Tap. You know that you’re going to be toast pretty soon; the
only interesting question is how.
It would, I concede, be rather cathartic for me to list
all the ways in which Keir Starmer was a historically terrible premier. But, as
it happens, I have a different target to roast. Peruse the channels of
sophisticated opinion in England today, and you will inevitably encounter some
variation of the argument that the United Kingdom has of late become
“ungovernable,” because its “complicated” electorate desires a set of public
policies that cannot coexist. British voters, this supposition runs, want housing
to become more affordable for the young and for the existing housing
stock to retain its value; they want taxes to stop rising and for more
money to be spent on the health service, on pensions, and on care for the
elderly; they want the price of energy to go down and to achieve “net
zero”; they want Britain to start inventing things again and for their
island to retain its sprawling archipelago of regulations; they want to be
welcoming and “diverse” and to acknowledge that the country’s
infrastructure is already bulging at the seams. As a descriptive matter, this
may well be true. As an excuse, however, it is thoroughly inadequate.
Substantively, there is no real difference between it and the suggestion that
the median voter in Britain is seven years old. Voters want everything, all at
once, with no trade-offs or sacrifices to be seen? Of course they do. Who
wouldn’t? But adults ought to know that this is not possible. Where are the
adults in British political life?
I am not offering up a defense for any of the figures who
have run Britain over the last two decades. Keir Starmer included, they are all
craven mediocrities. Rather, I am attempting to lay the blame for that where it
ultimately belongs — which is with the British public. Vote-seekers are
professionally obliged to pretend that Britain has had seven prime ministers in
ten years because there is something abstractly wrong with the “system” that
the selection of the right leader will magically fix. I am not so obliged,
which allows me to say without fear or favor that the real reason that Britain
has had seven prime ministers in ten years is that the British public would
rather blame its own lazy schizophrenia on the Westminster class than to look
inward and acknowledge that it has routinely demanded its own decline. “Our
doubts,” wrote Shakespeare, “are traitors / And make us lose the good we oft
might win / By fearing to attempt.” They don’t want to hear it, but, in this
instance, the doubts, fears, and treachery here are the voters’.
The numbers are stark. In 2008, U.S. GDP per capita was
about 25 percent higher than the U.K.’s. Today, it is 40 percent higher, such
that were Britain to become the 51st American state, it would be poorer than
all of the existing 50 — including Mississippi. (Per capita GDP in Mississippi
is $55,900; in the U.K., it is $53,200.) Since 2008, average household incomes
in the U.S. have gone from about 36 percent higher than Britain’s to about 63
percent higher. Over the same period, real GDP per capita has increased by
around 65 percent in the United States, and by about 3 percent in the United
Kingdom; British productivity has been effectively flat; and American stocks
have left their British counterparts in the dust, with the S&P 500 vastly
outperforming the FTSE 100. In 2026, Britain has only a handful of innovative
companies, an alarmingly limited ability to project military force, and,
despite the fact that the Exchequer is on course to collect a larger share of
national income in taxes than at any point in the postwar era, a raft of
crumbling public services about which voters never stop complaining.
Given all this, one would expect to see considerable
support in Britain for radical change — not simply in who is running the
government but in the core presumptions that inform that government’s approach.
And yet, incredibly, no such movement is afoot. “Growth” remains an alien word
within British political life. Only 19 percent of Britons believe that taxes and spending should be decreased. No
major political party will touch the National Health Service, and no major
political figure has come out against the “triple lock” policy that guarantees
that pensions will rise each year by whichever is highest: inflation, wage
growth, or 2.5 percent. There has been no meaningful attempt to embrace a broad
program of deregulation, even as regulation has become an increasingly
significant constraint on housing construction, energy development, and
infrastructure projects. The political consensus behind “net zero” has endured.
Worst of all, the British do not seem to understand on a visceral level that
their nation has become poor, sclerotic, and geopolitically irrelevant. Now, as
ever, the smug reassurance that “at least we’re not America” obfuscates a
multitude of sins.
Well, perhaps Britain should try being more like America
for a while. It worked last time.
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