Devolution Is a Deflection, Not a Diagnosis
11th August 2026
The King is dead; Long live the King!
Or so the media declare as Britain faces up to its seventh Prime minister in a decade. The seemingly ritualistic axing of our head of government has been accompanied by all the usual rites. The choir of voices declaring “The grownups are back in charge”, the scuttling of MPs as they preach the virtues of their latest leader with the new gospel in their hands and hopes of promotion on their mind; and the insistence by all that this will herald a new age of politics. That this time things will be different!
But in and among these rantings and ravings is the same essential diagnosis. Britain doesn’t work. Its institutions are out of date; its practices out of step and its state model out of time. And aren’t they right? Isn’t it true that in place of efficient execution we’ve had unparalleled chaos at every level of government, with most ministers lucky to last two years at the head of their departments? That instead of a state that builds, we’ve got a state that consults, one that spent fifteen years planning a railway to Manchester before abandoning it, having sunk £2.3bn on a stretch of the railway that got cancelled. A railway which, in the stretch we are still building, will cost more than Britain’s entire nuclear deterrent.
I thank God every day that I don’t live in Britain.