Blain’s Morning Porridge July 3rd, 2026 – Happy Birthday America and what ails Broken Britain
“Reorganising the civil service is like drawing a knife through a bowl of marbles.”
Compare and contrast the USA and Britain. The new country and the old. Our problems are not in our inventiveness, our skills or our people, but in how our societies work. We suffer from Politics that don’t govern, Businesses that don’t share, and Bureaucracies that don’t deliver. These are problems of late-stage democracies in need of a reset. Politicians keep promising – maybe one day one of them will actually make changes!
Happy Birthday America!
Have a great party! Celebrate a quarter millennium of awesomeness! Across the pond in Europe we sincerely mean that. We have much to thank the USA for and much to be proud of. Britain’s finest sailed the ocean to the new world and forged a nation. It was a reaction to a far-away tyrant’s actions, founded on the basis all men are created equal and may only be ruled with the consent of the governed. The new state attracted Europe’s huddled masses giving it the strength and diversity to thrive. Today it is the most powerful nation on Earth – as its’ leader keeps reminding us. The USA has worked pretty well – thus far!
The relationship across pond between the White House and Europe is a tad strained these days. The gaps may widen. There is division where once was shared political vision, and a deepening distrust of American businesses and how they operate. European’s watch the rising inequality and income division between the haves and have-nots in America and fear a crisis is coming. Trust across the Atlantic is not what it once was, and that could have profound economic and geopolitical implications for Europe and the US.
On the other hand, hundreds of thousands of visiting football fans from around the World have discovered how welcoming Americans are. They are, by and large, wonderful people with deep hearts. It’s a marvellous place. When the current unpleasantness is over and normality returns – and it will – I can’t wait to visit again. I’ve a hankering to drive Route 66, walk the Civil War battlefields, see Nashville, visit Yellowstone, and ride Monument Valley pretending I’m John Wayne at the head of a cavalry detachment!
However, I can’t help but wonder if it would all have turned out differently if America had been a Spanish or French colony? Would they have cared as much about notions like “no taxation without representation” or “the rights of man”, or would they have given a shrug and worked around the laws that so triggered the Anglo-Scots sensitivities of the colonists? Just a few decades before, France could well have taken the whole Eastern freeboard… but we will never know. It’s worth remembering nearly the whole of the American era has seen the rise and decline of the British Empire, and its replacement by the USA as Global Hegemon. What will follow?
History we can read. Tomorrow? We can only guess.
Back in the real world…
I have to giggle at the Front Page of the FT this morning. Lunch with the FT features Labour bogeyman Morgan McSweeney. It’s hilarious – but very revealing about why Britain is so difficult to govern.
It starts badly. The thing about Lunch with the FT is the interviewee gets to pick the restaurant and the paper pays. But like McSweeney’s time in power as Chief of Staff to premier Sir Keir Starmer it’s a bit of a farce. He picks his favourite North London Gastropub – no doubt to show his street credentials – but he’d didn’t check and picked the day the kitchen was closed, so they have take-away pizza instead!
McSweeney admits what we all now know. Labour was utterly unprepared for Government. They’d talked and talked and talked, but took office with no real plan.
(I was invited to talk to some of McSweeney’s colleagues from the Labour Together think tank well before the election – I’d been recommended as someone who knew the bond market. I did a lot of listening as they told me how they thought the Gilts market worked. I interrupted to say something like, “Er, no… let me explain how it actually works and what investors expect.” I explained Gilts buyers care about prompt repayment of interest and principal, stability and no inflation. They want economic and political competency – and if they get it, they will fund the required borrowing to rebuild broken Britain. Give them a clear plan well explained and they will be happy. I talked about debt/GDP as a notion – not a block. They were shocked I’d expressed an opinion. I never heard from them again… I’d failed the interview.)
Oh dear. There, there. Never mind…
I worked out from the FT interview why McSweeney failed. Was it just the lack of planning, or was it the political games he played? He manoeuvred Starmer into the leadership – which he describes in the article. But he’s been accused of undermining Sue Gray, Starmer’s first choice for Chief of Staff – who had been charged with developing “the plan.” McSweeney goes on to deny there was a toxic environment at No10 and they played political games. He blames The Treasury – the bureaucracy – for misleading the elected government on the consequences of economic policy decisions.
The rest is history. He played politics. Labour did not govern. Those who live by the sword die by the sword, and after the catalogue of errors the Starmer Government proved to be, he resigned after the Mandelson farago.
What the article doesn’t delve into is why the UK state functions so badly. McSweeney knew how to play politics – but that’s only one part of Broken Britain’s problem!
I’ve tried explain some of the wider problems in my recent book – The Battle for Hamble. It uses the planning permission granted to a quarry in Hampshire as a case study in Broken Britain. The aim was to demonstrate and describe how the processes of government fail to deliver good outcomes, how the consequences of bad bureaucratic delivery of government policy results in economic damage and decline, and how greedy and rapacious corporates exploit the broken system to the benefit of Shareholders (and board members) to the detriment of Stakeholders (the community).
It’s a text-book case study of how corporate greed, bad planning and economic illiteracy results in social injustice on a massive scale. (The quarry will negatively impact over 20,000 residents around Hamble, putting 6000 jobs at risk for gravel nobody needs!)
It describes and illuminates why the grand policies and ambitions expressed by Government in Parliament don’t translate into a stronger economy. It describes:
- A culture of box-ticking and arse-covering across government and bureaucracy to shirk responsibility,
- A dearth of accountability,
- A lack of “cures” for bad decisions (“computer says no” mentality) – which is why social injustices in the UK like the Postmaster, infected blood, and maternity unit scandals get buried in inquiries and take years to bring to court.
- The broken, under-resourced and underpaid planning process,
- Democratic failure and Institutional blindness,
- Bureaucratic indifference to protecting resilient communities and the health, wealth and prosperity of locals,
- Economic illiteracy across government and the bureaucracy with no understanding of the consequences of bad decisions,
- A hopeless treacle of rules, regulations and procedures that tend to favour obsolete policies and process over economic common sense,
- The exploitative, wasteful and extremely expensive legal system that’s evolved to monetise planning decisions – while making planning lawyers obscenely rich,
- And finally, how all these failings are gamed and exploited by corporates seeking to profit from the broken system!
Planning is just one aspect of delivery failure. I looked at how the cost of fighting planning decisions favours big money, the way in which lawyers act as “problem factories” to extract fees from the planning system, cost escalation in planning disputes, how the planning process is anything but transparent or fair, how it is weaponized against residents who are dismissed as ignorant “Nimbys” , how the process gets buried in details to the detriment of the bigger economic picture, and how the “environment” is treated as a conceptual speedbump to skate around rather than protect.
I think the UK’s problem is the system. Fix that and let the economy thrive!
Have a great 4th of July! Out of time and back to the day job!
Bill Blain
Author of the Morning Porridge
CEO Windshift Capital
Advisor – Spitfire Strategic Capital
Meanwhile, don’t forget about my new book:
The Battle For Hamble is a proper grown-up examination of how economies fail: a tale of Greedy Corporates, Bad Planning and Economic Illiteracy. It uses a wholly unnecessary Gravel Quarry in the middle of a prosperous village to illustrate the multiple failings and abdications of responsibility that have created Broken Britain. It’s about bureaucracy, money, exploitation and shareholders vs stakeholders. It’s about social injustice – asking why it’s ok to put 6000 jobs at risk so corporate bosses can reap bigger bonuses! Whether is the Hamble Quarry, HS2 or the abysmal state of UK armed forces due to bad procurement, read the book to understand how its broken process and bureaucratic indifference that is sinking Britain.
