Noah Smith’s piece on the UK as a cautionary tale for the US is worth your time. He’s ex-Bloomberg, now freelance, and he knows exactly what he’s walking into - an American criticising Britain is guaranteed to get the “shut up, Yank” treatment.
He addresses it head on: “If you bring up the UK’s flaws on social media, you’re going to get an earful about how America elected Trump, Americans have no health care, American kids are constantly dodging bullets… Any criticism from an American is seen as giving free ammunition to the local enemy.” He’s right that it’s unhelpful, and he’s also right that it’s inevitable.
I don’t agree with everything he argues. It’s a stimulating read nonetheless.
He draws heavily on the ukfoundations.co manifesto, which is worth considering in its own right.
On the National Health Service (NHS) - real recent experience here. A family member resident in UK has just been diagnosed with lung cancer. Caught early, good prospects. He can’t afford health insurance. In Britain he doesn’t need it. In the USA, he might be forced to choose between bankruptcy or much delayed diagnosis and treatment, possibly hastening death.
“People facing cancer and survivors who are uninsured – or don’t have health insurance – have high health care costs, poor access to care, poor cancer outcomes and experience a great amount of financial hardship.” - American Cancer Society
The NHS dealt with him expeditiously; his only out-of-pocket cost was transport to and from hospital. It probably helps that he lives in central London, close to the best hospitals Britain has. That’s the NHS at its best and it’s worth acknowledging.
My ongoing thesis on the UK is this: the people with the get up and go have often got up and gone. The class system remains deeply embedded, and social and economic mobility is close to nonexistent. That’s not a tabloid take, that’s the structural reality underpinning most of what Smith is arguing.
So what does this mean for Australia? A few things stand out clearly.
We need governments and civic leaders who stay pragmatic and refuse to be dragged into culture wars - Brexit was an irrational culture war dressed up as economic sovereignty, and it cost Britain enormously.
A diverse economy is a healthy economy, which raises the uncomfortable question of what Australia is actually doing to move beyond houses and holes - banking and mining remain the twin pillars, and that’s a fragile foundation.
Austerity that damages large numbers of citizens ultimately damages everyone, including the people who thought they were insulated from it. Households are the economic engine of western economies. Suppress wages and benefits, slashes taxes on the wealthy and you ultimately damage the whole economy.
Trade relations matter - no Australian government, to its credit, has ever really forgotten that lesson. A lesson that was lost on 51.9% of Britain that voted for Brexit.
Regulations need regular honest review and should land at just enough to protect quality of life for us and for future generations, not one clause more.
And the switch to lower-cost renewable energy is urgent - unlike Britain, we have an embarrassment of solar irradiation, so there’s no excuse.
Anyway, none of this is simple. But the bottom-line is clear enough: cultural warriors and peddlers of clean simple but wrong answers - your Brexits, your austerity merchants - are the ones who leave the mess for everyone else to clean up.
“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” - H. L. Mencken
Sources: