Moments of truth

This week: the president who disunited the states, and Canada’s charming Heritage Minutes. But first: what if we were wrong?

There is a very tiny part of me that feels sorry for Kwasi Kwarteng. Many of us tut at what a government is doing, some of us professionally, and tell each other what they should be doing; few of us get the chance to actually put our ideas into practice. But as Liz Truss’s chancellor, Kwarteng – a former financial analyst and uber Thatcherite, who’d set out his stall in books like Britainnia Unchained – actually got to do it. Few people have ever been proved so swiftly, so comprehensively or so publicly wrong. 

The parts of the internet who’ve spent the past few years diagnosing Britain’s economic malady are neither as self certain nor as organised as the group doomed forever to be tarred as the “Trussites”, but nonetheless a sort of theory of the case has emerged. Since the crash, Britain’s wages have barely grown, because our productivity has barely grown. After two centuries of steady and apparently automatic growth this is unnerving.

There are a number of possible explanations for this, including an over dependence on the financial sector, an ageing population and British workers being lazy/managers being shit [delete to personal experience/political taste]. Other issues, though, are actually in the government’s gift to fix. A lack of public investment, stemming from a decade of austerity. A lack of private investment, stemming from a sclerotic and unpredictable planning system. If the government built more stuff, and enabled the private sector to do the same, we’d get more data centres, more lab space, more homes close to jobs and better transport links between them.

So: reform planning, raise investment levels, and growth will come back; and that, in turn, should pay for everything else. That’s the theory to which a lot of clever people I generally agree with subscribe. And, despite some wobbles, there are tentative signs it’s one Chancellor Rachel Reeves agrees with, too.¹ Everything’s going to be great.

But – and here’s where my sympathy for Kwarteng comes into play – what if it’s not? What if these things aren’t the main causes of the productivity puzzle at all? What if it’s Brexit, a policy which deliberately cut Britain off from its main trading partner and which the current government has limited interest in reversing? Or what if it’s something else we can’t even see? Western Europe as a whole has fallen behind this past decade, after all (albeit by less than us).² 

So what if it wasn’t all just the Tories after all?

Maybe this doesn’t matter. The rest of western Europe does now feel a lot more prosperous than Britain: just getting us back to that level would make a huge difference. There are many things a government should be able to do to improve things, even if “being as rich as the rest of the English-speaking world” is off the table. 

But there is nonetheless something unnerving about seeing a government actually do what you want, because it raises the question: what if it doesn’t work? When the gods wish to punish you, they answer your prayers. 

Talking books

For those of you who’ve been waiting fretfully for the opportunity to listen to me bang on about that book that I wrote, good news! I was on the Booking Club podcast with Jack Aldane, talking borders over a rather nice French Onion soup in Bellanger on Islington Green. Check it out here. 

Here’s the cover of the North American version:

Hey, talking of Americans (see what I did there), let’s talk presidents. Since starting this mini-series, I’ve been moving inexorably forward – but with time running out before election day, I’ve realised that it’s time to jump back and talk about the two terrible men who bookended the Civil War, and make Abe Lincoln appear even more of a giant than he actually was. First up, his predecessor. 

Half-forgotten US president of the week: James Buchanan

Lived: 1791-1868

15th president: 1857-1861

Oops, I did it again: portrait of James Buchanan. Image: Library of Congress/public domain.

Perhaps I’m just projecting what I know here, but the official portrait of James Buchanan makes him look like a hapless sitcom character: there’s just something about that facial expression that makes me hear distant cries of, “Hennimore!” He served, his official White House biography begins, “immediately prior to the American Civil War, [and] remains the only President to be elected from Pennsylvania and to remain a lifelong bachelor”. Not only is this out of date – Joe Biden is from Pennsylvania – it feels a bit like beginning a description of Charles I by noting that, at 5’4, he’s believed to have been the shortest king of England. Sure, this is mildly diverting, but he broke his country. You’re burying the lede.

Buchanan was born to a large Ulster-Scottish family (eleven kids!) in the mountains of southern Pennsylvania in 1791, making him the last president to be born in the 18th century. He trained as a – sit down, this may come as a shock – lawyer, and had a pretty illustrious pre-presidential career: elected five times to House of Representatives, served as ambassador to Russia, then spent a decade in the Senate. After that he served as Secretary of State under James K. Polk, which, by my reckoning, means he shares blame for the war against Mexico (it wouldn’t be his last); then as ambassador to Britain under Franklin Pierce, his immediate predecessor and a president so forgotten I’ve not even found room for him in this column. 

Being out of the country for the Pierce years turned out to be an advantage: it meant, according to that White House bio, that he hadn’t seemed to take sides in “bitter domestic controversies” that would soon take the nation to Civil War. He swept to the Democratic Party nomination in 1856, and thence to the presidency itself.

What were those bitter domestic controversies? If we wanted to be generous, we could note the tension caused by the shift in economic and political muscle, from agricultural south to increasingly industrial north. But we don’t want to be generous, because the biggest issues were whether it was okay to keep human beings as slaves, and who would get to decide that. (“States’ rights”, you’ll recall, often carries a silent “to be racist”.) Because these issues generally set south against north, Buchanan, a northerner from the southern-dominated Democratic party who’d kept his hands clean during the Pierce years, was assumed to be a fair dealer who could float above the fray.

That is not, it is fair to say, how things turned out.