It's the quality of people.<p>Our institutions are reliable. Our parliament, judiciary, civil
services, while weakened by decades of under-funding, remain
essentially sound and held together by great hard working people with
a deep ethic of civic duty. Our electorate are pretty well educated,
active and dutiful. Our elections are fair and well attended. We have
a multi-chamber carefully segmented government with plenty of checks
and balances to steer a path between conservative and progressive
courses.<p>On the face of it we should have a model democracy and a prosperous
nation.<p>But "politics" in the UK is a seedy, corrupt selection mechanism to
find the worst possible human specimens and put them in power. It
rewards childish, irresponsible, petulant, mean-spirited, greedy and
corrupt little bullies who are vain, shallow, dishonest, weak-minded,
cavalier and self-obsessed. And I'm being charitable here.<p>The era of the statesman is over. No matter how excellent our systems
are they cannot function if staffed by incompetent hooligans.<p>A massive improvement to British politics could be made simply by
selecting the cabinet and prime minister randomly from the population
and then voting only on policies.
<i>The problem with the UK Tory party is not the personal defects of the captain. The problem is that you’re not eligible for the captaincy unless you agree it was a brilliant idea to scupper the ship in 2016- and can convincingly act baffled why it has been sinking ever since</i> - David Frum
What’s happened is that Labour’s long-standing unelectability has allowed the UK political scene to become dominated by the digestive tract that is the Tory party. Grassroots-electable Tory MPs go in one end, and gradually work their way through the system, extracting any goodness, until a waste product emerges at the other end. This normally slow-moving constipation of political career development has become fast-flowing diarrhoea in recent months, with the current turd being pushed out before properly flushing the previous effluent, which is now looking up from the bowl through dishevelled hair, looking for a way back in through the newly-vacated opening.
The problem was Brexit, or more specifically it going ahead on 51% of the vote without any plan. I couldn't find a more blatant act of economic self-sabotage if I tried.
I think the problem is the 2 party political system that flip flops between the left and right with one party having full power. We need a more balanced PR based system that forces compromise and gives the smaller parties a voice. I believe Brexit and the latest goonery wouldn't have been allowed to happen in such a system.
You could summarize it as fanciful brexit economics crashing into reality.<p>The dark irony is that it's from someone (Truss) who wasn't originally in favour of brexit.<p>The FT described her economic strategy as "cakeism" - getting to both eat and have your cake.<p><a href="https://www.ft.com/content/f8f8d943-35e9-423a-9a9a-b6074a6cf29d" rel="nofollow">https://www.ft.com/content/f8f8d943-35e9-423a-9a9a-b6074a6cf...</a>