BY STEWART SLATER

One of my favourite ideas in philosophy is the Duhem-Quine thesis, one of those concepts “discovered” independently by two different people using two different approaches, which tells us that we can never eliminate all but one explanation for a single event. There will always be other potential reasons for what happened. Consider Emma Raducanu. Until the current Wimbledon, she had exited every Grand Slam she had entered after her triumph in New York no later than the Second Round. Is she an elite, Grand Slam-winning level tennis player on a run of bad form, or is she a 30-60 ranked player who once got lucky? Her results support both interpretations and give us no reason to pick one over the other. (I see that she is now out of Wimbledon, losing to a mere qualifier).

The upshot of this is that it is never wise to commit too heavily to any particular interpretation because there is a reasonable chance that it will be wrong.

Despite this, and despite their PPE degrees probably having given them at least some familiarity with Messrs Duhem and Quine, for the past several months, we have seen the political classes converge on a single explanation for what ails Britain. There is, to the Sensibles/Grown-Ups/Serious People, nothing particularly wrong with the country, there is merely a problem with the way it has been run. The British “model” is basically fine, but it has been badly managed. Rishi Sunak’s pitch during the election (to the extent he had one) was to admit that things had gone awry under Liz Truss, but, claim that, having corrected her mistakes, he had now got things back on track.

Keir Starmer, despite, ostensibly being Sunak’s rival, actually took a very similar approach. The only difference in his pitch was that Rishi Sunak would be unable to run things, and that, for the model to actually function as intended, he and his chums needed to be in charge. He is the very model of a modern Manager-General, not a leader, still less the Father of the Nation (as, in a very real sense, his predecessor but two probably was) but the Bureaucrat-in-chief.

For it was striking how apparently unideological his speech outside Downing Street was. He claimed to be “unburdened by doctrine” and offered a “government of service” in a “mission of national renewal”. There was no mention of ideas, or changing the nation’s approach, just of doing the job better than those who had gone before, as I imagine Jeeves might have done when interviewed by Bertie Wooster. The reward was a “politics [which will] tread more lightly on your lives”, code in previous usages for “don’t get involved, let me run everything and do what I say.”…

But, “If everyone thinks the same, someone is not thinking” and, as we can imagine, there is another way of looking at the past fourteen years. If, instead of a good system, badly run, we have a failing system run about as well as possible, the results would probably not look much different.

For, as I outlined in a piece explaining why I was not going to vote (turnout figures suggest some people did actually read it…), the country is ageing, highly indebted and highly taxed. There is a limit, absent a sustained period of high growth, to how much more can be spent on public services. Indeed, the country already spends too much on public services – the average Baby Boomer will make a life-time profit of c. £250,000 out of the British state (the value of what they receive minus the taxes they pay) – as a system designed for a predominantly young nation whose elderly die soon after retirement fails to cope with an older population who live for decades after leaving work. The country has become a money-game, the state merely shuffling cash from one part to another. This is unsustainable, but Labour appears committed to it. Democracy, as someone said, will last until people realise they can vote themselves benefices from the public treasury…

Even if the money can be found, it will need to be spent, but here too, there are problems. For while it has been politically convenient for Labour to pin every failing of the British state on their opponents, the numerous scandals (this piece outlines a selection of them), in reality, have come from the permanent bureaucracy, not the more ephemeral political leadership. It was not, for example, Matt Hancock who covered up Lucy Letby. It may be true that Conservative politicians were incompetent, but there is no reason to think their non-political underlings were any better, and plenty of examples of them being worse exist.

Expecting a bureaucracy of questionable competence to produce stellar results by spending money which does not exist, while hemmed in by existing laws which actively constrain growth (to which the government is committed – attempts to change planning laws will run into issues with environmental legislation) and which (as in a recent Supreme Court judgement on oil drilling) courts are increasingly willing to interpret expansively is, let us be kind, a punchy call.

Nor do we have any reason to believe that those now at the top of the greasy pole are themselves competent. A glance at their CVs reveals a lot of lawyers, advisers and activists, but few with any experience of running a large organisation successfully. Keir Starmer’s time at the CPS was not, to be fair, entirely without criticism. Indeed, his one campaign in his short political career to date – overturning Brexit – resulted in the “hardest” of exits this side of “No Deal” and a Tory landslide, the worst, from his point of view, possible outcome. Those tempted to depression at the result should take some comfort from the reality that, even if the system still works, there is little evidence the new government will be able to operate it particularly successfully.

This may work for those of us prepared to kick back for five years, pour out a glass and snigger, but it will not work for Labour. Claiming to have junked ideology and tribalism (all that “country before party” stuff which merely raises the question of what Starmer was doing during the Corbyn years when, by his current analysis, his team were very much “party before country”), they offer no reason to vote for them in 2028/9 outside of their results. What if they don’t come? One can tell people till the cows come home that one is “serious” “competent” or any other such buzz-word, but eventually, the electorate stop listening to one’s self-congratulatory rhetoric and take a look at the real world results.

James Kanagasooriam, the pollster who coined the term “Red Wall” has recently returned to his phrase-making ways with the notion of “sandcastle” politics – modern coalitions are inherently unstable and prone to collapse. As tribal loyalties have frayed, the nation has now become one of floating voters, apt to switch party at the drop of a hat. Labour’s result was certainly efficient (large numbers of seats with low majorities), but the flipside of efficiency is fragility – it does not take much for such a system to collapse as we discovered when a captain decided to park his boat in the middle of the Suez Canal a few years back. Satisfying all parts of the coalition Labour has established will be just as hard as satisfying all parts of Boris Johnson’s was. What appears “competent” to a man-bun sporting barista in Clerkenwell is not what will appear “competent” to a former steel worker in Port Talbot. We may have reached the stage where the coalition necessary to win an election makes it impossible to win re-election.

Whether Labour’s majority was “loveless”, it was certainly, to an extent, lucky. A lot of things went right for the party, things which, had their opponents behaved differently, might gone in another, less congenial way. But, as David Cameron showed, the problem with being lucky is that, eventually, you are not. And what do you do then?

Stewart Slater works in Finance. He invites you to join him at his website.