This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.

This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.

The forced departure of the sixth British prime minister in 10 years is being interpreted as yet one more symptom of Britain’s chronic political instability. Comparisons are made with Italy, though the current Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has been in office for three years and eight months.

Such hand-wringing misses the point that a country able to rapidly change its leaders by democratic means is far better off than one stuck with the same dud. Longevity in office is not necessarily a sign of successful leadership: witness Vladimir Putin firmly in power since 1999 despite launching a disastrous war. Khalifa bin Salman Al-Khalifa, who died in 2020, probably holds some sort of record as the despotic prime minister of Bahrain for 50 years and 300 days.

All recent British prime ministers have failed to cope with, still less reverse, the country’s comparative decline compared to the rest of the world. This failure has gathered pace since the financial crisis of 2008, though its roots go back much further to the first half of the 20th century.

But it is crucial here to keep a sense of proportion because Britain faces deep-seated problems, but it is not on the edge of a catastrophe. Yet it might easily inflict a real calamity on itself by ill-judged and over-radical efforts to promote national resurrection. Brexit is the most notorious example of national self-harm, but other remedies for the British malaise have had equally negative results. Britain is like a patient who suffers from serious but non-fatal illnesses whose immune system – in the shape of plausible but toxic reforms – goes into excessive overdrive, doing more damage than the original ailment.

Despite exaggerated talk about Britain’s ultimate decline, there is strangely little realistic analysis of how to put it right. The chief economic commentator of The Financial Times, Martin Wolf, says that the starting point in raising languishing economic growth rate “must be admission that the Thatcher experiment failed: it did not transform the underlying performance of the economy for the better.” He says the political response to this falls into two categories: charlatanism and timidity, with Sir Keir Starmer in the latter ineffectual camp.

Can Makerfield MP Andy Burnham do any better as prime minister, given how many wrong turnings there have been in the past? Privatisation of public utilities and outsourcing of government operations in the 1980s and 1990s are now generally admitted to have been a disaster, but how quickly and........

© iNews