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The decline and fall of the British State

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3 years ago

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Part the Second

By Michael Patrick O’Leary

Declinism

Last week, I wrote that for decades there had been a thriving literary genre consisting of works that portrayed Britain as the sick man of Europe (as the Ottoman Empire used to be known) and, indeed, in poor health globally. Much of this rhetoric came from the right but there were also voices on the left. Tom Nairn, who died on January 21 at the age of 90, was one of those voices. Nairn was a Scot who graduated in philosophy from the University of Edinburgh and , thanks to a British Council scholarship, spent a year at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, where he learned Italian, discovered Marxism and explored the writings of Antonio Gramsci.

Together with Perry Anderson at the New Left Review he developed a thesis to explain why Britain did not develop in a “normal” way. “The decline, mediocrity and archaism are also related to something else, less visible. As well as the socio-economic peculiarities of the United Kingdom, one should take into account its distinctive state. What seems to be happening in the new phase of British problems is that a long-standing illness of society is turning, rapidly and unmistakably, into a crisis of the state. For the first time outside the experience of war, ‘crisis’ has grown sufficiently acute to involve and threaten the form of state power.”

Diminishing Returns

Since 1948, spending power has increased in the UK, doubling every 30 years. It was about twice as high in 1978 as in 1948. It was close to doubling again by 2008, before the financial crisis intervened. Since then, stagnation.

The Resolution Foundation notes that average real earnings have fallen by 7% since a year ago and predicts that earnings will take four or five years to recover to the levels of January 2022. A quarter of the people the foundation surveyed said they couldn’t afford regular savings of £10 a month, or to spend small sums on a night out, or to replace electrical goods, or to turn on the heating when they were cold.

Had the pre-banking crisis trend continued, the typical Brit would by now be 40% better off than they are now. Instead, they are slipping ever backwards. What Britain has instead is a broken polity and people who cannot afford to heat their homes. Taxes are high but public services are appallingly bad. Voters have lost trust in the police (who are not investigating crimes but adding to them by raping and murdering) , the NHS, public utilities, ability to renew a passport or driving licence, the freedom to get from one place to another on time without paying a fortune and suffering extreme discomfort.

Causes of Decline

The current government doggedly attributes the sorry state of the country to the pandemic and the Ukraine war, which they claim have led to inflation throughout the world. Critics of the regime look elsewhere and put the blame on incompetent response to the 2008 financial crisis, the austerity policies of the Cameron government and Brexit. There is also the matter of ministers spending all their psychic energy on the problems of a hopelessly fragmented, fractious and fissiparous Tory party rather than attending to the needs of the nation.

Veteran political commentator Nick Cohen makes a good point in his blog Writing from London: “It’s not wholly the fault of a succession of failed prime ministers that Ireland, a nation the British once patronized as a rural backwater, has surpassed it.” Ireland was Britain’s first colony and now it is in better health than its former master. Being part of the EU has something to do with Ireland’s success. Astra Zeneca is planning to build a new state-of-the-art manufacturing plant in Blanchardstown in Ireland rather than in Macclesfield, citing Britain’s “discouraging” tax regime.

Those failed prime ministers (I have lost count) will not be able to convince voters that they are blameless for what has happened during the 13 years of their rule. The tendency is to blame someone else including a Labour Party that has had no control over events.

Brexit

I exhausted myself a couple of years ago writing about the dangers of Brexit. I was one of the doom mongers, the Remoaners. I used to write a column on Europe for two Sri Lankan business magazines. Looking back at those columns, I am not surprised to find that all of them were critical of the EU. I was not blind to the corruption, the undemocratic lack of accountability, the arrogance. However, it was clearly the height of folly for the UK to withdraw from a successful trading bloc without having a plan.

Liz Truss made a terrible hash of being prime minister but she is now back claiming that the current regime under Rishi Sunak is stifling growth by not cutting taxes. This ignores the obvious fact that growth has been retarded by willingly stepping out of the nearest (and powerful and influential and successful) trading bloc and failing to get better trade deals elsewhere. The trade deal that she negotiated with Australia did not go any way to replace the beneficial relationship with the EU. The minister, George Eustace, who negotiated it has recently said it was useless.

There were Leavers and Remainers, now we have Regretters. A poll by Savanta, found that. of people who voted to leave the bloc in 2016, 30% said they wanted the relationship with the EU to be closer. Of those surveyed, 29% believe Brexit is the primary reason for staff shortages in the UK, impacting a range of sectors like the National Health Service and agriculture. The proportion of respondents said Brexit was partly to blame for gaps in the labour market was 34%.

There are countless convincing reports that conclude that Brexit was a disaster for the UK economy. The OBR (Office for Budget Responsibility) has predicted that, over the 15 years from 2016, Brexit will reduce the UK’s GDP per capita by 4%. The Irish think tank the ESRI (Economic and Social Research Institute) released a report on 19 October 2022 showing reductions in trade from the UK to the EU reduced by 16% and trade from the EU to UK by 20%. Brexit has led to a significant decline in trade with the UK in almost all cases although by varying magnitudes. For most countries across the EU, the size of the impact is broadly similar for both export and imports. Ireland stands out as having had a particularly large reduction in imports from the UK relative to its other international trade patterns. Exports from Ireland to the UK, on the other hand, continue to perform in line with those of other markets with no notable impact to date of Brexit on the total levels traded.

Households across the UK are suffering the worst living standards since the 1950s.The think tank UK in a Changing Europe (UKICE) said trade barriers introduced after leaving the EU had led to a 6% increase in UK food prices between December 2019 and September 2021. Energy companies have been forcing their way into people’s homes to install pre-payment meters. The courts have declared this illegal. Energy companies have declared record-breaking, obscene profits but the government argues against them paying more tax while elderly and disabled people suffer from hypothermia because they cannot pay their extortionate bills. What would Dickens make of this?

The LSE ( London School of Economics) Centre for Economic Performance found that a “clear and robust impact of Brexit-induced trade frictions” had led to the increase in prices. It said Covid-19 could be ruled out as an influencing factor because there was a correlation between price increases and the share of EU imports for a particular product.

Figures from the accountancy firm UHY Hacker Young show that UK businesses and consumers paid £4.8bn in customs duties on imported goods last year, a new record, and up from £2.9bn a year earlier.

A recent meeting took place to discuss Brexit. The highly unusual cross-party nature of the gathering – and the seniority of those who agreed to attend – reflects a growing acceptance among politicians in the two main parties, Remainers and Leavers, as well as business leaders and civil servants, that Brexit in its current form is damaging the UK economy and reducing its strategic influence in the world.

I Deny that I Am in Denial

Jeremy Hunt, the Chancellor, declared that the UK’s new long-term economic plan is “necessitated, energized and made possible” by post-Brexit freedoms. We should face the future with bright eyes and confident smiles, because “declinism about Britain is just wrong“.

What planet is he living on? Adam Tooze summarized the argument against Hunt’s delusions: “For most of the last 60 years when critics have spoken of decline, they have tended to exaggerate the extent of the malaise. GDP and per capita income actually continued to increase. In the 1970s they did so quite buoyantly. By contrast, since 2009 there is nothing exaggerated about declinist talk. For a significant part of the British population real incomes actually fell. The shocking novelty lies in the fact that decline and stagnation are not figures of speech, but a literal reality.”

Private Affluence and Public Squalor

I am not an economist but I have seen this decline in the streets and in the shops – the pound shops, the charity shops, the food banks, the pawnbrokers. There were legions of homeless people sleeping in the street in freezing December because the government is too incompetent to provide enough affordable housing. Data collated by multi-agency database the Combined Homelessness And Information Network (Chain) and published by the Greater London Authority showed a 23% increase in the number of people permanently living on the streets in the third quarter of the 2020-21 financial year, compared to between July and September. There was also a 10% rise in the number of people who were seen occasionally sleeping rough but were not deemed to be a living on the streets.

I wrote in these pages how the elegant city of Bath Spa is so accustomed to homelessness that there is a statue of a homeless man and his dog. Food banks are struggling to meet record demand from people who are in work – including NHS staff and teachers. More than 80% of people running food banks reported supporting a significant number of people using them for the first time, while many said demand was growing among pensioners and families with babies.

Rishi Sunak helped out at a soup kitchen and asked a client if he was interest in a career in financial services. The man said he was interested in finding a home. Sunak’s wife has a pair of slippers designed by JW Anderson that cost £570.

People are dumping old clothes in the streets and I have seen with my own eyes seemingly respectable people picking through them. People are dumping old furniture and soiled mattresses on the street. Everybody looks drab, shabby and tired. Every second person you see is grotesquely obese and struggling to walk. Nearly two-thirds of adults in England are overweight, according to new data from a government public health agency. There are 19 district local authorities where more than 70% of adults are overweight or obese. Copeland, Cumbria, has the most overweight people in England – 75.9% of Copeland’s population are overweight or obese. Obesity is a disease of poverty not affluence. Many people in London look unhealthy and there are countless wheelchairs.

Today’s high taxes are not purchasing quality public services. It is a Kafkaesque nightmare embarking on a train journey. People are carrying Pringle cartons to pee into because the toilets are shut. People are dying while waiting hours for an ambulance to arrive. Those who are lucky enough to get to hospital wait for hours on a trolley in a corridor. In a declining country, even high taxes cannot provide sufficient funds to improve public services or reduce the national debt.

The water companies are giving out huge dividends to their foreign shareholders but cannot control the leaky system and the rivers and beaches are full of shit.JK Galbraith wrote of “private opulence and public squalor.” That is Britain today and successive Tory governments, Truss’s mayfly regime being the most egregious, have pursued policies which give to the already rich and take from, not just the poor, but the middle class. They will surely pay the price for rising public anger.


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Features

Ranking public services with AI — A roadmap to reviving institutions like SriLankan Airlines

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5 hours ago

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2026/03/13

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Efficacy measures an organisation’s capacity to achieve its mission and intended outcomes under planned or optimal conditions. It differs from efficiency, which focuses on achieving objectives with minimal resources, and effectiveness, which evaluates results in real-world conditions. Today, modern AI tools, using publicly available data, enable objective assessment of the efficacy of Sri Lanka’s government institutions.

Among key public bodies, the Supreme Court of Sri Lanka emerges as the most efficacious, outperforming the Department of Inland Revenue, Sri Lanka Customs, the Election Commission, and Parliament. In the financial and regulatory sector, the Central Bank of Sri Lanka (CBSL) ranks highest, ahead of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Public Utilities Commission, the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission, the Insurance Regulatory Commission, and the Sri Lanka Standards Institution.

Among state-owned enterprises, the Sri Lanka Ports Authority (SLPA) leads in efficacy, followed by Bank of Ceylon and People’s Bank. Other institutions assessed included the State Pharmaceuticals Corporation, the National Water Supply and Drainage Board, the Ceylon Electricity Board, the Ceylon Petroleum Corporation, and the Sri Lanka Transport Board. At the lower end of the spectrum were Lanka Sathosa and Sri Lankan Airlines, highlighting a critical challenge for the national economy.

Sri Lankan Airlines, consistently ranked at the bottom, has long been a financial drain. Despite successive governments’ reform attempts, sustainable solutions remain elusive.

Globally, the most profitable airlines operate as highly integrated, technology-enabled ecosystems rather than as fragmented departments. Operations, finance, fleet management, route planning, engineering, marketing, and customer service are closely coordinated, sharing real-time data to maximise efficiency, safety, and profitability.

The challenge for Sri Lankan Airlines is structural. Its operations are fragmented, overly hierarchical, and poorly aligned. Simply replacing the CEO or senior leadership will not address these deep-seated weaknesses. What the airline needs is a cohesive, integrated organisational ecosystem that leverages technology for cross-functional planning and real-time decision-making.

The government must urgently consider restructuring Sri Lankan Airlines to encourage:

=Joint planning across operational divisions

=Data-driven, evidence-based decision-making

=Continuous cross-functional consultation

=Collaborative strategic decisions on route rationalisation, fleet renewal, partnerships, and cost management, rather than exclusive top-down mandates

Sustainable reform requires systemic change. Without modernised organisational structures, stronger accountability, and aligned incentives across divisions, financial recovery will remain out of reach. An integrated, performance-oriented model offers the most realistic path to operational efficiency and long-term viability.

Reforming loss-making institutions like Sri Lankan Airlines is not merely a matter of leadership change — it is a structural overhaul essential to ensuring these entities contribute productively to the national economy rather than remain perpetual burdens.

By Chula Goonasekera – Citizen Analyst

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Features

Why Pi Day?

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5 hours ago

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2026/03/13

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International Day of Mathematics falls tomorrow

The approximate value of Pi (π) is 3.14 in mathematics. Therefore, the day 14 March is celebrated as the Pi Day. In 2019, UNESCO proclaimed 14 March as the International Day of Mathematics.

Ancient Babylonians and Egyptians figured out that the circumference of a circle is slightly more than three times its diameter. But they could not come up with an exact value for this ratio although they knew that it is a constant. This constant was later named as π which is a letter in the Greek alphabet.

Archimedes

It was the Greek mathematician Archimedes (250 BC) who was able to find an upper bound and a lower bound for this constant. He drew a circle of diameter one unit and drew hexagons inside and outside the circle such that the sides of each hexagon touch the sides of the circle. In mathematics the circle passing through all vertices of a polygon is called a ‘circumcircle’ and the largest circle that fits inside a polygon tangent to all its sides is called an ‘incircle’. The total length of the smaller hexagon then becomes the lower bound of π and the length of the hexagon outside the circle is the upper bound. He realised that by increasing the number of sides of the polygon can make the bounds get closer to the value of Pi and increased the number of sides to 12,24,48 and 60. He argued that by increasing the number of sides will ultimately result in obtaining the original circle, thereby laying the foundation for the theory of limits. He ended up with the lower bound as 22/7 and the upper bound 223/71. He could not continue his research as his hometown Syracuse was invaded by Romans and was killed by one of the soldiers. His last words were ‘do not disturb my circles’, perhaps a reference to his continuing efforts to find the value of π to a greater accuracy.

Archimedes can be considered as the father of geometry. His contributions revolutionised geometry and his methods anticipated integral calculus. He invented the pulley and the hydraulic screw for drawing water from a well. He also discovered the law of hydrostatics. He formulated the law of levers which states that a smaller weight placed farther from a pivot can balance a much heavier weight closer to it. He famously said “Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand and I will move the earth”.

Mathematicians have found many expressions for π as a sum of infinite series that converge to its value. One such famous series is the Leibniz Series found in 1674 by the German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz, which is given below.

π = 4 ( 1 – 1/3 + 1/5 – 1/7 + 1/9 – ………….)

The Indian mathematical genius Ramanujan came up with a magnificent formula in 1910. The short form of the formula is as follows.

π = 9801/(1103 √8)

For practical applications an approximation is sufficient. Even NASA uses only the approximation 3.141592653589793 for its interplanetary navigation calculations.

It is not just an interesting and curious number. It is used for calculations in navigation, encryption, space exploration, video game development and even in medicine. As π is fundamental to spherical geometry, it is at the heart of positioning systems in GPS navigations. It also contributes significantly to cybersecurity. As it is an irrational number it is an excellent foundation for generating randomness required in encryption and securing communications. In the medical field, it helps to calculate blood flow rates and pressure differentials. In diagnostic tools such as CT scans and MRI, pi is an important component in mathematical algorithms and signal processing techniques.

This elegant, never-ending number demonstrates how mathematics transforms into practical applications that shape our world. The possibilities of what it can do are infinite as the number itself. It has become a symbol of beauty and complexity in mathematics. “It matters little who first arrives at an idea, rather what is significant is how far that idea can go.” said Sophie Germain.

Mathematics fans are intrigued by this irrational number and attempt to calculate it as far as they can. In March 2022, Emma Haruka Iwao of Japan calculated it to 100 trillion decimal places in Google Cloud. It had taken 157 days. The Guinness World Record for reciting the number from memory is held by Rajveer Meena of India for 70000 decimal places over 10 hours.

Happy Pi Day!

The author is a senior examiner of the International Baccalaureate in the UK and an educational consultant at the Overseas School of Colombo.

by R N A de Silva

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Features

Sheer rise of Realpolitik making the world see the brink

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1 day ago

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2026/03/12

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A combined US-Israel attack on Iran.(BBC)

The recent humanly costly torpedoing of an Iranian naval vessel in Sri Lanka’s Exclusive Economic Zone by a US submarine has raised a number of issues of great importance to international political discourse and law that call for elucidation. It is best that enlightened commentary is brought to bear in such discussions because at present misleading and uninformed speculation on questions arising from the incident are being aired by particularly jingoistic politicians of Sri Lanka’s South which could prove deleterious.

As matters stand, there seems to be no credible evidence that the Indian state was aware of the impending torpedoing of the Iranian vessel but these acerbic-tongued politicians of Sri Lanka’s South would have the local public believe that the tragedy was triggered with India’s connivance. Likewise, India is accused of ‘embroiling’ Sri Lanka in the incident on account of seemingly having prior knowledge of it and not warning Sri Lanka about the impending disaster.

It is plain that a process is once again afoot to raise anti-India hysteria in Sri Lanka. An obligation is cast on the Sri Lankan government to ensure that incendiary speculation of the above kind is defeated and India-Sri Lanka relations are prevented from being in any way harmed. Proactive measures are needed by the Sri Lankan government and well meaning quarters to ensure that public discourse in such matters have a factual and rational basis. ‘Knowledge gaps’ could prove hazardous.

Meanwhile, there could be no doubt that Sri Lanka’s sovereignty was violated by the US because the sinking of the Iranian vessel took place in Sri Lanka’s Exclusive Economic Zone. While there is no international decrying of the incident, and this is to be regretted, Sri Lanka’s helplessness and small player status would enable the US to ‘get away with it’.

Could anything be done by the international community to hold the US to account over the act of lawlessness in question? None is the answer at present. This is because in the current ‘Global Disorder’ major powers could commit the gravest international irregularities with impunity. As the threadbare cliché declares, ‘Might is Right’….. or so it seems.

Unfortunately, the UN could only merely verbally denounce any violations of International Law by the world’s foremost powers. It cannot use countervailing force against violators of the law, for example, on account of the divided nature of the UN Security Council, whose permanent members have shown incapability of seeing eye-to-eye on grave matters relating to International Law and order over the decades.

The foregoing considerations could force the conclusion on uncritical sections that Political Realism or Realpolitik has won out in the end. A basic premise of the school of thought known as Political Realism is that power or force wielded by states and international actors determine the shape, direction and substance of international relations. This school stands in marked contrast to political idealists who essentially proclaim that moral norms and values determine the nature of local and international politics.

While, British political scientist Thomas Hobbes, for instance, was a proponent of Political Realism, political idealism has its roots in the teachings of Socrates, Plato and latterly Friedrich Hegel of Germany, to name just few such notables.

On the face of it, therefore, there is no getting way from the conclusion that coercive force is the deciding factor in international politics. If this were not so, US President Donald Trump in collaboration with Israeli Rightist Premier Benjamin Natanyahu could not have wielded the ‘big stick’, so to speak, on Iran, killed its Supreme Head of State, terrorized the Iranian public and gone ‘scot-free’. That is, currently, the US’ impunity seems to be limitless.

Moreover, the evidence is that the Western bloc is reuniting in the face of Iran’s threats to stymie the flow of oil from West Asia to the rest of the world. The recent G7 summit witnessed a coming together of the foremost powers of the global North to ensure that the West does not suffer grave negative consequences from any future blocking of western oil supplies.

Meanwhile, Israel is having a ‘free run’ of the Middle East, so to speak, picking out perceived adversarial powers, such as Lebanon, and militarily neutralizing them; once again with impunity. On the other hand, Iran has been bringing under assault, with no questions asked, Gulf states that are seen as allying with the US and Israel. West Asia is facing a compounded crisis and International Law seems to be helplessly silent.

Wittingly or unwittingly, matters at the heart of International Law and peace are being obfuscated by some pro-Trump administration commentators meanwhile. For example, retired US Navy Captain Brent Sadler has cited Article 51 of the UN Charter, which provides for the right to self or collective self-defence of UN member states in the face of armed attacks, as justifying the US sinking of the Iranian vessel (See page 2 of The Island of March 10, 2026). But the Article makes it clear that such measures could be resorted to by UN members only ‘ if an armed attack occurs’ against them and under no other circumstances. But no such thing happened in the incident in question and the US acted under a sheer threat perception.

Clearly, the US has violated the Article through its action and has once again demonstrated its tendency to arbitrarily use military might. The general drift of Sadler’s thinking is that in the face of pressing national priorities, obligations of a state under International Law could be side-stepped. This is a sure recipe for international anarchy because in such a policy environment states could pursue their national interests, irrespective of their merits, disregarding in the process their obligations towards the international community.

Moreover, Article 51 repeatedly reiterates the authority of the UN Security Council and the obligation of those states that act in self-defence to report to the Council and be guided by it. Sadler, therefore, could be said to have cited the Article very selectively, whereas, right along member states’ commitments to the UNSC are stressed.

However, it is beyond doubt that international anarchy has strengthened its grip over the world. While the US set destabilizing precedents after the crumbling of the Cold War that paved the way for the current anarchic situation, Russia further aggravated these degenerative trends through its invasion of Ukraine. Stepping back from anarchy has thus emerged as the prime challenge for the world community.

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