We may have lost faith in politicians but don’t lose faith in Britain itself
It’s the only conversation in town — at least if you are upwardly mobile, well-to-do, with the potential to go to Dubai or a tax haven or wherever else. When are you getting out? Have you made provision? What does your accountant think? Well, my accountant got in touch last week explaining how much cash I could save in the Middle East, not to mention all those sunny beaches and cheap migrant labour. Could a journalist WFH over there? It’s a conversation that has dominated the upper middle-class conversations at my son’s private school, my daughter’s private school, at a dinner last week for high-flying people in professional services, even at a tech conference in Europe in the aftermath of the budget. I have seen memes on the internet telling people to get out while there’s still time and even in comments under the line on The Sunday Times website. I have seen the statistics of a growing exodus and what it would mean for the UK fiscal position if it accelerated even a little. The emerging view is that the UK is finished.
Get out while you can.
I get it. I really do. It is not just (if I can ventriloquise for those who have either left or are on the verge of doing so) about Rachel Reeves, Sir Keir Starmer or even the budget. It is also about Brexit, 14 years of hopeless Tories, a decade and a half of record immigration (too high even for most “liberals”), the vivid sense of political betrayal. Why stay? Why not take our talents and ambition elsewhere? I was talking to a multimillionaire American last week and he put it starkly: the conversation in the UK is all about its own impending demise. Why would I invest there? But perhaps I might offer a different perspective during a moment of acute, possibly existential, vulnerability. We live in a democracy. We have an opportunity to change things. We have the vote, the chance to join a party, to organise, to make our voices heard. If we who are socially assertive, high in social capital, well-to-do and upwardly mobile leave, taking our cash with us, won’t this condemn the nation further? Moreover, don’t we have a duty to this nation and to those who are not so mobile (and could never afford a golden visa)? I am not just talking about the teachers and volunteers, but the hidden army of fellow citizens without whom we would have been nothing at all. Don’t we owe those who fought and died in world wars, the quiet sacrifices of men and women who faced a danger greater than Rachel Reeves and who didn’t desert — and would never have dreamt of doing so. Why? Because they believe this nation is not just a place to make money, but also to make sacrifices; a place worth saving, a place called home.
You will have read a lot last week about the bloated welfare state. You’ll have seen the headlines: “Feckless Britain”, “Lazy Britain”. And I agree with those who say we need root and branch reform of this monstrous system with its perverse incentives. But here’s something we don’t reflect on anything like enough (except, briefly, during the pandemic): there’s an even larger group of our countrymen working like crazy as carers, nurses, plumbers, one-man-van merchants. Many are the patriotic white working class (I think of my mum’s side of the family, fabulous people who give back in a million ways), who have been let down by the right (who don’t care about them) and the left (who became obsessed with identity politics) while being lectured about their “white privilege”. These people are the absolute best of us. Yet what happens when the most privileged withdraw their talent and money, depriving our shared ecosystem of the nutrients without which it will not — cannot — survive?
I’m sick of the self-fulfilling poison of declinism, of this helplessness
I am sick of the self-fulfilling poison of declinism, this helplessness, this monstrous notion that we — the mobile, the footloose, the well-to-do — can abandon ship without consequence. I say again: we can make a difference. We can fight for a better future. Isn’t this both the blessing and the responsibility of democracy? I will not leave for the sake of a lower tax bill. I absolutely will not. I do not judge those who do so, particularly the young expanding their horizons and who live in a system rigged against them. They deserve their opportunities abroad. I don’t even condemn those closer to my age, who have benefited mightily from this nation but now wish to leave. As I say, I get it.
But perhaps I might say this: be careful what you wish for. Who do you think is set to benefit the most from this evacuation? That’s right: Putin, Xi, the ayatollahs. They want the West divided, denuded of its indigenous talent, which is why they pump out bots in their thousands insinuating that you should flee. Indeed, much of their “foreign policy” is directed to flattering this idea, promoting it, creating the sense of a burgeoning exodus, thereby bolstering its momentum. Academic papers show that they have in mind the model of a bank run, where the perception of impending disaster contains the seeds of its own fulfilment — undermining the West as a whole.
So, yes, your bank account will get fatter in the Middle East, or wherever else, and your personal wealth larger.
But you will also become more vulnerable. This is the bit the Chinese and Russian bots don’t want you to know. Dubai is not what you think it is.
This puny jurisdiction with its tenuous property rights will cease to exist the moment western military power retreats in the region. You are not safe there.
Your money is not safe. Your families are not safe. Indeed, no civilisation is safe if its elites leave the moment the going gets tough, or slightly less good than the alternative.
I LOVE this nation. I love it so much I persuaded Rob, our peerless sub, to put it in capitals. I get a frisson whenever walking through passport control, the sense of returning to an extraordinary place that incubated the rule of law, Magna Carta, the Beatles, Fawlty Towers.
The naysayers are wrong. The Russian bots are wrong. There is a depth and vitality here the autocrats either don’t understand or fail to appreciate. Well, I grew up living with a Pakistani immigrant who revered this place, and would have fought till his dying breath to save it. He was damn well right.
You may say I’m laying it on a bit thick, but I perceive today, with a clarity that scares me, the risks ahead, the cliff edge nobody is talking about. Readers of The Sunday Times, a superb group who are broadly well-to-do and hugely patriotic, have rarely mattered more.
Please don’t conflate the legitimacy of losing faith in British politicians with losing faith in Britain itself. Stay and fight. Use your voice. And remember the words of the Kitchener poster at a time of war, when our enemies were seeking to extinguish the flame of Britain while our heroic forebears stood firm. Your Country Needs You.
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