Undeveloping Britain

9 October 20208 October 2020 Martin VogelLeave a comment

Back in January 2019, Matt Bishop and Tony Payne at Sheffield University’s Political Economy Research Institute (SPERI) posed the question of whether Britain might be the world’s first example of an undeveloping state. By this they meant that the characteristics that sustained the UK’s development over four hundred years as a pioneer of capitalism and industrialisation may have turned into pathologies that hold it back in the modern global political economy:

“Britain could again be first, albeit in a league table not of its choice! It could be the first of the ‘early developers’ to be forced to grapple with the implications of sustained ‘undevelopment’. This is defined here straightforwardly as the dismantling, rather than the building, of a viable, functioning political economy that satisfactorily serves its people.”

The Covid-19 pandemic has brought this thesis visibly to life. Britons have spent 2020 discovering that the securities they have for decades taken for granted are in fact very fragile. I won’t rehearse the catalogue of incompetence that has characterised the British Government’s approach to the coronavirus. But, lest it becomes too normalised, I commend keeping to hand the excellent Sunday Times investigations whose titles say it all: 38 days when Britain sleepwalked into disaster and 22 days of delay and dither on coronavirus that cost thousands of British lives.

Check your privilege

23 January 20204 October 2024 Martin Vogel2 Comments

One thing that worries me about our attachment to knowing is that our knowing is outpaced by its impacts.

The systemic complexity of our world seems to be slipping beyond the wit of Homo sapiens to manage. This was evident in the financial crash of 2007, when it was revealed that those in charge of the banks had no understanding of the complex derivatives for which they were responsible. Google and Facebook have no real means to manage the uses of their networks by bad actors. In fact, their incentive to keep enabling malevolent uses of their networks pushes Google and Facebook themselves into the category of bad actors. And in Brexit, the UK Government is managing a process the consequences of which it seems unable to understand, still less contain. We shall see.

First post

3 January 202012 February 2021 Martin Vogel3 Comments

I’m fed up with knowing. There’s too much certainty in our world. I’m not thinking here of the knowing of experts. I respect expertise. I’m thinking of the knowing that solidifies too readily into identity. The knowing on which polarisation feeds.

I’m susceptible to it myself. Over the past years, as the Government pursued an extreme version of Brexit with no effort to secure losers’ consent, I turned from grudgingly accepting Brexit to opposing it. And the more the left proved incapable of addressing its antisemitism, the more I detached from my lifelong affiliation with Labour.

But, broadly speaking, I prefer to wear my certainties lightly.