Last week, Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company, gave his two cents on the state of Britain.
Speaking to reporters during a visit to London, he warned that the country lacks a ‘growth culture’, is too focused on the risk of failure and that despite our incredible natural advantages and human capital, we somehow find a way to squander them.
We have developed tortuously elaborate systems for scrutinising, consulting, mitigating and reviewing decisions but never get around to gazing out beyond our navel
‘There’s a strange general behaviour in the UK… for some reason, if there was a million ways to win, you find the one reason not to do it, and I think you overthink things.’
Huang has tapped into something.
So much of our national inability to get anything done seems to come down to this tendency to make the perfect the enemy of the good. In every sphere of activity, the state is engaged in doing its level best to frustrate with its right hand what it is trying to do with its left.
Nothing can be done without endless consultations, appeals and interminable introspection. The rallying cry of Silicon Valley – and of the Yimby (yes in my back yard) movement here who want to see the UK building critical infrastructure again – has become: ‘You can just do things.’ Well, in Britain, you can’t.
In place of action we have substituted a surfeit of deliberation. China has built 60 airports – not runways, entire airports – in the ten years we have spent agonising over whether or not to build a third runway at Heathrow.
Our inability to build anything and, when we do build things, to manage to do so at ludicrous expense and in the ugliest way possible, is becoming internationally renowned. On Friday, the Wall Street Journal – fresh on the back of blasting our ballooning welfare state for ‘Crushing Britain’ – carried an article with the following headline: ‘A “ludicrously ugly” bridge is Exhibit A that Britain has lost its mojo’. In case you’re wondering, the railway bridge over a two-lane road in Oxford cost more to build than the Titanic and the London Eye.
Our remarkable ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by overthinking everything recalls the concept of ‘everythingism’ (coined by Joe Hill): the moronic idea that that every government policy or project must simultaneously advance every other government objective, and so nothing at all gets done. The state expects every initiative to deliver not just the thing it was designed to do, but also to further everything from our net zero efforts to countering social inequality.
But it’s worse than that. It’s not just that peripheral issues crowd out, complicate and delay the primary objective. They have become more important than the core mission, precisely because they are easier to progress. As I criticised when I left the Foreign Office, all the peripheral guff assumes a primary importance for officials. Far easier to focus on making our diplomatic activity environmentally sustainable, through Greening Government Commitments and eco-friendly embassy buildings, than to fight the hard battles with foreign countries to advance our own self-regarding national interests.
Across swathes of government, our national policy is designed to be self-defeating: just this week we saw one arm of the state paying to defend a decision while the other pays for it to be challenged, with the news that the Home Office is putting up civil servants without any legal qualifications to argue in court against seasoned barristers representing asylum seekers fighting deportation – both sides of the argument paid for by the taxpayer.
We have developed tortuously elaborate systems for scrutinising, consulting, mitigating and reviewing decisions but never get around to gazing out beyond our navel. In Whitehall, actually reaching decisions and implementing them not so much plays second fiddle as is seen by bureaucrats as outside of their wheelhouse and frankly of trifling importance. Process is king. Delivery nothing but a troublesome pretender to the throne.
Jensen is right: we ‘overthink things’, and we are possessed with no urgency – to grow our economy, or invent the next great thing. Elon Musk gave us flying cars. In Britain we’d have to wait for pigs to fly before the planners approved one. In any case, flying cars requires a state that esteems high-IQ weirdos and misfits – and since Dom Cummings no one in the political class has bothered to cultivate them.
We cannot continue in this manner. The government says it wants to do something and then does everything possible to put obstacles in the way of delivering it. We still have world-leading universities (despite Cambridge’s recent best efforts to prove to the world otherwise) and brilliant scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs to boot. But commercialising their discoveries requires scale-up capital, affordable energy, infrastructure, planning permission and a state capable of making decisions – and willing to take a punt. We have none of those things. We can just about still invent things yet fail to get those same things built.
We are in a mighty funk. Increasingly, the only people unable to see this are our own government. The never-ending public inquiries and social value requirements in government procurement are symptoms of a deeper national malaise. If we wish to be taken seriously by international investors and foreign governments the state must strip away the pointless barnacles of bureaucracy that are impoverishing the country. Until it ruthlessly and doggedly focuses on delivering what it says it actually wants to achieve – whether growing the economy, deporting those who hate us, or anything else – we will remain demoralised and frustrated. We will also increasingly be regarded not just by the British populace, but also internationally, as no longer a serious country.
