Allister Heath is Editor of The Sunday Telegraph, a Brexiteer and a man who seems to be permanently cross. He occasionally writes articles for the The Telegraph. They almost always have a note of either weary resignation, seething anger or downright menace. During the tortuous negotiations of 2019 it was usually a case of stuff the EU, let’s quit and just leave without a deal, nothing to worry about, everything will be great once we’re out of the evil clutches of Brussels. Well we are out now so what does he think?
A few days ago we got this from him: Entitlement Britain is becoming a poor country and too many people don’t care.
He defends Liz Truss and her recent stupid comment about British workers just needing “a bit more graft” and attacks those upset by her accusations that British workers have got the wrong working culture or mindset and lack the application of other nations.
Heath says, “For years, Tory and Labour politicians alike have taken the easy way out, obsessing about “sharing the proceeds of growth” and green social engineering, taking prosperity for granted, all the while slowly poisoning the economy with tax hikes, regulatory assaults, an increasingly insane housing and infrastructure planning system and injections of monetary crack cocaine.”
“It has been a disaster: real wages, the ultimate measure of a country’s economy, haven’t gone up, on average, since 2006, the year before Northern Rock went bust. Output per worker hasn’t risen, and given that what we earn is usually related to what we produce, pay has stagnated. This is a disgrace, and requires us to undergo a period of brutally honest self-reflection of the sort Truss is proposing.”
If this is what he believes he is even dafter than I thought. We do need a change of attitude but in the boardroom much more than on the shop floor. It is about investment above everything else. Germany is still installing ten times as many industrial robots as the UK and has been doing so for the last decade or more. Other EU countries are following close behind. What is a British worker to do, buy his own?
Heath says we are now “increasingly poor by international standards” and berates our "overvalued housing stock and second-rate health service" but he compares us with America and a growing number of Asian economies. European countries like Germany or France which also have no over valued housing stock and first rate health services don’t get a mention . No prizes for guessing why.
Anyway, although Johnson - The Telegraph's man remember - was meant to understand all of this but "sadly he didn’t, and three years have now been wasted. Liz Truss, a principled libertarian, does get it, and, crucially, isn’t scared of being blunt. The Tories can’t afford to mess this up again: it’s Truss’s way, hard graft and all, or a Labour landslide in 2024."
In Heath world under Liz Truss we're going to get Brexit good and hard. Don't worry, my forecast is that by 2024 Heath will be piling in to Truss for 'failing to understand'.
Contrast this with a highly optimistic piece he wrote in October 2018: In 30 years' time historians will wonder why the elites feared Brexit so much.
It’s written as if it was 2050.
"Today, 32 years on, our GDP per capita is higher than Germany’s, as well as, of course, than that of France; Switzerland and Norway are the only European economies that remain wealthier than us, although the Republic of Catalonia is doing well."
"Even the most optimistic of Brexiteers wouldn’t have dreamed of such an outcome back in late 2018, that bleakest of years. It is a period in British history which is now studied in conjunction with the Suez Crisis, the Maastricht Treaty and the Iraq War to explain why the Foreign Office was so unceremoniously abolished in 2024, replaced by the integrated Ministry for Defence and External Affairs."
The House of Lords has been scrapped, ministers are akin to CEOs for their own departments, and hire and fire personnel as they like. The Treasury has been "remodeled as a pro-competitiveness department staffed by free market economists, designing every tax policy with the aim of maximising growth."
A Swiss style system of referenda has been introduced for major policy decisions, planning has been liberalised, a new National Health System was "created out of the ashes of the old NHS" and skilled migrants were welcomed, despite a "permanent overall reduction in immigration; welfare reform and temporary work visas took care of labour shortages." I like that one.
Northern Ireland has emerged as a hub for biotech and genetically modified food research after the EU's precautionary principle was ditched, Heathrow and Gatwick got extra runways and the UK has pioneered driverless technologies, using the money that would have been spent on HS2 to build three new special motorways.
It goes on - and on. Germany has withdrawn from NATO, Italy finally crashed out of the euro in 2026 and triggered the long forecast Great Banking Crisis (all caps) that "changed European politics forever."
He ends predictably with the people all admitting "we were right to leave" but with the big question troubling the younger generation of historians in 2050: "why did it take so long for the British Establishment to come to its senses?"
I happened across his 2018 article and couldn't help but compare it, as Heath himself has done, with reality as we have it today. The economy is in a mess, inflation is forecast to be over 18% in January, pay isn't keeping up with prices and we are looking at the biggest fall in living standards for two generations. Britain is teetering on the brink of a terrible winter as energy prices hit stratospheric levels, raw sewage is being pumped into our rivers and coastal waters. Public sector workers are increasingly resorting to strike action.
Rather that having a per capita GDP above Germany we are "increasingly poor by international standards."
Even Michael Gove has said the government is “simply not functioning” and failing to deliver even basic services. We are sending asylum seekers to Rwanda and seeking to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights. Our right to protest or have government decisions reviewed by the courts is being eroded
Of course Heath couldn't have known about covid-19 or the war in Ukraine - but that is the nature of government isn't it? You can't forecast events but Brexit has made all of the crises worse and more difficult to resolve.
Heath is like a lot of Brexiteers - Daniel Hannan is another prime example - who can always point to serious issues with the EU and dangle before the voters a lavish Utopian future where Britons are richer, more content and highly influential in world affairs while working three days a week and enjoying good health, cheap living and generally swanning around. The two are always inextricably linked in their mind because - well it can't be our own fault can it? We're British.
The problem is that he and all the other Brexiteers have no idea how to make the conversion from failing state to world beater.
