Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt has, with the usual pluck of a man drowning and praising the weather, declared that the British economy is showing ‘resilience’ even as the American behemoth burns ever brighter. One can almost hear the collective sigh of relief from Whitehall: ‘At least we are not Greece.’ But let us resist the urge to uncork the sherry just yet.
It is true that the latest GDP figures suggest a modest uptick, and inflation has finally begun to slink back from its grotesque peak. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the United States is in the throes of a grotesque consumer carnival, with growth rates that make our own look like a Victorian convalescent taking the waters at Bath. Yet our Chancellor, wielding the language of Churchill in a world of TikTok, insists that Britain is a ‘resilient’ nation. Resilient to what? To its own self-inflicted wounds? To the slow, grinding atrophy of a once-great industrial power now reduced to squabbling over the correct shade of beige for a new housing development?
Let us not mistake stoicism for strength. The British economy is resilient in the way that a tired old boxer is resilient: he can still take a punch, but he can no longer throw one. We have become specialists in managed decline, masters of the graceful retreat. The American boom, by contrast, is the raucous, sweaty, debt-fuelled euphoria of a hyperpower that still believes tomorrow will be better than today. We, poor souls, have come to suspect that our best days are sepia-tinted memories.
This is not to say that the Chancellor is wrong to find a silver lining. The British economy has, against many predictions, avoided a technical recession. But this is the lowest of low bars. It is like congratulating a man for not setting his own house on fire. The structural problems remain: anaemic productivity, a creaking infrastructure, a housing market that functions as a giant wealth transfer from the young to the old, and a political class that seems to have run out of ideas beyond tweaking the tax bands.
Moreover, the very act of touting ‘resilience’ as a virtue is a symptom of decadence. Rome did not fall because it was not resilient. It fell because it confused its long twilight for a permanent golden age. The Victorians, for all their faults, did not boast of resilience. They boasted of progress, innovation, and empire. They built bridges, railways, and institutions that outlasted them. We build focus groups, PR campaigns, and memorials to our own vanishing greatness.
The American boom, for all its grotesque inequality and financial chicanery, at least retains a dynamism that we have lost. Their workers are quicker to change jobs, their regions quicker to adapt, their entrepreneurs quicker to gamble. We, by contrast, have become a nation of rent-seekers and bureaucrats, ever more skilled at preserving the status quo and ever less skilled at disrupting it.
So let the Chancellor have his moment of triumph. Let him tell us that the British bulldog is still game. But let us not delude ourselves. The real test is not whether we can avoid a recession today, but whether we can avoid a slow, inexorable slide into irrelevance tomorrow. Resilience is a fine quality in a lifeboat, but what we need is a ship that can still sail.
The American economy booms not because it is more virtuous, but because it is willing to take risks we are not. Until we rediscover that willingness, we shall be forever the plucky, resilient, and ultimately forgettable supporting character in the American epic. And that, dear reader, is not a role for a nation that once ruled a quarter of the globe.
