Diagnosing the New British Disease

BEFORE MARGARET THATCHER made great moves to set British Industry to rights, the “British Disease” meant strike-happy unions, obsolete industrial plant and work practices, low productivity, and industries ripe for foreign takeovers.

After eleven years of New Labour government, Thatcherism is looking like an anomalous interlude of relative social health between two rather different kinds of social pathologies. The new British Disease, in many ways more potentially totalitarian and threatening to British identity and traditional values than the old, is also rather harder to diagnose.

Further, while the Labour government of Gordon Brown is obviously on death row, it is hard to be confident that a change of government will tackle many of the problems with a sufficient degree of new thinking: Britain appears to be in a late phase of a successful Gramscian campaign to capture not merely parliamentary power (the British electorate shows itself highly distrustful…