Rafe Fletcher is the founder of CWG.
Walking up Virginia Avenue towards Georgetown, I stopped to look at the large banner adorning Washington D.C.’s Department of the Interior. Ten days ahead of the Fourth of July, adjacent portraits of George Washington and Donald Trump celebrated “America’s First” and “America First” respectively.
Both presidents represent an American pragmatism amongst the higher-minded ideals of its foundations. In the historian David McCullough’s 1776, he describes Washington’s great strength as seeing things as they are, not how he wishes they were.
Boston aside, 1776 was not Washington’s annus mirabilis. The British routed his Continental Army in New York. Only sheer grit kept the rebels going. Their eventual victory a literal testament to the idea you can lose battles yet win the war. That Washingtonian perseverance pervades today in Trump’s own Iran concessions and more widely in its “fail fast” mindset. Write it off and move on.
There is a scrappiness to America. Dated infrastructure still does its job. People compartmentalise politics in way that defies outside perceptions of volatility. The country readily accepts imperfection and gets on with it.
America fulfils the maxim of Britain’s Looking for Growth’s founder Lawrence Newport: “You can just do stuff.” In that way, it’s more like my usual subject matter of Singapore than immediate optics suggest. Both think relentlessly about what works. Neither resources-rich America nor the quasi-democratic microstate provide perfectly applicable templates for Britain. But they show its problems with navel-gazing and lack of execution.
Compare HS2 to America’s Amtrak. The quasi-public railroad may not be nationally comprehensive or offer the high-speed services of Japan, or Chinese-financed links elsewhere in Asia. But you get a comfortable seat, the Wi-Fi works, and fares are reasonable if you play dynamic pricing right.
Amtrak took me the 200 plus miles from D.C. to New York City, and from there to Boston, in three and a half hours per trip. It effectively links up the so-called Bos-Wash east coast corridor, where around 15 per cent of America’s population lives. It was never a grand national project, but a re-appropriation of privately built railroads that risked redundancy as air and road travel grew.
The government took the vestiges of an antiquated system and applied it to modern needs. By contrast, HS2 tries to solve capacity problems with grand ideas instead of incremental improvements. It is conceived under a perception of the inherent worthiness of rail over car and speaks to central government’s need for a signature project to justify itself.
Even Singapore, which prides itself on building flagship infrastructure, thinks first about the use case for such development. It takes great pride in Changi airport, regularly named the world’s best. But it lacks any airport express train to take passengers the 15 miles into the city centre. A more pedestrian metro service already does that in 40 minutes, so it questions the marginal benefit of building new things to shave 20 minutes off a journey.
Singapore can make prudent assessments because it governs a population of six million and land mass of 290 square miles. HS2 assumes central power can similarly meet the needs of a far larger, diverse country. Moreover, in providing faster links to London, “levelling up” becomes about redistributing the capital’s wealth instead of building stronger regional pockets.
Britain can’t readily import America’s federalism, lacking its sizer and localist foundations. But more regional responsibility, and subsequent internal competition, would incentivise more pragmatic initiatives. And yield a healthier distance from superficial Westminster politics.
It’s what I find in America, where general attitudes confound outside impressions of consistently febrile debate. East coast acquaintances, MAGA sceptics by and large, aren’t afraid to air their misgivings about the president. But few display symptoms of so-called Trump Derangement Syndrome. They don’t make the incumbent a prohibitive obsession.
One former ambassador in the Middle East, a career diplomat, was miffed to have lost his post under the president. Non-political appointees usually carry on unless the administration has someone else in mind. Two years on, no one has replaced him. Nevertheless, despite his misgivings over America’s current direction, he was looking beyond personal grievances to new endeavours.
Perhaps as a long-time D.C. resident, he is less shocked by Trump’s blurring of personal and public interests. As the journalist Mark Leibovich details in This Town, the city is famed for its revolving door. The “swamp” isn’t popular but there’s a resignation to its grubbier practices. Again, it’s a pragmatism that recognises trade-offs. Unless you run a Singaporean technocracy with lucrative salaries, pluralistic democracy inevitably throws up questionable associations.
Britain expects Singaporean purity without the pay. It risks selecting for sanctimony over capability. Differences between Nigel Farage’s dodgy donors and MPs’ corporate earnings may seem obvious in Westminster. But do the public see such a contrast? If Farage is highlighted as an unforgiveable moral transgression, the buck is unlikely to stop there. The danger is that the surviving do-gooders aren’t necessarily the most incorruptible. They are simply the most useless. Outside money ignores them, not vice versa.
Virtuous grandstanding breeds inertia as the perfect becomes the enemy of the good. Projects and politicians alike become irreparably tainted if there are trade-offs in execution. In the American telling of its independence story, this same trait inspired the rebels. Britain repealed unpopular stamp duties under protest from its own merchant class. Yet accompanied that with the Declaratory Act, affirming its right to impose binding internal taxes on the colonies. Legislation that Pitt the Elder railed against in its needlessness.
250 years on, Americans may celebrate more abstract concepts of liberty and rights. But Washington saw the battle in pragmatic terms, shaking off centralised dogmatism that demanded a particular way of doing things. The thirteen colonies were not refusing to pay for British defence but wanted to raise those revenues through regional administration.
That light-touch dispersed approach was how Britain otherwise governed its empire. America was the aberration. And rehashing centralised principles today breeds the same futility. Instead, Britain must take Washington’s realist view and make the best of things as they are. Pragmatism over purity.