Thinking Aloud - How Do Governments Correct Massive Mistakes?

From Appeasement & Suez to Brexit & the Corn Laws

Thinking Aloud - When Countries Make A Mistake

Anyone who is married or in a serious relationship knows what it is like to make a mistake. We also know what we have to do about it. We admit the mistake, apologise and try to put things right. There is an alternative - to lie, bluster or deny that any of it is our own fault, or even to refuse to concede that it is a mistake after all. That route may work for a time but it almost always unravels. When it does, the relationship is doomed. I’ve been thinking that this can translate into how a leader, or a nation, can and should correct mistakes in policy or behaviour. How difficult is it for politicians to admit they were wrong? And - before we get to a British example - at the most extreme level, what is the escape route from error in nations led by an autocrat or dictator?

A superb new study of tyranny and its failures by the German academic and author Marcel Dirsus reminds us that for a dictator even admitting mistakes can ensure the dictator’s downfall. Marcel’s book “How Tyrants Fall - and how nations survive” makes the point that one of the biggest mistakes a tyrant might make is losing a war. The Ugandan dictator Idi Amin’s 1970s conflict with neighbouring Tanzania is one obvious example, along with the more familiar battlefield failures of Hitler, Mussolini and Saddam Hussein. Idi Amin was lucky to escape alive. He spent the rest of his life in exile. One lesson for today may be that fear of losing the Ukraine war and losing power or even his life is one obvious motivation for Vladimir Putin to fight to the last Russian soldier in order to save his own skin. 

For democratic governments the usual penalty for failure tends not to be death or exile but resignation, loss of votes and ultimately the cruel verdict of history. In Britain in the 20th century, for example, two of the more obvious mistakes made by our democratically elected governments were the Appeasement of Hitler in the 1930s and Suez in 1956. The failed French and British mission to occupy the Suez canal zone was one of the last great flings of British and French imperialism. When it failed it meant prime minister Sir Anthony Eden destroyed his political career. At the beginning in the 1930s the appeasement of Hitler may have seemed at least rational. Many - most - British politicians the 1930s did not want to fight another European war. Many thought that the punishment meted out to Germany under the Versailles treaty was unfair. And most recognised the threat from Soviet communism under Stalin. Appeasement of Hitler, as modern historians judge it, was of course a mistake, but not (at least in the earliest stages) irrational.  

These historical re-evaluations are worth considering in terms of the most recent great mistake of British statecraft - Brexit. Rather like appeasement, leaving the European Union must have seemed reasonable to more than 17 million British voters in 2016. But by May 2024 Statista reported a majority (55 percent) of British people thought it was wrong to leave the EU and fewer than a third (31 percent) still thought it was the right decision. With prime minister Keir Starmer speaking vaguely of a “re-set” in relationships with our European friends while simultaneously denying he is overturning Brexit, I asked on social media the following question: 

“If Keir Starmer reversed Brexit, which of the Brexit benefits would you miss most?” 

This was intended as a joke, but last time I checked on one social media site, Twitter, the post had been viewed just short of three million times. The responses were mostly in the spirit of the humour of the Tweet although many were also sarcastic and angry. A handful of respondents engaged with the question directly. They provided vague answers about the astonishing new opportunity to “make our own laws” or suddenly to be able to enjoy British “sovereignty”, benefits 99% of the respondents clearly did not notice. 

More interesting however is that people in Britain still think and argue about Brexit in 2024. The Brexit vote of 2016 is clearly not finished business.

Quite the opposite. The boasts of a better Britain made by Brexiters in 2016 are recycled for comic effect in 2024. No one can boast of a real world tangible benefit. Everyone can point to real world drawbacks and failures. These include (but are not limited to) the weakening of the union of the United Kingdom with considerable problems in Northern Ireland and great irritation still in Scotland because most Scots and Northern Ireland citizens voted Remain; long queues for Brits at EU airports; more checks and disruption to European travel planned for the autumn; trade barriers and extra costs through increased bureaucracy and form filling; loss of EU students at British universities; loss of easy travel for British students to study in the EU; loss of power and influence with our nearest neighbours, and as the former UK National Security Adviser Lord Ricketts argues, a consequential loss of influence as a strong European ally for the United States. 

What Can We Do?

So - Thinking Aloud - what are we going to do about this? There appear to be three options. Option One is to pretend, as the few remaining Brexit enthusiasts do, that Brexit is still a brilliant idea, “if only it had been done properly.” This is the tired mantra of failure often recited by old time Marxists speaking of the failures of communism. What “doing it properly” means is never clearly explained. It never will be. You cannot, as advertising gurus say, polish a turd. Option Two is to accept that leaving the European Union has been a mistake, but - in good old British fashion - we just make the best of it. We British are good at “making the best of it” as anyone who has ever risked a camping holiday in Scotland in August can tell you. We even have a phrase for it - “mustn’t grumble.” But we do grumble. And the damage is real. And we notice. Option Three is to accept that leaving the European Union is a mistake based on fantasies, prejudices and ultimately lies - “£350 million a week for the NHS?” - and eventually we need to reverse that mistake just as we reversed that other post-imperial spasm, Suez. 

The problem with Option Three is what it says about British democracy. Brexit advocates claim that they won the 2016 referendum and that somehow that should silence all criticism. This is not how democracies work. A small majority of voters (though not in Northern Ireland or Scotland) did vote to Leave based on a 16 word question in the 2016 referendum. But the terms and the realities of leaving were never spelled out. Fortunately the British democratic system is  flexible. For example, we had a Fixed Term Parliaments Act introduced by David Cameron to ensure five year “fixed” parliamentary terms. It was seen as a mistake. Cameron’s successor Theresa May avoided (democratically) the fixed term and called an early general election. Her successor Boris Johnson scrapped the idea altogether. A law became history without ever being run to its course, and this is how parliamentary democracy works. But a bigger problem for people like me who see Brexit as a failure based on falsehoods and incompetence, is that rejoining the EU in the future can not be with as good terms as Britain secured in the past. The EU is also far from perfect. It can appear like a multi-headed bureaucratic hydra in which Viktor Orban in Hungary or some other member of the awkward squad can veto or stall sensible policies in order to extract more concessions from the others. British politicians know this well, because the British were similarly awkward and demanding when the UK was an EU member. 

So what can the United Kingdom realistically do now? I suspect that every Thinking Aloud piece I will ever write is likely to include the sentiment, “first, recognise the problem.” (If you really think that Brexit is not massively problematic then I would respectfully suggest that perhaps you are reading the wrong Substack.) Next, we should understand that part of any solution means we have to recognise - as Keir Starmer clearly does - that re-negotiating some kind of better relationship with the European Union will take energy, commitment, and some of luck. Years of discussions in boring rooms in Brussels and elsewhere lie ahead. Starmer is right to be pragmatic. He needs to get on with what he can change domestically, including rebuilding the public services of Britain, while simultaneously making the best he can of the opportunities we still have under Brexit. For now there is little point in wasting too much energy in empty rhetoric about rejoining. 

In all of this the lessons of history are of some comfort. Suez was a mess. But it was this last flash of old European imperialism on the continent of Africa and it crumbled in embarrassment without American support. Appeasement was a much more subtle problem, but eventually Britain began to rearm and prepare for war while Neville Chamberlain - whose legacy historians are now re-evaluating more positively - worked hard for peace. And there is one further and much older historical parallel which offers some comfort. It is another self-inflicted disaster with profound economic consequences, a policy decision that restricted the United Kingdom’s economic growth for decades, the Corn Laws of 1815. Tariffs were imposed on foreign corn imports. The result was that wealthy British land owning farmers became even more wealthy and even bigger land owning farmers, while in the cities the rapidly growing class of industrial workers was further impoverished. Poor urban households often could not afford bread to eat, resulting in rioting and other protests. That put a brake on industrialisation and the UK’s progress as an advanced 19th century economy. The Corn Laws divided not just rich and poor but rural and urban areas in a way reflected in part by Mrs Gaskell’s great novel North and South (industrial unrest versus bucolic and cheerful.) It took three decades to put right this great political mistake. In 1846 - in the middle of a decade also known as the Hungry Forties - prime minister Sir Robert Peel finally repealed the hated Corn Laws. He paved the way for the United Kingdom’s economic miracle to allow the country to become the greatest industrial and military power the world had ever seen. He also split the Conservative party. It took three decades for pragmatism, rational thinking and enlightened self-interest, to change the politics of the United Kingdom. It could happen with Brexit. Not today. Probably not tomorrow. But it will happen because in the end, reality wins. 

(I’d like to hear your own Thinking Aloud about this. All constructive criticism or comments are welcome. But please - please - no daft slogans about “wanting our country back.” We want our country forward. Don’t we?)