Westminster permadrama is sabotaging productivity
The constant drama of Westminster is distracting politicians, investors and the general public from getting on with what they’re meant to, writes John Oxley
On weeks like these, it feels like the political drama is unending. Leadership crises and collapses seem to be coming closer together. The pattern now feels very familiar. News alerts count who is declaring for whom, while TV pundits speculate about the way forward. Social media births a thousand memes – Thick of It GIFS, Paddington Bear escorting a troubled politician to the Great Beyond, jokes about Gazza, fishing rods and chicken. A large chunk of the nation stays glued to its phones, before rounding the evening off with its favourite emergency podcast repeating the whole thing back to them. We really shouldn’t be surprised that productivity is stagnating.
For a decade now, our politics has been largely running on adrenaline. It feels like you turned the TV on just before the Brexit referendum; there’s not been a chance to turn it off since. The result gave way to the fights over what leaving could mean and how it would be implemented. When that was done, Covid hit, followed by the war in Ukraine and the accompanying energy spike. In that time, we’ve cycled through three general elections, half a dozen Prime Ministers and enough mini crises that the word febrile is permanently lodged in our vocabulary.
UK productivity has ground to a halt
Through all this, political manoeuvring has gone from background noise to an almost endlessly blaring alarm. There’s more to pay attention to, it feels like it matters more and the media environment has gone from offering a few drops of headlines a day to a constant firehose of information. Keeping up has become almost a full-time job. This can’t be great for our actual full-time jobs.
In this time, productivity in Britain has stubbornly refused to grow. There are lots of reasons behind this, but maybe we’ve overlooked one – the constant Westminster drama. It has made keeping up with events more time-consuming and has generated hours of content to distract us from our days. The whole thing has been a gift to procrastinators across the country, a permanent distraction that feels important.
For news addicts, it’s like a potent new strain has hit the market. Maybe without it, we would have been less distractible, less consumed by politics and more prone to getting on with what we are meant to do. Instead, almost incalculable hours of value creation have been lost to briefly knowing what the Malthouse Compromise was. So much human ingenuity wasted on producing the best social media riff on some no-name minister resigning.
The economic cost of instability in Westminster
More seriously, Britain’s turbulence is a real problem for our economy. Investment decisions and commitments are measured in years. Political cycles that go to and fro in 18 months generate instability that confounds decision-making in both public and private life. One of the real drivers of poor productivity has been a lack of investment – and that should be unsurprising when the political background is so obviously volatile. Our political system has started changing too rapidly for people to keep up and to make their decisions accordingly.
Stability and good governance aren’t exciting. The return of ignorable politics would starve some of us for entertainment. We’d probably have to find better things to do with our time. That might make each of us incrementally more productive. But on a grander scale, it could have a real effect, too.
Predictability and surety are good for people who make big decisions based on politics. It makes it easy to invest in Britain and know you’ll see a proper return. Reducing the adrenaline levels in our politics might be mutually beneficial, delivering the sort of growth and productivity gains that make governance easier and more stable.
Part of Starmer’s promise was that he would make politics boring again. He’s failed. Those who aim to follow him should perhaps be thinking of how to make this the last burst of excitement for a while.
John Oxley is a corporate strategist and political commentator