Britain’s ‘Computer Says No’ attitude needs a reboot

Almost exactly 20 years ago, Britain was introduced to Carol Beer, a Little Britain character whose attitude to customer service transcended the programme and became an embedded catchphrase in our public life. Ms Beer would be presented with perfectly reasonable requests in her desk job at a bank or hospital, but after some typing into a keyboard would blankly reply ‘computer says no’ (before coughing into the face of the customer for good measure).

‘Computer says no’ has become shorthand for every excruciating and frustrating interaction we have with the process-over-outcome landscape of modern Britain. And nowhere is this truer than in the way the British state has developed since the end of the second world war.

Once we had been a land of liberty, where there was a presumption that you could do something unless there was a specific injunction against it. Now there is a morass of legislation, regulation and stultifying bureaucracy that increasingly seeks to control every action of individuals, families, and businesses.

All of us will have come across this in our daily lives, whether we truly appreciate it or not. If no examples spring immediately to mind, think about how expensive your rent or mortgage is. Or about how crowded your commute is. Or how expensive your electricity bills are becoming. Why?

Expensive housing is due to a lack of supply, caused by the most damaging planning laws in the developed world. Painful commutes are because infrastructure investment lags well behind where it should. And Britain produces less energy than our peers, and that which we do produce is much more expensive.

The common thread of these is the self-inflicted wound caused by a huge, officious public sector that is choking investment, preventing freedom of private bodies to act, and pointless rules that make it too expensive to commit to much-needed investment.

A fabulous new essay makes this case extremely powerfully, and it has been endorsed by everyone from Silicon Valley tech bros and Dominic Cummings to the Tony Blair Institute. In a stunning cri de coeur entitled Foundations: Why Britain Stagnated, Sam Bowman, Ben Southwood and Samuel Hughes lay out the extent of devastation we have chosen to inflict on our economy, and the hurt it has caused to our country.

It is not party political, nor does it get distracted by Brexit, which it acknowledges could damage productivity whilst also opening up new opportunities, such as Britain’s AI prospects that I wrote about in September.

Instead, it places our current economic woes in a historical context stretching back to Britain’s pioneering use of coal in the 1500’s, to our invention of the modern world through the industrial revolution, and our previous rallies from stagnation in the 1930s and 1980s.

They also use the evergreen tactic of highlighting all the ways in which the French have addressed these problems more successfully than Les Rosbifs. There are 7m more houses in France than the UK, despite our equal populations, and France has widely adopted nuclear power for energy. These two facts alone allow them to go on strike so much that their trade unions have portable barbecues that fit along tram lines, and still be more productive than us!

It is painful to see how needless the damage caused to our health, wealth and happiness is. However, the main takeaway people should leave with after reading the essay is immense hopefulness. As the authors say: “Because what we get wrong is so mundane and straightforward, fixing these problems would allow Britain to experience similar rapid ‘catchup’ growth that countries like South Korea, Estonia and Poland have experienced over the past 30 years.”

And the hope doesn’t stop there. The lack of government spending firepower is no weakness compared to the simple fact that we have banned private investment and innovation in all the areas where it is most needed. Again, to quote the essay: “We don’t need to pay businesses to invest in the areas where the British economy most suffers. We just need to stop banning them from doing so.”

We need to strip away all of the mind-forged manacles that are making us less prosperous, less healthy and less happy than we could be. We can’t any longer let Computer Say NO.