The Power to Say Yes
The Power to Say Yes - a homage to the Great British no.
Britain has not run out of brave people. It has built a country of naysayers, where blocking something costs nothing and backing it can cost you everything.
I usually approach the former industrial town of Greenock, my hometown on the west coast of Scotland and a short hop from Glasgow, by road. The M8 opens up to the water as you crest the concrete motorway, Dumbarton Rock to the right and a downward drive towards an ancient coastal heartland. I have also approached it from the water. It is a fine sight to behold from the bonny Clyde: the green hills behind it, the old sugar sheds from the days when the town grew rich on cane, and on the people who cut it, and a town that gave the world James Watt and, with him, a fair share of the modern age.
Hold on to that as you read on. This is not a town without ambition in its maritime blood. It sometimes feels, however, that it has simply lost its mojo. And I have come to suspect that so, more broadly, has the United Kingdom.
Yet in Greenock, as I write, a small army of engineers is spending twenty-four million pounds to take out a roundabout. It is the centrepiece of a wider regeneration of the town centre. It took years of planning and a bid to a government fund to pay for it, and from the day the money was awarded to the day the job is finished will be close to five years. At least.
It is a sensible scheme, and no doubt will do the town some good aesthetically, but if Jimmy Watt himself had worked at that pace, we would be having this conversation by candlelight.
It is not a disaster, or a scandal. It is more telling than either, because it is normal. This is the pace at which a proud and clever town, like every other town in Britain, is now allowed to change.
We could say that Britain has lost its nerve, but I would like to withdraw the phrase, because it is too flattering. Nerve is personal, and it lets us imagine that somewhere out there a braver Minister would fix everything. The truth is duller and much worse. We have not run out of brave people. We have built a country in which bravery is punished and caution is free, and then we express surprise that nobody is brave.
What we have lost is not nerve. It is the power to say yes.
Watch how a British decision dies, because it almost never dies in the open, in a vote, with a name attached to it. It dies by referral. It goes to a committee, then to a consultation, then to a review timed to report safely after the election. It is welcomed in principle. It is kept under review, which is a refusal with a pension. A strategy is launched and then, eighteen months later, refreshed, refreshing a strategy being the closest thing in public life to sprinting on a treadmill. Nobody ever stands up and kills the thing, because killing things can be quoted back at you and delaying them cannot. We have made inaction weightless and action lethal, and we call the result prudence.
Pride and prudence
I have sat close enough to this to promise you it is not a conspiracy. It is worse than a conspiracy. It is a room full of (well-paid) sensible people each doing the sensible thing. The official knows the safe advice is the advice that commits to nothing before the next election. The consultant knows his fee depends on the process continuing rather than concluding. The Minister knows he will be somewhere else in two years, that a project delivered late will belong to his successor, and that a project begun rashly will belong to him forever, in the headline, under his own photograph. Everybody behaves impeccably. The sum of all that impeccable behaviour is a nation that cannot take down a roundabout in under half a decade.
And here is the thing we have got precisely backwards. We think the danger is doing something badly. It is not. The danger is doing nothing, and doing nothing is the one failure that never makes the news. There is no inquiry into the port we did not upgrade, no photograph of the homes we did not build, no committee convened to examine the industries that shrugged and quietly set up somewhere else. We can all recite the disasters. The eye-wateringly priced railway that kept shrinking until it ran from not-quite-London to not-quite-Birmingham. The Scottish ferries that turned up years late and a fortune over budget. The airport runways argued about for fifty years and never a bucket of concrete poured.
But the real cost of British timidity is invisible, because it is the cost of everything we never attempted. The failure worth fearing is not the botch. It is the blank.
We do, from time to time, rouse ourselves. When we tire of doing nothing, we do the other British thing, which is to announce something enormous and then spend a small fortune proving we were never serious. We were going to bridge the sea to Northern Ireland, twenty-odd miles of it, across a trench the Navy once used to dump its unwanted munitions, and we commissioned the best part of a million pounds of study to tell us what any fisherman on the Rhins of Galloway could have told us for the price of a pint. We were going to build an airport in the Thames estuary, and we drew it, and argued about it, and did not build it. Paralysis and vanity are not opposites. They are the same disease in different hats: an inability to hold a serious decision steady for long enough to see it through, whether the decision is to build or, just as usefully, to stop.
Sail a little south from Greenock and you reach Hunterston, where a magnificent deep-water port sits mostly empty, staring out at the Firth, waiting. Scheme after scheme has been floated for it over the years, each launched with a photograph and a press release, each quietly evaporating. The most recent and most promising was a factory to make the giant undersea cables a wind-powered century will need by the thousand mile, tied to a plan to bring wind and solar power up from Morocco. It won its planning permission. It won public money. It promised close to a thousand jobs to a coast that could badly use them. The plant is now paused for what its owners called a strategic reset, which is the corporate cousin of keeping something under review. I am not pointing fingers of blame, I am pointing out the weary resignation that follows when ambition repeatedly meets the machinery of delay. Why are we so often paralysed by indecisiveness in this country?
It’s the planning, stupid
Next door sits the real heartbreak. Hunterston's nuclear station stopped generating in 2022, after nearly half a century, on a site as good as any in Britain for exactly the sort of small modular reactor the rest of the United Kingdom is now scrambling to build. It could anchor an industry. It could power a great slice of Scotland. And it will not happen, because there is a standing policy in Edinburgh against new nuclear of any kind, enforced through the one lever devolution hands a Scottish government with total reliability: the power to refuse planning permission. This is not nimbyism. Nobody local is chaining themselves to a fence. It is a decision, taken at the top, to foreclose an option before an investor is allowed to raise it. Whatever you think of the politics, and I have my views, it is a remarkable thing to watch a country talk itself out of an industry it has not even been asked to want.
When the money is tight, ambition is always the first thing cut, because ambition has no constituency in the room. Scotland has been trying to turn the A9, the road up its own spine, into a dual carriageway since it was promised in 2011. It is now promised for 2035, at close to four billion pounds, having been announced when I was a good deal younger. Hospitals and treatment centres are paused. School rebuilds slip. The capital programme, the part of the budget that builds the future rather than running the present, is always the part that goes first, because a delayed hospital is next year's problem and a cancelled operation is this week's headline. We eat the seed corn and call it prudence.
The empty places tell the same story. Strung along that coast are the bones of old industries that once employed thousands, the great Nobel explosives works at Ardeer among them, now returned so completely to the birds that it is easier to win a nature designation there than to raise a factory. Here and there something does take root: an aerospace cluster at Prestwick, a knot of companies around Glasgow that quietly builds more small satellites than anywhere else in Europe, the booming textiles, games, tech and pharma clusters which pop up in spite of government, not because of it. It is worth asking why those took and so much else withered. The answer, usually, is that they grew from below, company by company, and never had to wait for permission from above. Permission is the thing we can no longer give. I applaud them, all of them.
The plague of complacency
None of this is a Scottish disease, though Scotland shows the symptoms plainly and I happen to know that ground well. It is a British condition, and devolution, which I support, has quietly made one part of it worse. Over thirty years we have handed out, with great care, the power to object, and almost none of the power to commit. A project of national weight must now satisfy Westminster, a devolved government, a mayor perhaps, a council certainly, a queue of statutory consultees and the courts behind all of them. Every one of them can say no. Not one of them, alone, can say yes. We have built a constitution rich in brakes and poor in engines, and then wondered why the thing will not move.
Look at the argument we are having right now, back in Greenock itself. We are told, correctly, that the computers behind artificial intelligence are the new critical national infrastructure, as vital to a modern country as its power grid and its water. We say we want our data held in Britain and not on a server farm in Virginia or Guangdong, at the mercy of whoever runs Washington or Beijing that week. We even have the power to run the things: Scotland makes more renewable electricity than it can use or move, and on a windy day we pay generators to switch the turbines off, real money spent to waste clean power the grid cannot swallow. Every reason to say yes is present and correct.
And still, we cannot. At Spango Valley, IBM built computers for over half a century, then left, and the cleared site was consented for hundreds of homes that never came. Now a data centre is proposed for it, and the town is split. This is not green belt. It is not a beauty spot. It is a dead industrial site a community was promised would live again and never did, and even here, where the lazy caricature of greedy tech against unspoilt countryside does not apply, the thing inches through the machine while objections mount, ministers promise guidance by the year's end, and the honest answer to whether it will ever be built is that nobody knows. The same town that will spend five years taking out a roundabout cannot decide whether to let a dead site live.
And here is the part we do not like to say. When the system stalls a scheme like that, it is not malfunctioning. It is doing exactly what we built it to do. We made an instrument for stopping things, and it stops them, and it cannot tell a good thing from a bad one. The machinery that halts the polluting plant nobody should want halts, with the same reliability, the thing we have just agreed the country needs. We spent thirty years perfecting the power to say no, and we are surprised, every time, that we have mislaid the power to say yes.
But I would be letting us all off too lightly if I blamed only the constitution, because the deepest obstacle is not written in any statute. It is in us, and it is everywhere. It is the politics of the community meeting and the objection letter. The politics of the pub, where every grand idea is a con and every backer a chancer. The politics of the boardroom, where the cautious man always sounds wiser than the bold one. The politics of the shareholder who would sooner have a safe dividend this year than a great company in twenty. In this country the person who proposes the large thing is a fantasist right up until the moment it works, and the person who fails to deliver it is a villain forever. We tell ourselves we object on principle, to guard a view or a value. Often the truth is smaller. We object because objecting is free, and because saying no has never once cost anyone anything in this country, while saying yes can cost you everything. A nation of sensible people, each being safely and cheaply against, will decline slowly, comfortably, and with excellent reasons.
Round and round we go
Which brings me, rather neatly, back to roundabouts. Two of them.
The first is the one in Greenock: years in the planning, twenty-four million pounds in the taking, and five years from cheque to completion. The second is under the Atlantic. In the Faroe Islands, a scatter of rock with fifty thousand people and weather that would frighten Greenock, they looked at the sea between their islands and drove tunnels beneath it, and where the tunnels meet they built a roundabout, on the floor of the ocean, ringed with light, the only one of its kind on earth. Fifty thousand people did that. We are more than a thousand times their number and immeasurably richer, and Shetland, which rather fancies the same idea, has spent close to a decade on studies and business cases and has still to put a spade in the ground.
The Scottish Government has now confirmed twenty-three million pounds for the first tunnel. None of it will build one. It pays for the business case and the groundwork, roughly the price of taking out a roundabout in Greenock. The council calls its tunnels buildable and investable. Good. Góða eydnu, as they say in Tórshavn. I will eat my Shetland jumper, boiled in lamb stock, the day I go from one Shetland isle to the next without a ferry.
So, two roundabouts. Ours? Five years in the removing. Theirs? Built beneath the sea because they decided to. The engineering is not the difference. The Faroese have harder seas than we do and the same stubborn rock. The difference is that somewhere in the Faroes a person was able to decide, and then be held to the decision. That is the whole story. That is the thing this country has mislaid.
Because the first obstacle in this country is never the thing we say it is. It is not the Irish Sea, the North Sea, or the sediment, or the shipping lanes, or the precious birds. It is not the money, and it is not the engineering. It is us. It is our now inherent lack of blue-sky thinking, of grand ambition, of making long-term decisions and owning them come what may. Whilst we squabble over a single runway, Turkey built one of the biggest airports on earth in about four years, and Dubai is now building one bigger still, five runways and room for a quarter of a billion passengers a year.
The real question is not whether Britain is still capable of great things. Of course it is. The question is whether a country that can no longer easily say yes to a roundabout can still say yes to anything at all.
Jamie Greene is a former Member of the Scottish Parliament and the founder of Kempock, a Scottish political advisory firm. He has spent long enough inside the machine to know how a good idea dies.