Telegraph

Let's admit it: Britain is now
a developing country ......:...We have iPads and broadband – but also
oversubscribed foodbanks. Our economy is no
longer zooming along unchallenged in the fast
lane, but a clapped-out motor
Elite economic debate boils down to this: a man
in a tie stands at a dispatch box and reads out
some numbers for the years ahead, along with a
few micro-measures he'll take to improve those
projections. His opposite number scoffs at the
forecasts and promises his tweaks would be far superior. For a few hours, perhaps even a couple
of days, afterwards, commentators discuss What
It All Means. Last Thursday's autumn statement from George Osborne was merely the latest enactment of this twice-yearly ritual, and I bet
you've already forgotten it. Compare his forecasts and fossicking with our fundamental problems. Start with last
week's Pisa educational yardsticks, which show British teenagers trailing their Vietnamese
counterparts at science, and behind the
Macanese at maths. Or look at this year's World Economic Forum (WEF) competitiveness survey of 148 countries, which ranks British roads
below Chile's, and our ground-transport system
worse than that of Barbados. Whether Blair or Brown or Cameron, successive prime ministers and their chancellors
pretend that progress is largely a matter of trims
and tweaks – of capping business rates and
funding the A14 to Felixstowe. Yet those
Treasury supplementary tables and fan charts
are no match for the mass of inconvenient facts provided by the Organisation for Economic Co- operation and Development, the WEF or simply by going for a wander. Sift through the evidence
and a different picture emerges: Britain's
economy is no longer zooming along
unchallenged in the fast lane, but an increasingly
clapped-out motor regularly overtaken by Asian
Tigers such as South Korea and Taiwan. Gender equality? The WEF ranks us behind Nicaragua and Lesotho. Investment by business?
The Economist thinks we are struggling to keep
up with Mali. Let me put it more broadly, Britain is a rich country accruing many of the stereotypical bad
habits of a developing country. I began thinking about this last week, while reporting on graphene, the wonder material discovered by Manchester scientists and held up
by cabinet ministers as part of our new high-tech
future. Graphene is also the point at which
Treasury dreaminess is harshly interrupted by
the reality of our national de-development. Briefly, the story goes like this: Osborne funnelled a few tens of millions into research on
the substance. It's the kind of public-sector
kickstart that might work in a manufacturing
economy such as Germany – but which in
Britain, with its hollowed-out industry and
busted supply chains, has proved the equivalent of pouring money down a hole. One university
physicist described how this was part of a
familiar pattern of generating innovations for
the rest of the world to capitalise on, then
sighed: "One day, we'll stop thinking of ourselves
as a major economic power, and realise we're more like South Korea in the early 60s." South
Korea, by way of comparison, has already put in
over 20 times as many graphene patents as the
country that discovered it. How can any nation that came up with the BBC and the NHS be considered in the same
breath as India or China? Let me refer you to
one of the first lines of The Great Indian Novel by Shashi Tharoor, in which a wise old man warns International Monetary Fund officials and foreign dignatories: "India is not, as people keep
calling it, an underdeveloped country, but
rather, in the context of its history and cultural
heritage, a highly developed one in an advanced
state of decay." Stop thinking of development as a process that only goes in one direction, or which affects a
nation's people equally, and it becomes much
easier to see how Britain is going backwards. Even banana republics have cash: it just ends up in the hands of a very few people – ask the
bank managers of Switzerland or the hotel
concierges of Paris. In Britain, we have become
used to having our resources skimmed off by a
small cadre of the international elite, who often
don't feel obliged to leave much behind for our tax officials. An Africa specialist could look at the
City and recognise in it a 21st-century version of
a resource curse: something generating oodles
of money for a tiny group of people, often
foreign, yet whose demands distort the rest of
the economy. Sure, Britain has iPads and broadband – but it also has oversubscribed
foodbanks. And the concept of the working poor
that has dominated political debate since the
crash is also something straight out of
development textbooks. Nobel laureate Amartya Sen defined development as "the removal of various types of
unfreedoms that leave people with little choice
and little opportunity of exercising their
reasoned agency". Yet when it comes to social
mobility, Britain now has the worst record of all
advanced countries – and will soon be overtaken by the newly rich countries of east Asia. And it's when wealth is concentrated in too few hands that the forces of law and order get
used as a militia for the elite – and peaceful
dissent gets stamped upon. That's why police are
now a presence on our business-friendly
university campuses; it also explains why
Theresa May had the front to try to deport Trenton Oldfield for disrupting a student rowing
competition (sorry, the Boat Race). This isn't a sub-Rhodesian moan about Britain going to the dogs. But as my colleague
Larry Elliott said in his most recent book, Going
South, the sooner we puncture our own
complacency at having created a rich economy
for the few, and think of ourselves as in dire
need of a proper economic development plan, the better. Otherwise, we're well set to corner the world market in pig semen. The United Kingdom of spoink. Tags: Economics, Economic growth (GD