A Buffoonocracy in Need of a Bond Crisis – The Plight of the UK as Reported from Mississippi with Douglas Carswell
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Douglas Carswell helped win the Brexit referendum, then left Britain in frustration to run the Mississippi Centre for Public Policy in a state that has quietly overtaken the UK in GDP per capita. In this episode, I talk to Douglas about why Britain has become, in his words, ungovernable and what investors and policymakers should take from the booming American South.
It's a contrarian, uncomfortable, and genuinely thought-provoking conversation, about decline, fiscal reality, and the unfashionable medicine Carswell thinks Britain will eventually have to swallow. Whether or not you share his politics, the diagnosis of why nothing seems to work is worth a listen.
Recorded on yet another day of Westminster upheaval, the conversation ranges from the structural causes of UK political instability to the hard fiscal maths now closing in on the gilt market. Carswell argues that Blair-era reforms handed power to judges, civil servants and quangos, leaving elected governments "in office, but not in power". The UK is a "buffoonocracy" that no single Prime Minister can fix without changing how Britain is governed.
He makes the provocative case that a UK bond crisis may now be the catalyst that forces real spending discipline and a "May 1979 moment." Along the way, he assesses Nigel Farage, Kemi Badenoch, and Reform's execution risk; why Brexit's opportunities were largely squandered (GDPR, the Working Time Directive, planning paralysis); and the one genuine bright spot, the UK's human capital.
Then he turns to Mississippi's free-market playbook: labour-market and occupational-licensing deregulation, a flat income tax now being phased out entirely, energy a third of UK prices, and school-choice and phonics reforms that lifted the state from 49th to 9th in fourth-grade reading. His message to Britain: the laws of physics aren't different in the American South, but the policies are.
A bracing, contrarian conversation about national decline, fiscal reality, and how the story might still turn around.
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