The UK Is Running On Outdated Software

It’s not been an easy few months for the UK Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer.

Apparently he’s the most unpopular Prime Minister on record. By the time you read this, he may even already have been turfed out of office by his fellow Parliamentarians.

But does it matter either way? In this brilliant interview from the Spectator podcast, Dominic Cummings (former advisor to Boris Johnson) makes the point that the problems presently afflicting the UK are systemic, not the result of one disappointing leader.

But that begs the question, which came first, the chicken or the egg? Did the toxic culture cause the political paralysis? Or vice versa?

Culture is to humans as software is to computers. It runs underneath everything, mostly invisible, until it stops working. And Britain’s hasn’t been updated in a very long time.

The trouble with old code is that everyone who might fix it has spent an entire career running it. They don’t see bugs. They see how things have always been done. So the operating system limps along, getting more and more buggy, till we arrive at our current position where it’s no longer fit for purpose. 

Now we’re seeing the hardware, the institutions (Parliament, education systems, Civil Service, the NHS, the Bank of England, the police and military), glitching out as a result. 

Which is why swapping the Prime Minister changes nothing.

The UK has a cultural problem, not a Prime Minister problem. Until the country acknowledges, like Cummings does, that the problem is not Starmer per se, but flaws embedded deep in the foundations of the British state, nothing will change. They’ll just keep kicking the can down the road… until they eventually run out of road. 

We’ve said it before and we’ll keep saying it: a business with a great culture can do anything it wants. A business with a lousy one can’t tie its own shoelaces.

A country is just a very large company that forgot its culture was a choice.