Britain Is Better Than This by Gavin Esler: An interesting but far from essential read

The title of Britain Is Better Than This is a nod to an accidental meme familiar from social media throughout the post-Brexit years. Invariably after yet another depredation visited upon the British body politic or society by either the Conservative government, its conniving media guard dogs, or simple common ruffians, British liberals would exasperatedly declare “we’re better than this”. This would be met with rejoinders from people on the left, or often from this very island, reminding them that such carry-on is indeed a time-honoured British tradition.

Former BBC reporter Gavin Esler is lucid enough to concede the latter while nonetheless cleaving to a belief in the former. For this book, he shrewdly takes his cue from a query from an elegant English lady of advanced years, who asked him privately at a book festival “why are things so…sh*t?”

Esler sees Britain, after more than a decade of Tory austerity and the self-inflicted wound of Brexit, as a barely functional polity in thrall to ancestor worship. It is a country whose parlous state is constantly bemoaned by millions of its citizens, who nonetheless feel powerless, largely because of the country’s winner-takes-all electoral system, to do anything about it.

Another culprit, however accidental, is the UK’s nebulous unwritten constitution, which served the country well until it no longer did, being little deterrent to the small coterie at the top of the Conservative Party that effected a soft coup d’état in the years following Brexit. Though Esler provides more diagnoses than solutions, he pines for the “good chaps” of British history, people like former royal private secretary Alan Lascelles, whose famous Lascelles Principles of 1950 continue to guide monarchs in deciding on dissolution of governments.

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You cannot fault Esler’s passion and ingenuousness but it is hard to see who the intended audience might be for this book, already his third in recent years on Brexit and its discontents. For most politics nerds, there is little here that is new, and it goes too far into the weeds for casual readers. While Esler would no doubt plead an urgency to the problems he outlines, there is a lingering sense that, with regard to Brexit at least, the train has long since left the station. An interesting read but a book that is far from essential.