Here's why Britain is so terrible at making long-term decisions like Brexit

The hi-viz Brexiteers don't realise how much they needed the Deep State

Brexit has made our politicians appear about as adept at rational long-term planning as the “rage-infected” zombies in Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, but it’s not all their fault.

The truth is that it hasn’t really ever been our forte. The “revoke and reflect” faction in parliament acknowledges this: let’s pretend Article 50 never happened; there’s no shame in kicking the can down the road.

This always made sense on Brexit. Why fling ourselves headlong at a needlessly tight schedule? Why drag frantic short-term thinking into a decision which will set the course for our grandkids’ future?

When it comes to the big, era-defining issues – whether climate change, pensions, infrastructure or our relationship with Europe – Britain has always struggled to get it right.

Our political structure can take much of the blame. A first-past-the-post electoral system equates marginal preference with absolute victory and we delight (sometimes) in an adversarial parliament more used to red-faced punctiliousness than decisive collaboration. Our media takes those cues, and tends towards the antagonistic.

There are occasional calls for a cross-party commission, on the NHS or legal aid perhaps, something to “take the politics out” of deeply complex issues. But few politicians are willing to trade away their traditional bulwarks of electoral support.

Tim Marshall, an emeritus professor at Oxford Brookes University, has spent years looking at how Britain manages its long-term infrastructure projects. He reckons a system of proportional representation, or at least a political class well used to coalition, would make a better fist of things.

He flags up Germany’s decision to give up on nuclear power and focus on renewables as a sound example of government for the generations to come. Here was energy policy achieved through a mutual understanding that a long-term strategy was required.

Caroline Lucas, the Green Party MP for Brighton Pavilion, makes a similar point. “There have been moments of long-term thinking on climate change,” she told me. “But our political system has allowed much of that progress to be reversed all too easily, and separates interconnected areas into silos.

“This systematic undermining of our ability to avoid climate catastrophe is borne out of both short-termism and a failure of joined-up thinking.”

It has maybe gone better In the Netherlands, where there is a fundamental threat of flooding caused by global warming. The solution there has been a multi-decade plan, backed by a major, agreed spending commitment.

And perhaps the clearest uncomfortable comparison comes in Norway. While Britain tiddled its North Sea oil money up the wall handing out tax breaks and inflating the housing market to make life miserable for our kids, Norway set it aside to build a giant pension scheme. It is now worth $1tn or thereabouts and has helped to define Norway’s place in Europe: powerful but separate; involved but independent. Precisely where some would like the UK to be.

France likes national debates to look at big issues. Emmanuel Macron wants one to address the gilets jaunes protests, but they have a sketchy track record. There were perhaps successes on the environment, but Nicolas Sarkozy’s debate on national identity has been blamed for rallying far-right support. The worry for Britain is that, right now, any national conversation would end up in a drizzly pub car park at closing time.

It’s not all gloom. Some long-term thinking does get done. Marshall has been encouraged by the creation of a National Infrastructure Commission in the Treasury. It has a sizeable team which will use bona fide research to give measured, long-term advice. Decisions will still fall to whoever is chancellor, but it is at least a powerful voice of reason working with a relatively apolitical view to the horizon. Is it a blueprint for a way past our adversarial instincts?

What that amounts to, of course, is handing over more of the hard graft of policy making to the unelected. If you’re one of those shouty Brexit supporters with a passion for hi-viz tabards you’d probably call it the “deep state” and mutter darkly about Sandy Hook.

A political system well used to the effective and measured consideration of epoch-making policy could have taken Brexit in its stride. With that absent, the bitter irony for libertarian Brexiteers is that perhaps their problem all along – leaving aside electoral fraud and and a penchant for crude mercantilism – was that the deep state simply wasn’t deep enough to make a difference.