Latest news with #SuezCrisis
Local France
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Local France
French Word of the Day: Barjo
Why do I need to know barjo? Because you might hear young people say it – and you can't be left wondering what it means. What does it mean? Barjo – pronounced bar-zho – and sometimes spelt barjot is a slang term for crazy, or insane. It comes from France's secret 'back-to-front' slang language Verlan version of jobard – which means 'fool' or 'simpleton'. Advertisement Usually the inverted verlan version makes a word more slangy and informal, but in this case both the forwards and the backwards version are quite colloquial and therefore not used in formal situations. The more common term for crazy is fou/folle - as in the classic Astérix catchphrase ' Ils sont fous ces romains ' - rendered in the English version as 'these Romans are crazy'. The version of barjo with the 't' ending is believed to be linked to Admiral Pierre Barjot, who was in charge of French naval aviation during the 1956 Suez Crisis. Use it like this Il est complètement barjo – He's completely crazy Elles sont un peu barjos – They're a bit crazy.
New Straits Times
07-07-2025
- Business
- New Straits Times
Geoeconomics of trade: Djibouti, the Suez Canal, and the business logic of geography
Introduction: When the Map Shapes the Mandate In global affairs, maps do more than illustrate borders—they reveal strategic imperatives. A country's geography is not simply its physical terrain; it is the architecture of its constraints, its possibilities, and its vulnerabilities. While resources, institutions, and leadership matter, geography imposes structural conditions that no policymaker can escape. The truism "Geography is destiny" is not deterministic—but it is profoundly instructive. Geography Is Destiny: From Slogans to Strategy The phrase, often attributed to Napoleon and echoed by thinkers from Halford Mackinder to Robert Kaplan, encapsulates how natural features—mountains, rivers, chokepoints, deserts—can shape a nation's developmental path and geopolitical weight. Geography defines what a country must defend, who it must trade with, and how it might project power. In essence, geography offers both opportunity and entrapment. Two case studies—Djibouti and the Suez Canal—offer sharp illustrations of this truth. They are not economic superpowers in themselves, but they sit astride arteries through which the lifeblood of global trade flows. Their strategic value is not what they produce, but where they are. Djibouti: Geography as Leverage Djibouti, a small nation on the Horn of Africa, lacks arable land, natural resources, and a large domestic market. And yet, it punches far above its weight on the global stage. Why? Because it commands the Bab el-Mandeb Strait—a chokepoint that connects the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden, through which roughly 10 per cent of global seaborne trade passes. More importantly, it serves as the maritime gateway between Europe and Asia, particularly for oil shipments and container cargo. This geographical positioning has transformed Djibouti into a global military hub, hosting bases for the U.S., France, China, and others. Each is vying for influence over this narrow corridor. Djibouti has used this to extract rents, attract foreign investment, and enhance its geopolitical relevance. It is geography turned into strategy. The Suez Canal: Control the Chokepoint, Shape the Century The Suez Canal is another potent example. Artificial, yes—but geopolitical in the extreme. Completed in 1869, the canal sliced through Egypt to link the Mediterranean and Red Seas, radically reducing travel time between Europe and Asia. Control over Suez has repeatedly shifted the global power balance: • In 1956, Egypt's nationalization of the canal by President Nasser triggered the Suez Crisis, a turning point in the decline of British and French imperial influence. • In 2021, the blockage of the canal by the Ever Given container ship—a black swan logistical event—froze $9 billion worth of trade per day, underscoring the fragility and significance of chokepoints in the modern economy. The Suez Canal does not merely move ships. It moves empires, markets, and military doctrines. Geopolitics: When Geography Meets Power Geopolitics is the study of how geography informs the behavior of states. It explains why Russia fears encirclement, why the U.S. prioritizes naval supremacy, and why China builds artificial islands in the South China Sea. Geography, in this context, is the stage upon which states act, and geopolitics is the script they follow in pursuit of survival, status, and security. Djibouti and Suez are prime examples of how static features—location, proximity, terrain—can make a place valuable, vulnerable, or volatile. Black Swan Events, Geopolitics & Geoeconomics: Fragility in the Fault Lines Black swan events—rare, unpredictable shocks—often expose the latent geopolitical and geoeconomic dependencies created by geography. The Ever Given was one such event. So was the COVID-19 pandemic, which revealed just how vulnerable the world's supply chains are to localized disruptions. The Suez Canal and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait are not just maritime shortcuts. They are single points of failure. A naval standoff, a pirate attack, a natural disaster—any one of these could ricochet across global markets in hours. Thus, geographic chokepoints become economic pressure points. In an age of interconnected commerce, geopolitics and geoeconomics have merged. Who controls the strait can influence shipping rates, insurance premiums,and commodity prices. The geography is permanent—but the shocks are episodic, and they test a state's resilience. Geostrategy and Geoeconomics: From Presence to Power Projection Geostrategy is how a nation translates its geography into power—militarily, diplomatically, and economically. It is not enough to possess a strategic location; one must know how to leverage it. • Djibouti has pursued a rentier geostrategy—offering land and logistics for global powers while investing in port infrastructure. • Egypt, under successive regimes, has used the Suez Canal as a fiscal lifeline, generating billions in toll revenue, while aligning itself with the interests of major powers to maintain canal security. Geoeconomics complements this by turning geography into a commercial and strategic asset. Both Djibouti and Egypt seek to monetize their location—through logistics, trade facilitation, and foreign investment. But this comes with dependency risks: the same foreign presence that brings stability can also invite entanglement. Today, the geoeconomic toolkit includes not only toll revenue or basing rights, but also: • Foreign debt diplomacy (as seen in Chinese Belt and Road projects), • Competing logistics corridors (like the India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor vs. China's BRI), • And regional port competition (e.g., between Port Sudan, Berbera, and Djibouti itself). These instruments allow states to amplify the value of geography into policy leverage and economic influence—turning location into strategy, and infrastructure into influence. History and Geography: A Feedback Loop in Geopolitics History is not just context—it is an amplifier. Past events shape the strategic imagination of nations. Egypt's experience with colonial exploitation, followed by the nationalization of the Suez Canal, still informs its statecraft. Djibouti's colonial legacy and post-independence struggle for relevance explain its current foreign base diplomacy. Historical memory guides current alliances, threat perceptions, and even public sentiment. In geopolitics, the past doesn't just echo—it instructs. Conclusion: The Compass and the Clock To understand a nation's place in the world, you must look at both the compass and the clock—its geography and its history. Geography imposes structure; history provides narrative. Together, they shape geopolitics, condition geostrategy, and expose the world to black swan risks with outsize consequences. Djibouti and the Suez Canal are reminders that small places can have oversized impacts—not because of what they are, but because of where they are. Geography is not just destiny. It is design—and in the hands of those who understand it, it becomes destiny by design. ———————————————————— Economist Samirul Ariff Othman is an adjunct lecturer at Universiti Teknologi Petronas, international relations analyst and a senior consultant with Global Asia Consulting. The views in this OpEd piece are entirely his own.
The Hill
17-06-2025
- Politics
- The Hill
How Israel evolved from the Middle East's David to its Goliath
Since its establishment in 1948, Israel has embraced the David and Goliath story as a defining myth, portraying itself as a tiny nation triumphing despite overwhelming odds against a powerful coalition of Arab states. While that claim had considerable truth for the first few decades of the country's existence, it has long since ceased to accurately describe the balance of power in the Middle East. Israel's attack on Iran reveals its ability to hit any of its regional adversaries with overwhelming force, even without direct U.S. assistance. When Israel was established, it did not look like the country would survive, let alone become a major power. No sooner did it declare independence than a coalition of five Arab states attacked it, determined to 'throw the Jews into the sea.' Tenacious defense combined with the failure of the invaders to coordinate their attacks saved the newborn state from being strangled in the cradle. Over the next decade, the Israel Defense Forces became a formidable military, but they were still outmatched by the combined strength of the surrounding states. Only with the help of France and Britain could Israel occupy the Sinai in 1956, and even then, the United States forced it to withdraw during the Suez Crisis. Then came the 1967 Six-Day War. To the shock of most observers, the IDF drove the Egyptians from Sinai, captured the Golan from Syria, and took the West Bank from Jordan. Israel now seemed to be the dominant player in the region, but victory bred complacency. On Yom Kippur 1973, an Egyptian Army rebuilt with Soviet aid broke through Israeli defenses along the Suez Canal while Syrian troops overran the lightly defended Golan. With its forces running low on munitions, the IDF was in serious trouble, but President Richard Nixon saved the day with a massive influx of military aid that allowed the Israelis to recoup the situation. The Yom Kippur War marked the last time Israel faced an existential threat from an Arab coalition. Over the ensuing decades, Israel emerged as the preeminent military power in the Middle East. Its transition from beleaguered state to regional hegemon depended on three factors. First, Israel acquired nuclear weapons, probably beginning in 1966-67. Although it will not confirm their existence, the IDF today is believed to have 90 nuclear warheads. With its Jericho ballistic missiles, F-15 and F-35 aircraft (supplied by the United States), and Dolphin II submarines, Israel can hit targets anywhere in the Middle East. That reality serves as a powerful deterrent for anyone contemplating attacking it, since no other nation in the region has nuclear weapons. The second factor contributing to Israel's rise to military hegemony was its systematic dismantling of the Arab alliance against it. It reached a peace accord with Egypt in 1979. In 1988, Jordan renounced its claim to the West Bank and signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1994. These agreements eliminated the threat of another war with an Arab coalition. They also made it easier for Israel to plant settlements in the occupied territories captured during the Six-Day War. U.S. support was the third factor contributing to Israel's rise to regional dominance. For the first decade and a half of Israel's existence, the U.S. provided it virtually no military and very little economic aid. Following the Six-Day War and especially after the Yom Kippur War, however, military aid in the form of grants and loans increased dramatically, averaging $3-4 billion annually and spiking to $17.9 billion during the year following the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks. Since 1948, U.S. aid to Israel has totaled $130 billion ($310 billion adjusted for inflation). The IDF has received some of the U.S. military's most advanced equipment, including the F-35 joint-strike fighter, giving it a decisive qualitative edge over any potential adversary. The ease with which it penetrates Iranian air defenses reveals its technological superiority. U.S. support for Israel has had many positive effects, but also some negative consequences. It has given the country a formidable war machine capable of resisting attacks by any state or alliance in the Middle East. It has also contributed to regional stability. Nixon's intervention may have saved Israel in 1973. Jimmy Carter made the Camp David Accords that led to the peace treaty with Egypt possible, and Bill Clinton facilitated the accord with Jordan. However, the same aid has relieved Israel of the 'guns vs. butter' debate over how much to spend on defense and how much on domestic services. Because of U.S. subsidies, Israelis can have both a large military and generous social welfare benefits, including universal healthcare and heavily subsidized college tuition, approximately $3,000 per year for public institutions, benefits Americans do not enjoy. U.S. aid has also emboldened Israel to defy international law by appropriating territory in the West Bank and the Golan. Gaza may be next. The U.S. should continue to guarantee Israel's right to exist, but that guarantee need not mean writing the country an annual blank check. Providing Israel with defensive weapons only and perhaps even signing a defense treaty with it should, along with its nuclear deterrent, prevent any state from threatening it. U.S. aid should also be contingent on progress toward a resolution of the Palestinian problem, which creates instability throughout the region. The war in Gaza, the attack on Lebanon and the current Iranian conflict stem from that problem. Until it is solved, lasting peace will never be achieved. Israel and its neighbors will live in a state of perpetual tension punctuated by periodic outbursts of violence. As it stands, Israel has two options. It could forcibly expel the entire Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza, which hardly seems possible since no other country will take them. Or it can reach a two-state solution, which seems like the only viable means of achieving lasting peace. As it has done in the past, the United States could play a major role in that peace process. Tom Mockaitis is a professor of history at DePaul University and the author of 'Conventional and Unconventional War: A History of Modern Conflict.'
Yahoo
05-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
I run a French university course on why Britain is such a mess – I won't run out of material
Your 60-minute exam on 'Public Policy Failure and the British State: A History in Twelve Case Studies' starts…. now. Turn the page and read Clarissa Eden's diary entry for November 4 1956, in the midst of the Suez Crisis, and answer the question: 'Do the personalities involved in a given policy failure matter as much, if not more than, the ideas themselves?' Bon courage! For the past three years, 38-year-old Oxford academic Oliver Lewis has been teaching an oversubscribed course at Sciences Po – the Paris university that produced six of France's last eight presidents – while researching a DPhil (equivalent to a PhD) on UK rail privatisation as a 'case study in British public policy failure, 1985-1997'. The source of Lewis's inspiration, he believes, was his father's scientific expertise in materials failure. After earning degrees in History and Politics at the London School of Economics and King's College London – and a short stint in financial services – Lewis was unable to shake off his interest in a different sort of failure, dating back to his study of the privatisation of British Rail for A-level Economics. Having enrolled at Oxford for his DPhil, he won a year's fellowship to Sciences Po in 2021 as part of an exchange programme. The following year, he was asked to develop a 12-week course. It has now been taken by over 200 French, British and other international students at the university dubbed 'la fabrique des élites' (the elite factory). 'Regardless of citizenship, there is a universal curiosity in a country that has gone from one of the richest in the world to a mediocre one,' says Lewis. 'There is definitely a general feeling that something has gone deeply wrong for Britain. When I tell people that my DPhil is on railways and public policy failure, they say, 'Well, you won't run out of material'.' There has certainly been no shortage of recent stories highlighting problems with Britain's rail infrastructure. In December, The Telegraph reported on an 18-mile line in Northumberland – a victim of the Beeching cuts in the 1960s – which took three decades to be rebuilt after plans for its reopening were first mooted in the 1990s. When work finally began in 2019, the £160 million project was due to be completed by spring 2023. It eventually opened in December 2024, by which time the estimated cost had nearly doubled to £298 million – and only two of its six stations were ready. Nevertheless, the curiosity displayed by Lewis's enthusiastic students appears untainted by any contempt for the country they have been studying. 'I have always been a fan of the UK,' says Milan Wojcieszek, a 23-year-old Polish student at the University of Amsterdam, currently on a year-long exchange at Sciences Po. 'I admire your newspaper culture and the civilised way in which you debate in Parliament. But for me, Brexit appeared an irrational decision in a country where everything seemed to be going right, and I wanted to understand the motivations behind it better. 'I still like the British attitude, but the course put an end to the picture in my head that people from western Europe have a superior intellect when it comes to statecraft. It raised my national self-esteem: if these guys can f--- up, maybe we're not so stupid.' But what about his French classmates, the Pompidous, Mitterands and Chiracs of the future? Did they enjoy a good laugh about les Rosbifs while quietly taking notes on mistakes to avoid? 'I did not see a visible enthusiasm for smirking about their arch-rivals shooting themselves in the foot,' says Wojcieszek, who hopes to become an entrepreneur when he graduates. 'I guess what I saw was more sympathy and curiosity.' Wojcieszek's classmate Amélie Destombes, a second-year student at King's College London currently on secondment to Sciences Po, confirms the impression that Britain is a fascinating country to study – if not for the most reassuring reasons. 'I've had conversations with many French students who have brought up Rishi Sunak, Liz Truss or Boris Johnson – so there's a pretty bad reputation,' she says. Brexit is often the hook that attracts European students to Lewis's course – although many might be unaware that he stood for Reform, originally founded as the Brexit Party, in last year's general election for the Montgomeryshire and Glyndŵr seat, where he came second to Labour. Now no longer active in the party, Lewis adopts a rigorously apolitical stance in his seminars. 'Our duty is to truth, not to subjectivity or opinion,' he explains. In any case, he argues, 'it's too early to tell' with Brexit. Instead, he roots his teaching in historical method, blending aspects of anthropology and law, as befits Sciences Po's interdisciplinary approach. This results in a 12-part lecture series on the 'long 20th century' that seeks to understand 'how we got to this malaise,' what lessons can be learnt for other countries, and whether British decline is reversible. The course begins with the First World War, a well-documented event, before exploring three further foreign policy failures: appeasement in the 1930s, the Partition of India in 1947, and the Suez Crisis of 1956. It then shifts focus to domestic issues, covering Northern Ireland, comprehensive education, the 'financialisation' of the economy, the poll tax, rail privatisation – which Lewis estimates has cost taxpayers over £120 billion – and Private Finance Initiatives (PFIs). This shift in focus reflects the changing role of a state that, over the past 100 years, has been asked to do more with less. 'For most of its history, the British state dealt only with defence and with imperial concerns,' explains Lewis. 'Its culture and institutions were designed to serve a different purpose. They are, therefore, not terribly efficacious when it comes to solving domestic problems. Britain is in a uniquely unfortunate position because its global role coincided with a domestic economy that could not shoulder its defence burden.' This, Lewis says, did deep, long-term damage, meaning the country 'could not adjust to its drastically reduced role post 1970, with the result that domestic public policy has been poorly planned, poorly executed – and at times poorly financed too.' Prof Sir Ivor Crewe, a distinguished political scientist, is the author of The Blunders of Our Governments, which features on the reading list for Lewis's course – alongside films such as Rogue Trader (the Nick Leeson biopic), and The Navigators, Ken Loach's story of Sheffield rail workers affected by privatisation. 'It's hard to say if Britain is appreciably worse than other countries such as Italy, France or Germany,' he says. 'But it's difficult to imagine students in Britain being very interested in the mistakes of those countries.' The Blunders of Our Governments, co-authored with the late Prof Anthony King and published in 2013, includes well-known British disasters such as the Millennium Dome and membership of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, as well as more niche blunders like New Labour's individual learning accounts and the Child Support Agency spending two years chasing a childless gay man over a daughter who didn't exist. The book argues that the British political system suffers from a dwindling talent pool, limited understanding of project management, ineffective checks and balances and inconsequential penalties for failure. Although decisive governments can make effective policy, it is just as easy for incompetent ministers to make bad decisions – a problem that has worsened since the Thatcher and Blair governments. 'With the best will in the world, I have found it difficult to identify successes since 2010,' says Crewe, who is currently working on a new edition of the book covering fresh blunders such as austerity, High Speed 2 and Covid. 'Even when I ask Conservative commentators, it's pretty thin gruel.' Lewis's course at Sciences Po concludes with the Iraq War, before devoting the final lecture to a handful of public policy successes, including PAYE and Bank of England inflation targeting, followed by a plenary discussion on the past and the future. 'My main takeaway is that, when we make policy, it impacts real people,' says Destombes, who hopes to work in British public policy after graduating. 'There needs to be better research on the communities that are affected.' Gabriel Ward, a third-year student at the LSE who took the course at the same time, cites Nicholas Ridley – the Cabinet minister responsible for introducing Thatcher's poll tax (and the son of a viscount) – dismissing people's financial worries by saying, 'Well, they could always sell a picture.' 'There's a disconnect between policy makers and those who would feel it most,' says Ward. 'I was constantly struck by the gap between ideology and practicality.' Wojcieszek's conclusion is that even a strong political system can lead to bad decision making. 'It reinforced my belief that what really matters is visionary leaders who can propose something unpopular,' he says. Lewis wants his students to 'leave with a knowledge that ideas can be as dangerous as they can be powerful.' But inevitably, he has some interesting ideas himself on how Britain might extricate itself from problems that began last century and have worsened since the millennium. 'I used to think that dealing with Britain's 'issues' would be a 30-year project,' he says. 'I now think it's a 50-year one. In the short run, the solution is attracting the best human capital into politics. In the long run, it's education. The education of our future political elite is a massive burning platform.' Lewis is an admirer of the French lycée system, as well as the strong sense of national pride at Sciences Po, where 'virtually every corridor has a tricolour and its primary duty is to the people of France.' Dismissing claims in a recent book that Sciences Po is a hotbed of woke radicalism – 'This obviously afflicts all institutions' – Lewis applauds 'the genius of de Gaulle and the reset of the 1950s,' which Britain has never had, with the possible limited exception of the Northcote-Trevelyan Civil Service reforms of the 19th century, aimed at moving away from patronage and towards a meritocratic system. 'Our electoral system creates a duopoly in which there's no market for ideas,' he says. 'We've never really had a proper conversation about the role of the state in our lives. 'An absence of vision and standards seems to affect every branch of the British state. It's now at emergency levels. Britain's standard of living is on course to be overtaken by Poland's by 2030. The electorate is not going to accept that decline. Something will have to give.' Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Telegraph
05-06-2025
- Business
- Telegraph
I run a French university course on why Britain is such a mess – I won't run out of material
Your 60-minute exam on 'Public Policy Failure and the British State: A History in Twelve Case Studies' starts…. now. Turn the page and read Clarissa Eden's diary entry for November 4 1956, in the midst of the Suez Crisis, and answer the question: 'Do the personalities involved in a given policy failure matter as much, if not more than, the ideas themselves?' Bon courage! For the past three years, 38-year-old Oxford academic Oliver Lewis has been teaching an oversubscribed course at Sciences Po – the Paris university that produced six of France's last eight presidents – while researching a DPhil (equivalent to a PhD) on UK rail privatisation as a 'case study in British public policy failure, 1985-1997'. The source of Lewis's inspiration, he believes, was his father's scientific expertise in materials failure. After earning degrees in History and Politics at the London School of Economics and King's College London – and a short stint in financial services – Lewis was unable to shake off his interest in a different sort of failure, dating back to his study of the privatisation of British Rail for A-level Economics. Having enrolled at Oxford for his DPhil, he won a year's fellowship to Sciences Po in 2021 as part of an exchange programme. The following year, he was asked to develop a 12-week course. It has now been taken by over 200 French, British and other international students at the university dubbed ' la fabrique des élites ' (the elite factory). 'Regardless of citizenship, there is a universal curiosity in a country that has gone from one of the richest in the world to a mediocre one,' says Lewis. 'There is definitely a general feeling that something has gone deeply wrong for Britain. When I tell people that my DPhil is on railways and public policy failure, they say, 'Well, you won't run out of material'.' There has certainly been no shortage of recent stories highlighting problems with Britain's rail infrastructure. In December, The Telegraph reported on an 18-mile line in Northumberland – a victim of the Beeching cuts in the 1960s – which took three decades to be rebuilt after plans for its reopening were first mooted in the 1990s. When work finally began in 2019, the £160 million project was due to be completed by spring 2023. It eventually opened in December 2024, by which time the estimated cost had nearly doubled to £298 million – and only two of its six stations were ready. Nevertheless, the curiosity displayed by Lewis's enthusiastic students appears untainted by any contempt for the country they have been studying. 'I have always been a fan of the UK,' says Milan Wojcieszek, a 23-year-old Polish student at the University of Amsterdam, currently on a year-long exchange at Sciences Po. 'I admire your newspaper culture and the civilised way in which you debate in Parliament. But for me, Brexit appeared an irrational decision in a country where everything seemed to be going right, and I wanted to understand the motivations behind it better. 'I still like the British attitude, but the course put an end to the picture in my head that people from western Europe have a superior intellect when it comes to statecraft. It raised my national self-esteem: if these guys can f--- up, maybe we're not so stupid.' But what about his French classmates, the Pompidous, Mitterands and Chiracs of the future? Did they enjoy a good laugh about l es Rosbifs while quietly taking notes on mistakes to avoid? 'I did not see a visible enthusiasm for smirking about their arch-rivals shooting themselves in the foot,' says Wojcieszek, who hopes to become an entrepreneur when he graduates. 'I guess what I saw was more sympathy and curiosity.' Wojcieszek's classmate Amélie Destombes, a second-year student at King's College London currently on secondment to Sciences Po, confirms the impression that Britain is a fascinating country to study – if not for the most reassuring reasons. 'I've had conversations with many French students who have brought up Rishi Sunak, Liz Truss or Boris Johnson – so there's a pretty bad reputation,' she says. Brexit is often the hook that attracts European students to Lewis's course – although many might be unaware that he stood for Reform, originally founded as the Brexit Party, in last year's general election for the Montgomeryshire and Glyndŵr seat, where he came second to Labour. Now no longer active in the party, Lewis adopts a rigorously apolitical stance in his seminars. 'Our duty is to truth, not to subjectivity or opinion,' he explains. In any case, he argues, 'it's too early to tell' with Brexit. Instead, he roots his teaching in historical method, blending aspects of anthropology and law, as befits Sciences Po's interdisciplinary approach. This results in a 12-part lecture series on the 'long 20th century' that seeks to understand 'how we got to this malaise,' what lessons can be learnt for other countries, and whether British decline is reversible. The course begins with the First World War, a well-documented event, before exploring three further foreign policy failures: appeasement in the 1930s, the Partition of India in 1947, and the Suez Crisis of 1956. It then shifts focus to domestic issues, covering Northern Ireland, comprehensive education, the 'financialisation' of the economy, the poll tax, rail privatisation – which Lewis estimates has cost taxpayers over £120 billion – and Private Finance Initiatives (PFIs). This shift in focus reflects the changing role of a state that, over the past 100 years, has been asked to do more with less. 'For most of its history, the British state dealt only with defence and with imperial concerns,' explains Lewis. 'Its culture and institutions were designed to serve a different purpose. They are, therefore, not terribly efficacious when it comes to solving domestic problems. Britain is in a uniquely unfortunate position because its global role coincided with a domestic economy that could not shoulder its defence burden.' This, Lewis says, did deep, long-term damage, meaning the country 'could not adjust to its drastically reduced role post 1970, with the result that domestic public policy has been poorly planned, poorly executed – and at times poorly financed too.' Prof Sir Ivor Crewe, a distinguished political scientist, is the author of The Blunders of Our Governments, which features on the reading list for Lewis's course – alongside films such as Rogue Trader (the Nick Leeson biopic), and The Navigators, Ken Loach's story of Sheffield rail workers affected by privatisation. 'It's hard to say if Britain is appreciably worse than other countries such as Italy, France or Germany,' he says. 'But it's difficult to imagine students in Britain being very interested in the mistakes of those countries.' The Blunders of Our Governments, co-authored with the late Prof Anthony King and published in 2013, includes well-known British disasters such as the Millennium Dome and membership of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, as well as more niche blunders like New Labour's individual learning accounts and the Child Support Agency spending two years chasing a childless gay man over a daughter who didn't exist. The book argues that the British political system suffers from a dwindling talent pool, limited understanding of project management, ineffective checks and balances and inconsequential penalties for failure. Although decisive governments can make effective policy, it is just as easy for incompetent ministers to make bad decisions – a problem that has worsened since the Thatcher and Blair governments. 'With the best will in the world, I have found it difficult to identify successes since 2010,' says Crewe, who is currently working on a new edition of the book covering fresh blunders such as austerity, High Speed 2 and Covid. 'Even when I ask Conservative commentators, it's pretty thin gruel.' Lewis's course at Sciences Po concludes with the Iraq War, before devoting the final lecture to a handful of public policy successes, including PAYE and Bank of England inflation targeting, followed by a plenary discussion on the past and the future. 'My main takeaway is that, when we make policy, it impacts real people,' says Destombes, who hopes to work in British public policy after graduating. 'There needs to be better research on the communities that are affected.' Gabriel Ward, a third-year student at the LSE who took the course at the same time, cites Nicholas Ridley – the Cabinet minister responsible for introducing Thatcher's poll tax (and the son of a viscount) – dismissing people's financial worries by saying, 'Well, they could always sell a picture.' 'There's a disconnect between policy makers and those who would feel it most,' says Ward. 'I was constantly struck by the gap between ideology and practicality.' Wojcieszek's conclusion is that even a strong political system can lead to bad decision making. 'It reinforced my belief that what really matters is visionary leaders who can propose something unpopular,' he says. Lewis wants his students to 'leave with a knowledge that ideas can be as dangerous as they can be powerful.' But inevitably, he has some interesting ideas himself on how Britain might extricate itself from problems that began last century and have worsened since the millennium. 'I used to think that dealing with Britain's 'issues' would be a 30-year project,' he says. 'I now think it's a 50-year one. In the short run, the solution is attracting the best human capital into politics. In the long run, it's education. The education of our future political elite is a massive burning platform.' Lewis is an admirer of the French lycée system, as well as the strong sense of national pride at Sciences Po, where 'virtually every corridor has a tricolour and its primary duty is to the people of France.' Dismissing claims in a recent book that Sciences Po is a hotbed of woke radicalism – 'This obviously afflicts all institutions' – Lewis applauds 'the genius of de Gaulle and the reset of the 1950s,' which Britain has never had, with the possible limited exception of the Northcote-Trevelyan Civil Service reforms of the 19th century, aimed at moving away from patronage and towards a meritocratic system. 'Our electoral system creates a duopoly in which there's no market for ideas,' he says. 'We've never really had a proper conversation about the role of the state in our lives. 'An absence of vision and standards seems to affect every branch of the British state. It's now at emergency levels. Britain's standard of living is on course to be overtaken by Poland's by 2030. The electorate is not going to accept that decline. Something will have to give.'
