China has built roughly 45,000 kilometres of high-speed rail in about the time it has taken Britain to build 250 kilometres of HS2, at a cost approaching £50 billion.
It wasn’t always this way.
Britain was one of the most competent builders in the world in Victorian times. In 1863 it built the world’s first underground railway.
It built a national rail network from nothing, a sewer system that still serves London today, and the largest navy the world had ever seen. That competence didn’t stop with the Victorians - it showed up again in the mobilisation of the Second World War, and again in the years right after it, when a shattered economy still managed to build millions of homes and stand up the NHS in a matter of years.
Then something changed under Thatcher.
The twentieth century had just shown the world the devastating effect of what an over-mighty state could do.
And one of the clearest ways to define who we are is by who are not, and that was the totalitarian and communist regimes.
So Britain made a choice: shrink the state, trust the market, keep power dispersed and checked.
A smaller state and a free market were the safeguard against that danger.
It was a reasonable response.
But we didn’t stop at a smaller state - we built a state so afraid of its own competence that it can no longer function.
Every layer of sign-off, every veto point, every review-of-the-review exists because someone, somewhere, was afraid of what a state that could actually act might do.
China didn’t make that choice.
Whatever else you think of the model, it succeeded because it could build. That’s the real difference - not talent, not resources, but which fear each country chose to organise itself around.
That’s the idea behind the Platform State: government’s core job is to build and manage the infrastructure layer competently enough that business, family life, and innovation can thrive on top of it. Every economy has two layers - the infrastructure layer (roads, housing, energy, universities, the rules themselves) and the dynamic market layer built on top of it. Britain spent the last forty years opening up the dynamic layer. It never rebuilt the infrastructure layer underneath.
Let’s get building again, so we can thrive.