Comfortable Errors
The myths that disable British government
Britain's governing class does not, in the main, fail through ignorance of the problems before it. It fails because it reasons about them with beliefs formed in particular post-war episodes and kept long after the conditions that justified them had changed, and because too few of those who decide command the economic, fiscal and institutional principles by which such beliefs might be tested.
What we mean by myth
Following the philosopher Mary Midgley, we treat myths not as lies but as imaginative patterns that suggest particular ways of interpreting the world. Their power lies in selection: they decide what a governing class treats as important, and so what it notices and what it ignores.
That is why these myths have survived the evidence against them. Each began as a reasonable reading of a real episode, from the settlement of 1945 and the IMF crisis of 1976 to the gilt-market crisis of 2022. The error lies in failing to revise them as institutions, preferences and circumstances changed.
One failure runs through them all
Across every domain, government fails to distinguish between classes of economic goods: private goods, public goods, club goods, common-pool resources and merit goods. It therefore takes on what markets would provide better, and under-provides the goods that only collective action can secure, nature conspicuously among them.
Hayek's argument about dispersed knowledge cuts both ways. It counts against a public that expects collective provision of ever more goods, and equally against a central state that treats its own knowledge as sufficient for everything it touches.
The fifteen myths
Ministers and parties, Whitehall and the Treasury, and the wider political class hold different myths for different reasons. A remedy aimed at one group will not reach the others.
Failures of understanding
- That economics in government is adequately represented by forecasting
- That Whitehall's knowledge is comprehensive and needs no external test
- That efficiency and resilience are the same thing
The economy
- That deficits are the normal condition, deplored in speech and tolerated in practice
- That weak regional productivity calls for regional strategy, rather than better management, stronger competition and broader education
- That policy offers only a choice between taxes and services
- That rising house prices are national prosperity
- That technology will rescue productivity without institutional reform
The state
- That an uncodified constitution corrects itself without deliberate diagnosis
- That the gifted generalist is equal to any office, and churn is harmless
- That more process makes for better decisions
Britain abroad
- That Britain "punches above its weight" without paying for the capabilities that once made it true, and that the special relationship guarantees its security
The social settlement
- That funding a merit good collectively requires the state to provide it
- That the settlement as implemented is the settlement Beveridge designed
- That nature is an amenity or a cost on development, rather than a commons on which every other system depends
What correction requires
Not a programme, but the direct corollary of each myth.
Literacy in first principles among ministers and senior officials, as Fulton urged in 1968.
Challenge built into policy-making, engaging dispersed knowledge before decisions are taken.
The class of good decides the instrument, and funding is treated separately from provision.
A fiscal framework that distinguishes investment and is judged by the actual path of debt, not forecasts of its fall.
Resilience as a design criterion, funded as a public good.
Reform that confronts incumbents in land, planning, property taxation and competition.
Diagnosis before constitutional change, rather than separate measures whose interactions are discovered in practice.
The remedy is not a governing class without myths, but one that examines the patterns by which it lives, and revises them when they fail.
Read the full paper
Comfortable Errors: The Myths That Disable British Government. Futuresphere position paper, November 2026. Fully referenced, with sources for every figure on this page.