It has become fashionable among experts to compare Britain’s economy, once a global superpower, to that of an “emerging market”. The former US treasury secretary Larry Summers recently argued that the UK is “behaving a bit like an emerging market”. The Dutch bank ING stated the trading volatility of the pound mirrored what “you would expect during an emerging market currency crisis” . The American billionaire investor Ray Dalio has described the administration of the new prime minister, Liz Truss, as operating “like the government of an emerging country”.
For those who live in Britain, it can be shocking to hear such labels applied to a “developed” country like our own. It runs counter to the history we were taught and the belief we were raised with: that as Britain was the birthplace of industrial capitalism, parliamentary democracy and the rule of law, it sits at the forefront of a linear path of development. Over the last two centuries, political thinkers from Karl Marx to Adam Smith shared the view that political and economic shifts first occurred in Britain and that the rest of the world would follow.
