A Great English Triumph

Schools in England are now as good as anywhere else in the western world. They may, indeed, be better than they have ever been.

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Everyone agrees that everything is rubbish. Britain at the tale end of 2023 is an unhappy place. The government is knackered and so are public services. Nothing works. The past decade has not been a uniformly happy one. Indeed, there is an argument to be made that the country has not wholly recovered from the financial crash of 2008. Add Brexit - a self-inflicted slow puncture - and the covid pandemic to the picture and you get a situation in which even normally restrained commentators are beginning to talk about the possibility of a “doom loop” in public finances in which higher debt interest payments necessitate higher taxes which in turn choke off the economic growth needed to reduce debt payments to a more manageable, sustai…