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Wall Street Journal
4 days ago
- Business
- Wall Street Journal
Regime Change in London? Don't Count on It
As I read Dominic Green's description of the U.K.'s future ('Britain Is on the Verge of Regime Change,' op-ed, Aug. 6), an old joke came to mind: The pessimist is one who reckons things couldn't possibly get worse, and the optimist is the one who chirpily insists that of course they can. To my eye, Mr. Green's diagnosis of Britain's maladies is simply too upbeat. Would that regime change were on its way. It isn't. Rome wasn't burned in a day, and Britain won't be either. The more plausible—and concerning—historical heuristic for our national unwinding is Beirut 1975, not Bucharest 1989. It is hard to see how Britain could undergo the relatively rapid, bloodless and successful transition that occurred when Romanians toppled Nicolae Ceaușescu. Far more likely is a future involving the slow but containable spread of localized bursts of low-level civil unrest of the kind we have witnessed across England since 2024. The British will witness even more varieties of state dysfunction, but the state will avert its disintegration by adeptly wielding its monopoly on violence and its increasingly vast powers of surveillance. Similarly, while economic stagnation will persist and deepen, the bond markets and the International Monetary Fund will successfully stave off total collapse.
Wall Street Journal
13-05-2025
- Politics
- Wall Street Journal
George Orwell's Great Legacy
Dominic Green's fine op-ed 'Orwell's Tweets and Podcast Would Be Great' (op-ed, May 8) is a more-faceted portrait than most of the ubiquitous sketches elsewhere. He is quite right in seeing George Orwell's closeness to Evelyn Waugh. Yet it's more likely that the 'two plus two makes five' business in '1984' was cribbed not from Dostoevsky but from a Soviet propaganda poster, whose point was that worker enthusiasm for the five-year plan added an extra digit. Orwell's seeing this and all denial of objective reality as a prerequisite to totalitarianism is his great legacy and explains his growth in popularity today. David Lebedoff
