WillChambers

This past week, on a test bed in Britain, a Rolls-Royce jet engine ran at full take-off power on pure hydrogen, putting out water vapour instead of carbon. Nobody on Earth had managed it before. It is the sort of thing that ought to stop the country in its tracks, and it will be forgotten by the weekend. Leave aside the recent paroxysms of renewed net-zero insanity from Derelict Ed and the pervasive atmosphere of offended envy that greets much homegrown achievement nowadays in Britain. This engineering is a wonder, and it's British to the bone. We gave the world the jet engine in the first place - Frank Whittle, a Coventry man and an RAF officer, patented it in 1930 while the Air Ministry assured him it was a curiosity. Rolls-Royce is today one of perhaps three firms anywhere that can build a large aero engine at the outer edge of the possible, and it has just done what most of the industry swore was twenty years away. As usual, you marvel at how little the people who govern us had to do with it. The engineers in Derby are world-class; the stewardship above them is third-rate. They pulled off a global first while paying the most expensive industrial electricity in the developed world to keep the power on over the bench - a weight no German, American or Gulf rival has to carry. We produce frontier brilliance on the shop floor and fritter it away at the despatch box, and we have done for two generations. That is the maddening shape of modern Britain: brilliance from below, sub- (or, indeed, ultra-) mediocrity from above. The people here who actually make things are still among the best in the world; the state that is meant to back them treats a firm like Rolls-Royce as a photocall today and a takeover target tomorrow, and prices its energy as though it would prefer the next plant were built in Texas. Progress starts from the other end. Give these people what every rival government gives its champions and we beg ours to do without: the cheap, abundant power their competitors already enjoy, a supply chain built around them, and a state that guards a national asset rather than auctioning it. The hard part of a British revival - the talent, the nerve, the engineering - is already done, and was done again this week, by people who deserve a far better country than the one currently sitting above them. We just taught an engine to breathe fire and exhale water. The least we owe the men and women who managed it is a government and a state as brilliant as they are.

Twitter is alive with diagnoses of the unfortunate present state of the British national spirit. Many of them perceptive and melancholic, and many of them offered by non-Brits. It's heartening to see how much the country's current depressive state, and the notion of our coming revival, means to so many of our cousins around the world. But beneath concerns of mere policy, debates over reindustrialisation strategy or philosophies of criminal justice, I believe there's something more fundamental we have to fix in the British spirit before it can support itself on its own wings again. There's an exchange of views that stands out in my mind when I think of the way the last decade or so is gone. You will have seen it play out a thousand times. In that exchange, you have two people. On one side, someone who is not a fan of Britain, though they are British. Sometimes these people conform to what you might consider the description of a 'leftist', though it's much more exact to call them a member of the Metropolitan class. On the other side, you have someone who considers themselves a patriot. I deliberately do not describe the latter as of a rightward leaning, because in my experience patriots can come reasonably from either side of the aisle, though perhaps the right-leaning ones are more typically voluble these days. In essaying Britain's current condition, the Met will arrive at a point in their argument where they'll claim that Britain, and its culture, doesn't really exist at all. That Britain has no culture, no history worth defending, nothing about it worth esteeming, owning, remembering, and taking pride in. Then the patriotic voice answers, hotly and at volume, that they disagree. What I find remarkable is that, often, both sides realise they cannot say much, beyond Shakespeare and the war, as to what British culture is really constituted by. Of course, the patriots know more, because they're interested to know more, but the exchange is never settled. It resolves to silence and a stalemate. This silence is the deepest thing wrong with Britain in 2026. Beneath the policy failures and the political incompetence and the slow leak of every public institution sits a quieter, more corrosive failure: we have forgotten who we are. There is an inability among the British people - who are among the most naturally and winningly modest in the world - to articulate what their own civilisation has been, and is, and could yet be. We have lost our cultural sense of self. We have mislaid the inventory. So I plan to start a list. A list essaying everything reasonably within the bounds of the British cultural heritage. And the start goes like this. The novel as a literary form. Science fiction. Children's literature as a serious form: Carroll, Stevenson, Potter, Milne, Tolkien, Lewis, Dahl. The dictionary as a cultural project. The King James Bible, which gave the English-speaking world the prose architecture it has used ever since. The discovery of how the heavens move, the composition of light, and the laws of motion (Newton). The structure of DNA (Crick, Franklin, Wilkins, working with Watson at King's College and Cambridge). The discovery of penicillin (Fleming, Florey, Chain). The vaccination of mankind against smallpox (Jenner). The invention of antiseptic surgery (Lister). The discovery that cholera came from water (Snow, the Broad Street pump). The marine chronometer that solved the longitude problem (Harrison). The first hospital nursing school (Nightingale). Modern epidemiology. Modern statistics. The randomised controlled trial. The steam engine. The locomotive. The railway. The factory system. The Industrial Revolution, the great miracle of mankind, originated here, not in some abstract elsewhere, but in Coalbrookdale and Cromford and Manchester and the Black Country. The jet engine. The hovercraft. The Spitfire. The Harrier. Radar. The cavity magnetron, without which radar at scale is impossible. The Bombe and Colossus, the world's first programmable electronic computers. The stored-program computer in hardware (Manchester Baby, 1948). The ARM chip, the architecture inside almost every smartphone on Earth. The World Wide Web itself, given freely to mankind by Tim Berners-Lee, a British civil servant's son working at CERN. Football, association and rugby. Cricket, codified at Lord's. Tennis. Boxing. Golf. Snooker. Polo, codified by the British in India. The Olympic revival, partly inspired by the Wenlock Olympian Games of Shropshire. The marathon distance of 26 miles 385 yards, set at the 1908 London Olympics and exported to the world. Magna Carta. Habeas corpus. Trial by jury. The Mother of All Parliaments. The Loyal Opposition as a constitutional concept. The abolition of the slave trade, paid for in blood and glory by the West Africa Squadron of the Royal Navy through the nineteenth century. The Statute of Anne, 1710, the first copyright law in the world. The Statute of Monopolies, 1624, the foundation of the modern patent system. The first national topographic map (Ordnance Survey). Greenwich Mean Time. The Prime Meridian. The first daily newspaper. The first scientific journal. The Royal Society itself. The English landscape garden, exported across Europe. The Georgian terrace. The garden city. The joint stock company. Lloyd's of London. The Bank of England, the model for every central bank that has followed. The Beatles. The Rolling Stones. Pink Floyd. Bowie. Queen. Iron Maiden. The Clash. Drum and bass. Jungle. The BBC, exported as a model of public broadcasting to the world. The Beck Tube Map, copied by every transit system on the planet. The red phone box. The Routemaster. The black cab. Yes, this is the start of my list. And already the list is a history of preposterous genius. The work of a single modest, damp, exquisite island. There is no reason Britain should have done a fraction of what it has, let alone all of it. The output, pound for pound, is unrivalled in human history. Athens, Rome, and Florence are our only credible competitors. And whatever the ingredients of this concentration of genius were, they are not magical. They are in us. They were and remain a culture, an inheritance, a magna-discipline of curiosity and craft, an instinct for liberty (and, yes, moral courage) bound to an instinct for institution-building, a people who did the work. By the time this decade is through, and by one means or another, I plan to see to it that the country that produced the world as we know it today - that produced the water in which all these glorious varieties of fish delightedly swim, though they know it not - will know who and what it is again. And it will be a fine thing when we get there.