One of the most striking aspects of the revelations in ‘Get In’, the brilliant book by Times journalists Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire on Keir Starmer’s rise to power, is how uninterested the Prime Minister is in the wider world, in policy, in history – in everything you need to be an effective leader.
One former aide summed him up as “the least intellectually curious person I have ever met”, his core problem being “He doesn’t brainstorm. He has no fixed views on anything. There’s no clarity because there’s no belief. There’s no belief because there’s no understanding. There’s no understanding because there’s no curiosity.”
Unfortunately, this lack of curiosity extends to the civil service too. As Dominic Cummings, the former chief advisor to Boris Johnson, has pointed out numerous times, “There is a general problem in Whitehall of parochialism. People don’t want to look at what is happening abroad… That has been around for many, many years.”
When you get both Number 10 and the civil service stuck in navel-gazing mode, without a constant radar sweep for new ideas and potential policy changes from across the globe, it’s often left to the Secretaries of State to seek them out and there have been precious few in the current government ready to look beyond our own island.
Only the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, has seemed willing to not only listen and learn, but to implement best practice. In 2025, she dispatched Home Office officials to Denmark to find out how Mette Frederiksen’s centre-left government had successfully conducted an overhaul of Denmark’s immigration system and she has already made a series of a policy changes based on the Danish model.
Wes Streeting showed early promise in opposition by visiting Singapore and Australia to look at their hybrid public-private healthcare systems, later claiming that “there is plenty the NHS can and should learn from around the world.” But in government he has imported little of their wisdom, seemingly swallowed up by the incurious Department for Health blob, bringing in no structural funding reform, no radical system redesign, and no productivity revolution.
With the number of countries who started out with the same failed model of healthcare as the UK and who have successfully transitioned to one that makes better use of choice and competition for the benefit of patients, it’s criminal that our government still hasn’t absorbed the lessons of these templates.
Singapore inherited a classic NHS-style system from us in 1965. A decade later and it was already fiscally unsustainable, becoming steadily buried under rising costs, and so a transition to one based on individual responsibility, personal savings and co-payments, with much greater competition began. It’s now arguably the best healthcare system in the world, with world-leading outcomes for life expectancy, infant mortality and disability-adjusted life years.
If Streeting needed a guide for how to mobilise other health providers to reduce our ludicrous 7.3 million person waiting list, he could also look at Oman. The Gulf state gained independence from Britain in 1951 and promptly went for a centrally planned, state-led model which eventually became swamped by exploding demand from patients.
Starting in the 1990s, major reforms created the conditions for a massive expansion of an initially small and tightly regulated private healthcare sector to take the pressure off. Private hospitals flourished, along with thousands of private clinics and pharmacies. Today 4.3 million people are making private outpatient visits there each year and Oman has cut its waiting times for key diagnostic procedures down from 16 months to less than four weeks.
And it’s not just in healthcare. So many of Britain’s knotty problems, those that drive our citizens insane, could be solved by a government that is simply more inquisitive.
For instance, Japan’s railway reforms offer a two-for-one deal that could fix both our dysfunctional and expensive rail networks and our persistent housing shortages. We could copy Japan by treating railways as city-building businesses, not just transport providers. When Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone broke up Japanese National Railways in 1987, he didn’t just privatise a failing network—he created integrated regional companies that could run trains, develop land, and profit from the communities they built.
Private railways like Tokyu Corporation and Hankyu Corporation have already shown what’s possible – they’ve built the lines, built housing along them, added shops and offices around stations, and captured the rising land value. Japan’s railways are financially viable, services are frequent and reliable, fares are reasonable (unlike the UK’s which are some of the highest in the developed world) and Japanese cities expand in a coordinated, transit-oriented way.
If the UK combined Japanese style rail-led urban expansion together with their highly dynamic planning system, which is much faster and allows for building at scale without NIMBYism, we could solve our housing crisis within a decade.
Wherever you look, the answers to Britain’s problems are readily available. Spending over £60 billion on Britain’s armed forces and yet struggling to deploy a single ship to the Gulf? Check out Israel’s indigenous defence manufacturing and their procurement culture that prizes speed over process, allowing them to spend 40 percent less than the UK on defence while being significantly more capable.
Stuck with Britain’s ballooning state pension costs? Chile’s privatisation of its state pension in 1980 can show you us a way out. Too many people on benefits and not working? Consider Switzerland’s reforms which tied welfare to work incentives and created a low dependency culture. Need tax reform to boost growth? Look at Estonia’s zero percent corporate tax rate on reinvested profits, encouraging investment and expansion while boosting productivity and capital formation.
Internationally, the solutions for Britain are being broadcast loud and clear. We just need to switch on our radars to pick up the signals.
Stronger Citizens is the Centre for Small State Conservatives in-house magazine where we feature thought-provoking ideas from high-quality thinkers who share our approach.
Damian Phillips is a Fellow of The Cobden Centre and a regular contributor to The Spectator.
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