The cover of the Economist’s 22 October issue coined the neologism “Britaly”. It showed Liz Truss as Britannia with a shield made of pizza and twirls of spaghetti impaled on her trident. Much as I cherish my former parish, I found the comparison unfair on Italy. The country may, like Britain today, be marked by political instability, subordination to the bond markets and economic stagnation, but to treat it as a mere cautionary tale is to underestimate it.
One of the motivations for the market meltdown under Truss was doubt about whether Britain could finance its huge trade deficit (it imports much more than it exports). Italy, by contrast, has a trade surplus and uses the euro, a more formidable reserve currency than sterling. Northern Italy leaves behind most of the UK economically: provincial Britain should be so lucky to have cities as productive as Milan, Turin or Bologna. And as Bill Emmott, a former editor of the Economist and fellow Italophile, put it to me recently: “The trope about Italian ‘political instability’ needs correcting too. Most of the 69 postwar governments were what in our system would be called ‘reshuffles’.”
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