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This is a global player original podcast. What do you think's wrong with Britain? What do you think's wrong with the United States?

Now, I know your initial reaction is, how long have you got? But there is

something which is common, especially in the English-speaking world overall, actually. We take

so long to build anything. Look around you, and the chances are you will see in the lived

environment of wherever you live, of wherever you are right now,

more of the 19th century than the 21st. In the UK, we take an average of 12.5 years

to build any significant piece of infrastructure, with 10 years usually just in the planning

process. Think of it. Crossrail, 30 years

end to end. Hinkley Point Power Station, 17 years and counting. Don't even mention HS2. Housing hasn't

been built in enough volume for decades. Environmental impact assessments now run to 30,000 pages, taking seven years to write and approve.

We spent 100 million quid on a bat tunnel. None of this happened by accident. And what if that

lack of ability to build anything explains so much not just of our economic problems, but of our

political ones too. What if our society has become, in effect, government of the lawyers, by the

lawyers, for the lawyers? What if our problem is that we are now a loyally society rather than a building one, where legal means always determine

the ends, the legal tail wagging the economic and political dog. And what does it mean when our

principal economic competitor, China, is none of those things? That's the question, the dissent into the loyally

society that Dan Wong, an American academic, has posed in his extraordinary new book,

Breakneck, China's quest to engineer the future. It's receiving rave reviews as a new way

of understanding the malaise which has gripped the West. So we asked him into the newsagent studio to explain what we don't understand about what

is happening right now in China, why Europe threatens to turn into a mausoleum continent and

whether China and the US are destined for a titanic confrontation.

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