Ferguson’s Law and the UK’s Flaw

England is good at some things, bad at others. In the last century the English have been good, perhaps exemplary, in the writing of history. And it is interesting that the only grand old academics who are standing up and saying anything sensible about our current situation are the three or four illiberal historians left standing: Tombs, Abulafia, Starkey and Ferguson.

Niall Ferguson is especially interesting. Tombs and Abulafia are sound and have written good histories. Starkey is remarkable for having a short and blistering vision of the entirety of English history: one that can be conveyed to an audience in a couple of lectures. But even he is not an original thinker. Whereas Niall Ferguson is that strange thing: an original thinker, or, let’s say, someone who knows what original thought is and sets about doing some original thought.

It is in this spirit that he has conjured up Ferguson’s Law. Ferguson’s Law, in its published form, starts with a long quotation from Adam Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society from 1767. However, the law is not Adam’s, but Niall’s. It has its roots in the Scottish Enlightenment of the 18^th Century, but it is the work of the Scottish Enlightenment of the 20^th Century. It says, though I state it slightly more uncompromisingly than Ferguson himself does:

Any power that spends more on debt service than on defence ceases to be a great power

Read Ferguson’s Hoover Institution History Working Paper, published on February 21^st 2025, if you want to consider the historical support for Ferguson’s Law. It has chapter and verse on Spain, France, Britain, the Ottomans, the USA, etc. It is good. It explains why, say, the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy was so weak before 1914. For those of us who are English, it explains why we should resent Duncan Sandys, David Cameron and George Osborne. The best quotation is from Duff Cooper, who said, “The first duty of Government is to ensure adequate defences of the country.”

The basic argument, for those who do not want to read it, is as follows:

• States always exerted power, and indeed came to exist, through war
• States no longer do so. They now exist through something else as well, namely welfare
• War and welfare: the two obvious very expensive things, and very existential things, for a state
• (Law-and-order, by contrast, of the usual sort, is relatively inexpensive)
• The history of states and war changed, decisively, before the 18th Century, when states began to harness the great engine and miracle of public debt – credit, borrowing, etc. – to pay for war.
• E.g. the British Empire; e.g. every modern state (hence the decline and fall of the British Empire. No one had a monopoly of the great engine and miracle of debt)
• And the history of states changed again when, flush with cash generated from debt, welfare was added to war
• Problem: welfare spending, plus old war spending, together have increased the debt in such a way that unless we do something about 1. debt, 2. welfare, we will be unfitted for war

That is it. 

The law is not meant to be an iron law. No such law is iron. It makes some silent assumptions, such as that states must necessarily display power and in such a way that the display is believed. But it is a thinkable theory, a hypothesis which, even if arguable, can serve, at the very least, as a grim warning.

Ferguson does not finish the argument. For I think that his law, and our breaking of it, proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that COVID-19 was the most incompetent instrument of government we have ever seen. There has not been such disastrous government in England since Edward II. And we know what happened to him.

Evidence? From around the year 2010, debt service was in the 50s and 60s of billions, but it suddenly rose in 2021 and especially 2022. It doubled. The defence budget was also in the 50s and 60s of billions after 2010. It has not doubled. Therefore COVID-19 broke Ferguson’s Law. In the year 2024–25 the UK spent around £60 billion on defence, and around £124 billion on debt service.

Next year is similar. The OBR says: “In 2025-26 we expect debt interest spending to total £111.2 billion. That would represent 8.3% of total public spending and is equivalent to over 3.7% of national income.” Parliament says defence spending will be £62.2 billion in 2025–26. In the United Kingdom, Ferguson’s Law is not just broken but broken in half.

Can any of our opponents still maintain that the response to the pandemic was wise?

Let me expand on this a bit. 

We have a warfare state. Trump wants us to have more of one. We also have a welfare state. Trump wants us to have less of one. But there is a problem. COVID-19 was nothing like an actual war. COVID-19 was not a world war. It was – if I can invent a phrase – a “world welfare”. And it sent spending, and hence borrowing, and hence debt service payments into the troposphere, like so many carbon emissions, overheating our economic planet and leading everyone into crisis.

Ferguson’s law is very interesting because it relates two things not usually related. The first is expenditure on defence. It relates this to expenditure on debt, where the debt is, let’s face it, at least in part a consequence of defence. It always was a consequence of war. So it makes sense that the two should be harmonised: in 1700, in 1800 and in 1900. But since 1945 we have added welfare to war. As well as a war state, we have a welfare state: so there are now two major existential drags on expenditure, two drags which, in an emergency, necessitate exceptional borrowing. And if we follow Ferguson’s argument along, then what has happened is that the welfare state, during COVID-19, came of age and insisted on emergency support. The welfare state went to war during COVID-19. And can we not have it printed in large letters in Piccadilly Circus and on Boris Johnson’s neck: A WELFARE STATE SHOULD NEVER GO TO WAR FOR WELFARE.

War is an emergency, indeed. War is exceptional. But welfare, at most, should be a hardy perennial: something planned, something normal. There is no excuse to ever impose war logic on welfare. As soon as we do that, we bring our system into ruin.

It is interesting to think about this contrast between war and welfare. War is external. It involves export. An export of violence. It takes the possibility of internal violence and exports it. On the other hand, welfare is internal. It involves a different way of dealing with violence. It is an attempt to diminish internal violence by muting it, by caring for everyone, by suspending everyone in protocols of peaceability.

But it comes at a cost. First, the welfare state, since it is procedurally antithetical to the war state, is hostile to it. Second, since it tries to expunge, rather than export, violence, it tends to paper over the cracks of civil disorder with incentives. Third, it is very costly and, in a way, as Ferguson’s Law shows, is cumulative in its cost.

For some, this is false thought. They imagine that we can forswear war and live in a world of peace. But we live, all of us, in a world of states. And states at least half exist by the old imperial logic by which they export war and export violence. And this costs great amounts of money. There is great support for the welfare state, as opposed to the warfare state, not only amongst many of the improverished but also many of the higher educated because it is peaceful, polite and progressive – on the surface. But it is also irresponsible, since it is about right, not duty; about credit, not debt; and about receiving benefits rather than doing anything. It assumes that someone else, someone higher, someone responsible, will pay. This assumption is the assumption of a child, and it is right that children have that assumption. But we remain children, and, let’s face it, we have remained children, by not outgrowing this assumption. 

This is a sad, even tragic, fact. We have to export war. If we don’t, war will come to us. And we only will be able to export war if we can pay more for war than others, and, as Ferguson suggests, we will only be able to pay for war more than others if we begin to reverse the drag on the economy that goes under the name of welfare, and, in addition, also do something about the vast irresponsible system of ideological commitments to beliefs – DEI, Net Zero, deindustrialisation – that have accompanied welfare.

If Ferguson is right, then believing that war is a dead end and that welfare ideologies are superior is going to become the cause of the next great decline of at least our part of the world.

I, for one, do not see that continued expansive and expensive welfare, and welfare ideology, plus ‘nudge’ and ‘attribution science’, plus sedation through drugs and toleration of objectionable minority minds, plus, haha, AI, is anything like a plan. So the question is: where is a plan to be found? Or, at least, an adequate response?

James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.