The UK, we are told, is becoming ungovernable. The “Broken Britain” narrative highlights rampant crime, boatloads of immigrants crossing the Channel, a buckling National Health Service, and a military which on a good day would struggle to seize an English market town. There is some truth in all this, but the notion that we have slipped back to the 1970s does not stack up.
I know because I was there. Rubbish piled high in the streets. Trade unions bossing the country. Inflation running at 20 per cent. Cars queuing at petrol stations. British soldiers driving ambulances and fire engines. In short, a chaos which lends some perspective to our present discontents and the Labour plotters seeking to topple Sir Keir Starmer as Prime Minister.
Today, there’s plenty of food (and booze) on the supermarket shelves. True, petty crime and phone theft remain a blight on urban life, especially in London; but violent crime in England and Wales has been in significant decline . Even NHS waiting lists are slightly down, while the number of illegal migrants on small boats – while still unacceptable – has fallen by one third compared to the same period last year.
So why the pervasive sense of drift? The nagging feeling that Britain isn’t working; the idea that we are heading toward a 1979 moment when a long-deferred reform of the state falls due. The answer is that British politics – not Britain – is broken.
The two-party system which governed the country for almost a century has fractured. The local election results were a repudiation of Labour, but they confirmed that Nigel Farage’s Reform UK and Zack Polanski’s Greens have joined the Conservatives and Lib Dems as serious opposition. Moreover, nationalist parties now rule the roost in all corners of the United Kingdom, from Scotland to Northern Ireland and Wales.
Politics in a broader sense has failed. Nothing is ever settled, whether an extra runway for Heathrow airport or a solution to long-term care for the aged. The answer to any problem, past or present, is a commission or a multi-million-pound public inquiry lasting years. “Everything is about process rather than outcome,” a top businessman complained to me the other day.
The quality of people in public life has slumped, too. Deference ended somewhere near the end of the last century. But the coarsening of political discourse hasn’t exactly dulled political ambition. There’s no shortage of pretenders to the Labour leadership (Wes Streeting, Angela Rayner, Andy Burnham and counting). Indeed, Nigel Farage, perhaps buoyed by his multi-million-pound crypto donations, now thinks he’s up to being prime minister.
Starmer himself has overcome many odds, but he fails the principal tests of leadership. He is a poor communicator. He cannot pick the right team. And he has no coherent plan for government or economic growth. This week’s King’s Speech outlining Labour’s legislative programme proved his unerring instinct for majoring on the minor.
Yet Starmer and his allies are right to warn about the dangers of changing horses in mid-stream, never mind setting the precedent of kicking out a prime minister with a 150-plus parliamentary majority who has served barely two years in office. The UK’s strategic position is weak. Wars in the Middle East and Ukraine threaten our economic and political security. Trump’s America is no longer a trustworthy ally. The UK is tied to Europe, but no longer a member of the EU. As MI6 chief Blaise Metreweli noted , we are operating in a space between peace and war.
Britain’s financial position is equally precarious. At 100 per cent of GDP, government debt is almost three times what it was at the beginning of the century. Politicians can blame external shocks such as the global financial crash in 2008 and the Covid pandemic, but the financial markets aren’t interested.
Last week, borrowing costs on 30-year bonds reached close to six per cent, the highest level since 1998. Gilt yields on 10-year bonds rose above five per cent. By comparison, Italian yields are around 3.75 per cent and Greece’s are just above four per cent. Almost unnoticed, the UK has slipped into Europe’s second division.
Labour’s left-wingers like Angela Rayner are flirting with nationalisation, hikes in the minimum wage and taxes on the rich. This is Bennite-lite economic policy. The first would be a giant waste of money. The second would kill jobs in small businesses already hammered by Rachel Reeves’s national insurance increases. The third would drive away the top one per cent of people who already pay more than a quarter of total income tax in the UK. Those who argue that bond markets will have to “fall into line” are deluded.
Almost all advanced western democracies are struggling with populist insurgencies fuelled by immigration and weak economic growth. France could see the far-right National Rally win the presidency next year in the shape of Jordan Bardella, still only 30 years old.
In Germany, Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s centre-right CDU leads an unstable coalition under siege from the far-right AfD which has spread well beyond its heartland in former communist East Germany. Ironically, those countries that suffered the most in the eurozone crisis 15 years ago – Portugal, Italy, Spain and Greece – appear the most stable today.
Maybe Dominic Cummings was right. Maybe a hard rain does have to fall before Britain turns around. But before we put up our umbrellas and retreat behind the barricades, it is surely time to have an honest debate about what the country wants, what it needs and what it is prepared to pay for.
A serious government would end the triple lock on pensions, whereby the basic state pension increases each year by the highest of either 2.5 per cent, inflation or average earnings growth. This 2010 election gimmick has become prohibitively expensive in the new inflationary age; it discriminates against the younger generation and crimps spending on other urgent priorities, notably national defence.
The second step would be comprehensive welfare reform. The number of people claiming welfare benefits climbed to 6.5 million in 2025, a 79 per cent increase since 2018. The legacy of the Covid pandemic lingers on; worklessness has become socially acceptable, particularly among the younger generation.
Third, national defence. Starmer has pledged to hit Nato’s three per cent target but there is no credible path – and the much-vaunted Strategic Review is still gathering dust in Whitehall. Lord Robertson, its co-author, has warned of a “corrosive complacency” on national security. He is right.
Fourth, as the 10th anniversary of Brexit approaches, the Government needs to set a course for a closer economic and political relationship with Europe. At the very least, we should consider rejoining the single market with its friction-free trade. Full EU membership may be a step too far; but with Ukraine banging on the door, we may see the EU evolving into a looser grouping of concentric circles where the UK could find its place.
Finally, the UK needs to rekindle its spirit of enterprise. Britain has world-leading technology in capital-intensive, science-heavy sectors such as fusion, quantum computing and energy resilience. It also has specialist clusters which defy the London-centric stereotype. Examples include advanced materials (Manchester); robotics (Sheffield), quantum computing (Bristol, Swansea); photonics (Southampton) as well as defence and security (King’s College, London).
So the UK situation is far from hopeless, but it is serious. And it demands a serious response.
Labour’s pretenders, young and old, be warned.
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