Entering the kitchen one morning this week, overheated from yet another night of London’s sweltering summer, I fumbled for the coffee machine as the Today programme blared out of the radio. The news was alarming: the Girl Guides were changing their uniform. “Busy day for you, then,” my wife noted with wry amusement as she passed me on the way to the kettle.
Had we really reached the dreaded silly season, I wondered? Was the news really going to be so quiet? It is true that Westminster – still slightly dazed from the Andy Burnham policy blitz – has begun to quieten down ahead of the autumn, when we will discover the true extent of the Prime Minister’s radicalism (or otherwise).
Yet, looking up from the day-to-day of British politics, the world is far from becalmed: wildfires are sweeping across France, the war in Ukraine continues to intensify, the Middle East is burning and Saudi Arabia may or may not be developing a nuclear programme. And all the while our Nero in Washington fiddles. Or worse.
But what is the connecting thread between all these crises? In one sense, it is obvious: the world is returning to the disorder that is the historical norm. Since 1990, we have been living in unusual times, made all the more so because we convinced ourselves they were, in fact, usual. This was a time of Western dominance. Liberal democracy and globalisation were the future and those who opposed them were reactionary misfits.
It is hard to look back on all this now without a sense of mild embarrassment. Were we all really that naive? Why didn’t we come to our senses more quickly? In part, I think, the nostalgic longing for our lost era of predictability has simply proved too strong to resist, drawing our gaze backwards to that apparently golden age at the turn of the century when the world seemed calm and optimistic. Even as it became more disordered, we clutched at evidence to the contrary.
And yet it is difficult to argue the trend was not always, ultimately, towards disorder and degradation. We did not deal with the climate crisis, despite knowing what was coming. We stopped investing in our national infrastructure, convinced we did not have to. New train lines went unbuilt, reservoirs were left to moulder and water companies were allowed to do as they pleased. Meanwhile, our military capability withered, even as we clung to the status we believed our nuclear weapons, aircraft carriers and “boots on the ground” abroad gave us.
The world we once believed in has decisively gone. The failures of the past 25 years (at least) are painfully obvious everywhere we look. The American empire has changed, surely irrevocably. Is it really on our side in the war in Ukraine? Will it remain there should that war suddenly expand beyond Ukraine’s borders? As Freddie Hayward notes, US policy is driven by America First nationalism and Trump First self-interest.
The result is the world we see before us: one that is reacting to the whims of a superpower whose word no one trusts. It is a world, as one realist friend put it to me this week, where the nuclear shadow has returned to darken our leaders’ calculations. Saudi Arabia, Iran, Ukraine, Poland, Germany, South Korea, Japan – all are drawn to nuclear weapons as an equalising force. This is a fundamentally more dangerous world, existentially so, as the great physicist Carlo Rovelli argues.
In Britain, meanwhile, failures of investment mean that if we choose to stay in the club of nuclear powers to protect our status in the world, it will cost us such an extraordinary sum of money that it will require a level of fiscal austerity no one is being honest about. The scale of this is set out by the former cabinet secretary Simon Case.
All this leads me back to my kitchen table and, inevitably, Andy Burnham. This is the world he must navigate, the failures he must correct. A criticism has emerged over the past few months that he looks too far backwards for his inspiration, a “Hovis” politician nostalgic for the failed 1970s rather than the optimistic 1990s. Yet, something similar could be said of Margaret Thatcher, who dismissed the 30 years of postwar consensus – her adulthood – as a failed experiment in socialism.
Burnham sees the past 40 years much as Thatcher saw the postwar years. But, given the failures of governance in Britain and across the West this century, is it any wonder that so much of the country does too?
[Further reading: The new nuclear terror]
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This article appears in the 29 Jul 2026 issue of the New Statesman, The new terror
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