Be under no doubt, Britain’s degraded public realm is paving the way for a Reform government. The overwhelming sense of national malaise is helping that rise, but so too is the easy lens by which Farage helps the public understand it. Rarely mentioned are things like a lack of resources and a state apparatus fragmented by the Blairite era of PFI and short-termism, and by the Cameroon fantasy of the “Big Society”, which was merely a rhetorical cloak for less protective government. They never acknowledge the dual cause of our present inertia: an ultra-liberalism that, with no real sense of national mission, co-exists alongside economic stagnation. Rather than labelling modern Britain a failure by design, they instead insist that the system has been corrupted by mendacious people.
Flat wages, rampant incompetence and the police being most conspicuous when responding to mean tweets – it’s no wonder that everyone, regardless of politics, thinks the country is failing. Whether it’s the seeming inability of the security services to protect Jewish worshippers from a terrorist attack, the alleged presence of an estimated 20,000 Chinese agents on our streets or an alleged breach of Whitehall data centres by a foreign power, everything seems to be disintegrating. The state has taken to bickering with itself, the Prime Minister publicly chiding a police force for attempting to safely regulate a football match. We are living through a moment of national humiliation.
Not that the left has an obvious solution to the impasse. Like Reform, much of it is driven by a nostalgic yearning for the past. Britain has done great things before, we are reminded, birthing both the Industrial Revolution and the world’s first labour movement. Later came democratic reforms that empowered the working class, the defeat of Nazism and, subsequently, the social-democratic settlement. Put more pithily, Reform wish to reverse the changes seen since 1997; the left since the Thatcherite Revolution after 1979.
And yet, wherever you look, the basis for those historic feats is lacking. It’s certainly true that Britain constructed an extraordinary welfare apparatus after 1945, at a time when public debt was higher than today. But that happened when the Sterling Area was the largest currency bloc in the world, covering 500 million people. The ability to build record numbers of homes, meanwhile, can’t be separated from the country’s status as a leading industrial power at the time. In short, the economic and social factors that enabled the country’s accomplishments of the last century have gone. As for the right, the political project of Thatcherism was built on North Sea Oil, privatisation and goldilocks demographics. Little of that can be repeated, either.
Britain doesn’t make much steel; yet some, including myself, want to decarbonise energy systems and build public transport at scale. Others demand that the country rapidly re-arm. Yet they fail to acknowledge these islands no longer possess an industrial base to do so (and that it was destroyed by the economic orthodoxy they hold most dear). At the heart of these debates isn’t just ideology, but material possibility. Visions for what Britain could be,collide against the choices we’ve made over the last half-century. The scale of the wreckage is so difficult to accept that most turn to sentimentality and easy answers. Just reverse immigration and the country will boom; just increase taxes on the ultra-rich and poverty will disappear.
Take the “small boats crisis”. Whatever one’s views on undocumented migration, the principal reason refugees are in hotels across the country is state dysfunction. More than 120,000 people are presently seeking asylum in the UK, equivalent to the population of Exeter. In many cases they have waited for several years as their case is reviewed, an absurdity resulting from under-investment in caseworkers and a useless Home Office bureaucracy. Whether you believe Britain should have a generous asylum policy, or not, everyone agrees the process itself should be expeditious. It is anything but.
It’s the same with prisons. A few months ago, thousands of inmates enjoyed early release because of overcrowding in the country’s prison estate – whose facilities had been operating at more than 99 per cent capacity for 18 months. Shortly after that plan was announced, Mark Rowley, Britain’s most senior police officer, warned how such a step would only serve to increase pressure on overstretched police forces. A long-neglected prison estate, intersecting with patchy forces subject to cuts for almost two decades. Yet rather than a consensus around under-investment, as one might expect, the national debate soon turned to Keir Starmer being either too liberal, or insufficiently so. The right thrives on this, with Robert Jenrick’s latest vertical video taking aim at the provision of Xboxes and confectionery for prisoners. The structural issues created by successive governments, including those in which he served, remain unmentioned.
The same pattern can be found in stories of everyday notoriety. The most compelling detail regarding Axel Rudakubana, the Southport murderer, wasn’t his ethnicity or religion, but the fact his heinous acts were so predictable. Rudakubana had previously been excluded from school for possession of a knife, which he had taken in on more than ten occasions. In 2022 he was arrested while in possession of a knife on a bus. Yet rather than detain him, the officers escorted the boy home and gave his mother “advice”. Three years before that, in 2019, aged just 13, Rudakubana contacted Childline asking what he should do if he wanted to kill somebody. He had been referred to PREVENT multiple times. Yet, he was still able to murder three little girls.
Again, such state incompetence should unite both left and right. But instead we get almost choreographed scripts as to how each side should respond: it is or isn’t racist to think this, it’s unacceptable to say that. Rather than focusing on the facts of state failure, somehow the fallout invariably turns to the boundaries of permissible speech. It happens almost every time.
The political response to Palestine Action, and its attack on RAF Brize Norton, was more of the same. What happened earlier this year was already covered under the law. But rather than simply enforce something on the statute book, the government decided to proscribe Palestine Action altogether – presumably from embarrassment that an e-scooter infiltrated a military installation. That something so outlandish was even possible didn’t merit discussion, apparently, despite the fact Serco is responsible for aspects of security at the West Oxfordshire base. Meanwhile, the specific planes which were damaged, two “Voyager” aircraft, are leased to the RAF by a private operator. The British state is now so withered that even critical military infrastructure depends on outsourcing and PFI.
These failures reflect not only Britain’s shift towards becoming a pseudo-state, but also the absence of a binding set of national values or a shared national project. The left should not be scared of championing either. Indeed for much of the 20th century, such things were foundational to socialist politics, from communist China – where socialist development and national rejuvenation went hand-in-hand – to Evo Morales and the “pluri-national” socialism of Bolivia. There is no contradiction between a strong state and robust civil liberties. Between a prison estate that isn’t constantly on the brink of collapse with guaranteeing inalienable freedoms. If that vision isn’t asserted by a state that protects – regardless of creed, colour or class – Britain’s future as a multi-faith society won’t just be at risk. It will be over.
[Further reading: For Tony Blair, Gaza is the future]
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