As 2025 has melted away, I’ve been reflecting on my first months back at work after a year out on maternity leave. When I closed my laptop and said goodbye to my colleagues, Rishi Sunak was still prime minister. Westminster was crackling with speculation about when general election day would be. Councils were declaring bankruptcy. Voters were still seething about partygate. Worst of all, the price of chocolate had risen 20 per cent in a year. Britain felt exhausted, slouching blearily towards an escape route. The country was, back then, peering at the Labour Party in the way a child watches fireworks for the first time: with curiosity and no little trepidation.
My colleague Hannah Barnes had written the New Statesman cover story the week before I left, headlined “The trauma ward”, about the scandal of poor maternity care (I saved reading that particular piece for after my own baby was born). It was a grim exposé, and a reminder of how you could poke around just about anywhere in the British state – from prisons and courts to bin collections and dentistry – and find chaos.
In my year out, I didn’t think a great deal about politics – though, inevitably, I was awake most of election night anyway. There’s nothing like a hungry baby keeping you up to stop you mulling over the turnout in Tipton and Wednesbury. But I had a vague feeling in that time that when I returned to work, I might be reporting on how the country was being fixed, rather than falling apart. Ah, the optimism new life can bring…
Instead, “Broken Britain” has become, once again, a ubiquitous phrase. The metamorphosis of this concept fascinates me. It was first used in the late Noughties by an unholy trinity of David Cameron, the Sun and, erm, Noel Edmonds. In this telling, Broken Britain was the result of everything from hoodies to teenage mums to speed cameras. It was the stuff of “compassionate Conservatism”, Iain Duncan Smith tearing up on an Easterhouse estate, and general glib promises that a few more proper coppers and nuclear families might sort things out.
And I’ve certainly done my own bit for the Broken Britain narrative, which soon became shorthand for the country under cuts. I have over the years spent a lot of time reporting in places left bereft and tense. And that’s if I can find a train running there on time. Readers may remember our “Crumbling Britain” and “Britain’s Lost Spaces” series based in various nooks of Britain: the vanishing libraries of Northamptonshire; Tottenham’s last youth club; potholes in the Cotswolds.
I now see the right using the Broken Britain critique against the left today – where asset-stripping Tory ministers are forgotten and everyone from immigrants to benefit claimants to autistic kids become the villains of the piece. It can be infuriating. George Osborne’s decision not to invest when borrowing cost nothing was an economically illiterate one we mustn’t forget. Boris Johnson’s betrayal of his promise to “level up” the whole UK carried this error forward.
But during my first year of motherhood, I experienced a Britain that differed from the one I’d been reporting on. When you have a baby, you come into regular direct contact with the state. I found a world of excellent healthcare, warm and busy children’s centres, more free baby classes and stay-and-plays (and, perhaps most enrichingly, tea and cake) than I had time to pack into my strange new schedule. I even got a free filling at the dentist; I don’t think he’d ever seen a patient so thrilled. And, later, the state-funded 30 hours of childcare changed my family’s circumstances overnight. It all made me feel slightly sheepish about declaring Britain broken in so much of my work, and intensely fond of my little corner of east London.
Now I’m back at work, and still jumping on trains to report this column each week, I’m realising many more feel the same way. Headlines are of course gloomy, and voters may be losing faith in their leaders, but they still love where they live. It is rarely cited, but polling finds the majority of Brits of whatever political tribe feel a strong sense of local pride, according to research by More in Common and the UCL Policy Lab. This finding, in a document that has been circulated in No 10, gives Labour politicians hope. Their flagship policy to beat Reform, after all, is to pump billions of pounds into improving neighbourhoods’ “Pride in Place”.
In a bid to be merrier especially at Christmastime, I’d argue this strategy isn’t a lost cause. Take the woman I met who had opened the first café in 15 years on Bradford’s Holme Wood estate, a place even bus drivers would reroute to avoid, for fear of smashed windows. She told me that since she opened her café “antisocial behaviour has dropped”. And the Wigan folk with a huge Union Jack in their front garden who regularly checked in on their pregnant Eritrean neighbour in the asylum house next door, and the Asian dad delighted to be asked by a fellow father on the school run if he had any red paint to help him paint a St George’s Cross on a roundabout (“We didn’t do it, but I was so happy that he asked me, and we had a proper chat about what was happening”). Or there’s the church in Luton where members of the congregation and Muslim families do “dads and lads” boxing together.
Britain can feel divided and lost, but there’s always another side to the story. If “all politics is local”, as the old saying goes, then perhaps all hope is, too.
[Further reading: Labour is now the least trusted party in Britain]
Content from our partners
Related
This article appears in the 12 Dec 2025 issue of the New Statesman, All Alone: Christmas Special 2025
Join the debate
Subscribe here to comment