Britain has spent 2025 in a deep funk. Its sense is of a stuck country which doesn’t work. It lacks self-belief, a moral centre, an animating spirit. Public spaces are ill-governed and derelict. Authorities exist to nag, mistreat or ignore a sulky populace. Epic sums are wasted and essentials scrimped. Security is fragile and defences weak. System insiders bask and outsiders fret. Cant and jargon are sanctified, and non-believers cornered. Entropy augurs calamity. Catalysis is both urgent and impossible. Thus the funk feeds on itself and seals the country’s wider blockage.
That is one take. Many more are available, a rant the usual form. The fuller version below elicits the malaise via four, connected stimulants: political paralysis, economic stagnation, corrosive scandal, social fissure. But the funk of 2025 has a precise origin, namely the Labour Party’s big electoral win on 4 July 2024 and the near-instant collapse of the hope, always muted, invested in this outcome. Before returning to this stimulant, a cursory digest of the three others.
Whirling to somewhere
Many UK economic problems — such as low growth, productivity, investment, employment levels, and skills training, plus high debt, taxes, inflation, energy costs, and welfare spending —now look endemic. Short-term horizons, policy switchbacks, bloated schemes, poor oversight, even unreliable statistics, can compound them. A blame-wedded polity and media surround them.
Somehow, for all these, the show stays on the road. There are even bright spots. Today’s “something will turn up,” as per North Sea oil in the 1980s and financial services in the 2000s, is a productivity and growth surge from AI diffusion. The sheer overlap of difficulties today, however, may be unprecedented. (The qualifier “outside wartime” must be used, if at all, warily: Russia-organised sabotage, and its naval menace to seabed cables, are a constant vexation.)
Britain is not, as things stand, a going concern. With a long static economy, trade dependent, tested by the fierce new geoeconomics, exposed to global bond markets prowling both for margins and reassurance, its highest financial hazard is (far from static) debt. That is created by long-term overspending, which requires more borrowing and higher interest-rate payments. Public sector net debt in 2025 will be equivalent to around 94.5 per cent of GDP, and servicing it cost around £111 billion (A$224 billion) — close to 8.4 per cent of total government spending, and far above outlays on education or defence. Borrowing in the seven months to October 2025 was £122 billion (A$246 billion), the third-highest ever for the same period (one other was during the pandemic).
Yet orthodox routes of containing the debt have gone astray or reached their political limits. Persistent near-zero growth, a multiplier of insecurity and social drag, continues. Britain’s economy grew by 1.1 per cent in the year from July 2024, then 0.1 per cent in 2025’s third quarter. Labour’s oft-cited “number-one mission” has expired. Productivity growth is weak, and productivity in the vast public sector, a key indicator of economic health, has fallen below 1997’s (adjusted) level. Energy inflation is an extreme concern for business and millions of worried citizens, the latter also facing steep food prices. Unemployment is above 5 per cent, a four-year high, as employers cut recruitment after a steep hike in their national-insurance costs.
The squeeze on citizens has got tighter. Two tax rises amounting to £116 billion (A$234 billion) will push the proportion to 38 per cent of the whole UK economy, a peak last reached in the early 1980s. Just one of the copious twists in a serpentine tax system, which makes the Schleswig-Holstein problem look a doddle, is that many families are deterred from earning more by the prospect of an extra tax hit or loss of childcare or other benefits.
“This tax trap is killing aspiration,” writes the Times’s Alice Thomson. “Now nearly 50 per cent of the young feel that working hard and playing by the rules no longer determines success in the UK. They believe if you try too hard, you’ll be penalised. A third are considering emigrating.” Graduates paying off their debt struggle on average salaries that will never earn a property, look at minimum-wage pals now earning 66 per cent of theirs, and ponder. The funk, in some variant, is everywhere.
Again, wealth creation via growth, along with well-crafted investment, “should” be a solvent for the above. The Conservatives mislaid the recipe. Labour’s statist government, lacking pro-business nous or instincts, barely shows interest, declarative pledges apart. Disdain for its outgroups (such as small businesses, farmers, public schools, the super-rich) — snobbery dressed up in “workerist” language is the norm — creates its own hostile environment.
(Britain’s class carousel makes Labour now the posh party, with a clear survey lead among the privately educated. The top-earning 1 per cent, some now (re)-emigrating, may be hard to like, but contribute 30 per cent of income tax proceeds. Call it a skewed system, but the UK also pays its ever-rising bills via such creditors, domestic and overseas.)
There is no plan either for welfare dependency, what journalist Juliet Samuel calls “the disastrously wasteful and demoralising phenomenon of a welfare system paying more and more people not to work.” The “universal credit” benefit, launched under the Conservatives, went to half a million individuals in 2018; today, more than five million receive it, with no obligation to work. A million young adults are not working, studying, or training. Every working day, 5000 people are being registered for long-term sickness benefits, the rate having doubled under Labour.
Almost ten million working-age people, that’s a fifth of the working-age population, are (finds a new review) now classified as disabled. A single category of the latter — two million in 2019, the outlay £11 billion (A$22 billion) — is projected to reach four million in 2030, the costs tripling to £34 billion (A$68.6 billion). All the above capable of working need support, skills, the right incentives; which in turn would require a larger change in public policy and even public morality. Neither of these is in sight.
It’s not all the fault of authorities, Conservative or Labour. Longer-term factors are also involved. Brexit may get in the neck, but the big clangers preceded it, which is why it happened. The European Union is no model, if it ever was. France’s debt-to-GDP ratio is higher and its problems at least as big, which consoles some. Yet the UK’s accumulated flaws make for acute vulnerability to external security foes (often now also internal), and ultra-dependence on “the kindness of strangers,” namely the bond markets. Among advanced economies, the UK’s bond-yield — the interest rate needed to make government bonds attractive — ranks very high: “an extremely uncomfortable position,” says the Financial Times sage Martin Wolf. The daily reel of governments and bond vigilantes is heady. But when, mid-whirl, the music stops?
On yer bike! Oh, it’s stolen
Britain’s penchant for large-scale scandal also incurs huge costs. Legal fees, restitution payments, interminable inquiries, severance packages, new legislation to preclude a repeat: all because, in the first place, the system didn’t work as it should. Linking many is that these costs are inflicted by often ostensibly enlightened institutions taking extreme lengths to protect themselves against their external, and in the end wholly justified, critics. Not exactly new, this feature encapsulates the UK’s recent decades.
The country’s most “revered” bodies yield some of the most damaging scandals. Go figure. (My guess: sentimentality plus unaccountability breeds entitlement.) The BBC has on its ledger Jimmy Savile, Huw Edwards, Martin Bashir’s Princess Diana interview, paedophilia smears against a peer and pop star, and many more; the NHS has organ retention, contaminated blood, a GP mass-murderer, a nurse baby-murderer, and countless others. Hannah Barnes’s New Statesman investigation (with Channel 4 News) into maternity care at Oxford University NHS Hospitals Foundation is one more catalogue of, it appears, rooted negligence where babies die and mothers are left to grieve for a lifetime. It also reveals a superior, cold-hearted executive style that chills the bone.
What’s new? In one sense, not much. A grim modern litany extends from Aberfan and Ronan Point in the 1960s to Grenfell Tower and Horizon/Post Office accounting in the 2010s. For bestiality, corruption, and longevity, grooming gangs from the early 2000s stands out. (A far too anodyne term for rape-and-sexual-torture gangs, or the professional term “group-based child sexual exploitation”.) The litany’s more recent cases echo the older while better concealing their own roots: a pick from secrecy, corporate malfeasance, tech trickery, indifference, cruelty and a particular kind of official disdain for those on the outside. So police and social workers (to name only those) could choose to ignore the in-plain-sight, years-long evidence of thousands of defenceless under-age girls being subject to grotesque, organised violation in English towns. Such fiascos are measured in enormous human pain, annihilation of trust, and generational damage.
The most extortionate scandals arise from joint state-business projects. A high-speed rail (HS2) plan to connect London and the north-west — from stunt by Labour’s Gordon Brown in 2009 to endless cash-drain under the Tories, since much reduced in ambition — will have cost above £100 billion (A$202 billion) by 2036. (Tip: in Britain, it’s safe each time to toss in another decade or two, with matching billions.)
A nuclear-power station at Hinkley Point C in southwest England, under joint UK-French auspices, was announced in 2008 by the then prime minister and Nicolas Sarkozy. It became part of David Cameron–George Osborne’s early 2010s fantasy of a “golden decade” partnership with China. (CGN, a Chinese company, owns a 24.4 per cent stake, down from 33.5 per cent.) Construction, begun in 2017, has been at a sloth’s pace: setbacks, delays and expenses at a cheetah’s. The cost estimate in 2015 was £18 billion (A$37.8 billion) until 2025 completion; it is now £48 billion (A$96.8 billion) by 2030–31 (for the initial phase, i.e. the first of two reactors.) Even to reach this point has entailed a host of public consultations, judicial reviews, and environmental studies — one of which is leading £700 million (A$1412 million) to be spent on protecting extremely low numbers of not-at-all endangered fish and seabirds. (That inaugural PM was… Gordon Brown. For its melancholy part, Britain “never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.”)
The state’s colossal prodigality and tendency to vice, in the context of economic stagnation, become a tool of social fissure. Its wilful transfer of border security in coastal England’s southeast to transnational criminal gangs ravages social trust, jeopardises civic safety and kindles extremism on each flank. (Please remember: the far right and the far left are always allies.) Unlawful migration in small boats, from 2018–24, numbers perhaps 130,000. Incomers are largely young men, 70 per cent said to be from Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, Albania, Syria and Eritrea; more recently, Sudan and Bangladesh have joined the list. (Amid constant, contested input from media, NGOs, lawyers and partisan groups, much about this business is unknown, reliable information is scarce, and little can be taken for granted.)
Boat numbers have risen since Labour arrived, contrary to Starmer’s many fulminating promises: 43,000 from mid 2024–25, an annual increase of 38 per cent. Perhaps 15,000 came via lorries or other means. Almost all, it seems, had travelled through several EU countries; some, according to verified documents, even lived for years in Germany or Sweden. Asylum claims as a whole that year amounted to 111,000, the highest figure since 2001. More than 400,000 people have claimed asylum since 2021.
Asylumees (if the term is allowed) are initially housed in poorer areas whose local people are already hard-pressed. A good number go straight to work, often prearranged, in the underground economy, as for instance delivery bikers; others join or are forced into gangs, or enslaved. Their periodic crimes, especially sexual, are avidly reported in the right-wing media and underplayed or finessed in the left’s. An informal social contract has been torn up. As a recipe for social unrest and division, unlawful migration is hard to beat. Shabana Mahmood, Labour’s new home secretary — a flinty spark on Labour’s notional right, and feasible leadership contender — has taken on the job with sure intentions that make back-benchers growl.
Those locals’ towns, and cities, across Britain share an immediate consequence of stagnation: their main streets’ decay as familiar small businesses close and fake shops (vape or candy stores, or “Turkish barbers”) arrive. Some are exposed — if police can be bothered to investigate — as fronts for laundering drug money, a sign of the widening reach of (mainly London’s) patchwork of criminal gangs. In London itself, phone-snatching is the street crime du jour, with high-end mugging (luxury watches or jewellery) and upmarket bike-theft also a trend. Many retailers, quality and corner-shop, have given up defying shoplifters: too dicey, and the police (re burglaries too) routinely do nothing.
Terrorist attacks are rare thanks only to the security services’ intelligence and craft: most plots go unreported. MPs were murdered in 2016 and 2019 by far-right extremists (neo-Nazi, then Islamist). Acute danger —related to Russia-led sabotage, Iranian proxies, and lone-wolf attacks, anti-Muslim zealots targeting mosques, Jews intimidated everywhere, all synagogues’ need for tight security, Hong Kong exiles harassed by Beijing’s thugs — form the outer layer of a stressed civic realm. England’s vintage tolerance and trust, that realm’s supreme guarantee, are in question. People are on their own, with no sense the government is on their side. Mahmood may just have the mettle to redress that, in the unlikely event she’s allowed.
In military terms, the British army’s 74,000 full-timers, half of all armed-services personnel, represent a 50 per cent decrease from two decades ago. It struggles for recruits, notably from the UK’s ethnic minorities. Half of young adults consider Britain a racist country and 41 per cent would never fight for it; 11 per cent would, so that’s a start. Lucky the international situation is so calm! (And that for space — and mental health — reasons, this piece omits reference to UK foreign policy.)
Economic stagnation, public scandal and social fissure compose terrible failures of state. Both main parties are culpable. (Labour’s local government record in big cities such as Birmingham is but one case.) If the above examples count as egregious, they are far from alone.
“A stench of death”
Labour’s sweeping victory in mid-2024 was also an anti-climax. The electorate’s savvy use of the first-past-the-post system handed Labour a majority of 172 in the 650-seat House of Commons on 33.7 per cent of the vote. A telling 41.3 per cent of voters abstained. To mass relief, the Conservatives were out — after fourteen years, five prime ministers and umpteen failures. Yet expectations were low. Sir Keir Starmer, a career lawyer of stock views and a prim manner, was not popular (minus 18 approval in YouGov’s tracker on election eve), while Labour’s bland manifesto had offered detail-light “change.”
There was no honeymoon. The public mood quickly turned sour amid lavish wage deals, abortive welfare cuts, price increases, small-business fetters, miniscule growth rates (at best), and Rachel Reeves’s £40 billion (A$84 billion) tax rises in her first budget as chancellor. Starmer and Reeves’s monotonous blame-hunting was no help in lifting it. Number 10 Downing Street’s backroom tiffs and leaking feuds soon buzzed into life. Labour’s wealthy grandees awarding cabinet members high-end trips, designer clothes, sports tickets and concert freebies met with real anger.
More obloquy came with resignations, often involving property: of an anti-corruption minister, niece of Bangladesh’s ousted PM; a homelessness minister who had evicted her own tenants then raised the rent; Angela Rayner, the combative deputy PM, for non-payment of £40,000 (A84,000) owed in tax over a house purchase. That Starmer and Rayner had been zealous prosecutors of every Tory misdeed invited the most bittersweet of taunts: hypocrisy.
Starmer’s approval rating fell to minus 51 in November 2025, the lowest for a PM since 1977. Labour, having lost support to Greens on the left, LibDems in the centre, and Reform on the right, dropped below 20 per cent. No one was surprised. Again, it was not that hope had been high. Rather, engaged voters had sought hope; a cathartic thrashing for the Conservatives; and change tout court; any of which had to be, it was assumed, for the better. For its part Labour, indulging each wish, wanted solely to glide into office. When it did, and people saw that instead of a plan Starmer had only fusty banalities to offer, they tuned out for good.
Reeves, the PM’s accessory, faded alongside. (In a November pre-budget poll, a record 71 per cent were dissatisfied with her record.) Before the election her grip of the economics brief, reinforced by Starmer’s own lack, had raised her almost to co-equal status. The ambitious Rayner’s exit did the chancellor no harm. But Reeves’s own capital was depleting: at first from scrutiny of her CV, her book on women economists, and even her chess expertise, and later with news that she had leased her south London property without the required licence. In between she had appeared utterly distraught in a packed Commons as Starmer declaimed — including yet more footblah — without glance or gesture toward her. A confounding scene.
Then, Reeves’s plans for her second budget on 26 November turned into an unwitting daily farce, with the bond markets playing the jittery straight man. An antic double reversal over an income-tax rise — first you see it, then you don’t — riled colleagues to leak-venting fury. Starmer himself got in on the act by provoking a leadership wobble via leaks against up-and-coming rival Wes Streeting.
MPs despaired. The New Statesman’s political editor Ailbhe Rea reported cabinet members’ “contempt” for their PM. And the Economist’s Bagehot columnist let rip: “[A] viper’s Downing Street, a fed-up cabinet, feral and panicking MPs, polls pointing to oblivion… [Starmer] has no personal charisma to charm his way through… [and] neither friends nor followers in the party… [T]he top of government is a circus… [I]n sixteen months] Sir Keir’s government has managed to accumulate a stench of death.”
In the event, the chancellor’s welfare splurge (coming soon) and scattershot hike in taxes (years away) delighted Labour MPs and calmed bond markets. (By many accounts, voters were unmoved or derisive.) Job done, for a day at most. By the weekend, Reeves was spending a TV round denying a serious charge of overplaying the gloom of pre-budget forecasts to enhance the meagre offering to come. Starmer, riding to her rescue on December’s dawn, is in on the paper-trail that now overshadows them both.
It’s all in vain. Months before the comically grim pre-budget spectacle, prime minister and chancellor had lost voters’ trust. It will never be regained. So while posterity will debate the sequencing to come, the politics of this moment are long clear: Starmer and Reeves are already finished. True, the mechanics of their departure, requiring a Labour revolt — more likely a behind-the-scenes cabinet one — and member-led election, look knotty. Labour scribes stress the party’s discomfort with coups, unlike the ruthless Tories. And there is no recourse to patriotism: Starmer’s borrowed “country first, party second” slogan is a vague memory, if that. Grilled by Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch in parliament on 19 November, he faced his own MPs while bellowing: “This will be a Labour budget with Labour values.” QED.
What makes Labour’s ordeal tougher to process or resolve is its self-portrayal as the “adults” who would turn Tory chaos into stability, disrepute into propriety. (The favourite of Starmer’s patronising jibes at Badenoch, whose budget reply to Reeves was both fiery and witty, is “unserious.”) Trevor Phillips, a sound, Labour-friendly broadcaster, is persuaded there was no plan: “They simply convinced themselves that they would succeed because they were better people — harder-working, more virtuous, more organised, more moral — than their predecessors.”
The upshot is another protracted Westminster melodrama. And, yes, the intra-term ejection of dire leaders (such as three of those five Tory PMs) can be regarded as essential: a fusion of constitutional duty and popular justice. Claims even follow that “the system is working.” The funk intuits the opposite: in these all-consuming spasms, which suck yet more energy and attention from Britain’s many intractable problems, it sees less drama than desolating waste.
A medley of muddle
Labour’s serious trouble as the governing party also maintains Britain’s tenor since the Brexit referendum of 2016 and its long aftermath. Two upheavals supervened: Covid-19 and (Britain’s version of) Black Lives Matter. The concatenation forced an already dizzy governing order towards agitation in ways that fed into politics. Society’s pivotal gulf began to erode a century-old party model; not just coalitions, but those of interchangeable causes, began to emerge. Not least, the system’s insiders became more detached and status-aware. A mix of such elements, contingency very much included, helped make things happen as they did. Here (again) is one take.
Years-long bitter wrangling, political and constitutional, followed voters’ choice (by 52–48 per cent) to leave the European Union. Sects filled a leadership vacuum, judges a political one, motormouth partisans the airwaves, flags and loudhailers the streets, social media the screens. It took an unimagined synchronism — the Conservatives’ decisive electoral win in December 2019, breaking the Brexit logjam, and the Covid-19 pandemic, choking public life — to release the main conflict, but then only into a tumbling cascade of fresh rancour. A natural end, far less resolution, never came. By the time Boris Johnson’s misrule became scandal in 2022, public contempt for him, but also widespread disgust with politics as a whole, had solidified.
In respect of these outcomes, there is — thus far — a straight line from Boris Johnson to Sir Keir Starmer. Continuous too is today’s schism between principal tribes: each capacious yet defined, with traits both felt and ascribed, ever replenished by fresh incidents, issues or disputes via rupturing social media. Almost a decade on, “Remain vs Leave” is now just one item in “Britain versus Itself.” As if the jaunty satire of the Pythons’ “Looking for an argument…?” sketch, more than fifty years old, was rather provident social commentary.
Equally, the last decade’s turbulent stability isn’t solely the work of venal politicians. The centralist fragmentation of the UK state, begun during Tony Blair’s decade (1997–2007), has propagated. One strand is the creation or promotion plus dense funding of a host of institutions: from environmental, legal, higher education, scientific and sporting bodies to cultural organisations, charities, NGOs, religious foundations and voluntary groups.
Most of the latter, in the century’s opening decade, would have been regarded as belonging to “civil society,” or parts of an autonomous “third sector” alongside state and business. Since then, just as current social, generational and political trends now run through their bloodstream, so patronage does their moneystream. In turn, the UK state’s diversified reach has accommodated them as a quasi-public sector, effective cohabitants of a broader official order. And as the state has mutated in additional ways — to become more digitalised, corporate, legalistic, segmented, regulatory, opaque, and intertwined with techno-business — this sector has kept pace alongside.
The 2016 referendum, and foremost the pro-EU “Remain” campaign, hinted at emerging political effects. In elections, parties appeal to voters with shades of opinion; healthy parties are already a loose coalition. In a referendum, where coalition-building focuses on a binary choice, voters’ uniformity — not their variety — is esteemed. The coalition must bind, though this can have psychic and public side-effects. The former risks groupthink, as temptation and reality; the latter an ethos of superior wisdom, effusive agreement, complacent debate, companionable outrage.
Such was the Remain camp. Even with the entire establishment on its side, it fell short. Its constituency, from the governing class to those junior institutional branches and beyond, had embodied the outlook of the expanding state. Its top layer was highly educated, London-centric, liberal-left-to-centre-right, would-be cosmopolitan, its credo visceral anti-Brexit certitude, allied to beneficent (even patronising) attachment to a particular idea of Europe and of multiculturalism, professed faith in the British state’s behemoths, the BBC and NHS. Virulent antipathy to contrary views on these topics, especially those couched in patriotic terms, was a given. (Although a surrogate patriotism was and is often discernible.)
Remain’s cohort adapted to defeat by spurning losers’ consent. Rearguard action came via parliament, courts and streets, where (as signalled above) enormous crowds from many a British nook marched through London, flags aloft — EU flags, of course. A second referendum was mooted before the first had been enacted. The supreme court (a Blair invention, one more of those institutions) got involved. Remain’s smug shock-jocks, fired-up newspapers and why-oh-why columnists, a monomaniacal BBC (“Institutional bias? Who me?”): all succoured the stop-Brexit cause. Tories and Labour, split every way in any case, looked irrelevant. Something was going on, deeper than old, dull, party politics.
Covid-19’s irruption in early 2020 added to the brew. State spending jumped above 50 per cent of the economy. The pandemic’s eerie half-world handed authority an instant semi-free pass to suspend liberty. A kind of soft authoritarianism took hold: society’s insider–outsider gap more overt, the inducements of a mainstay greater. For the longer haul, a professedly commanding state — unequipped for the task, and ill-led — needed majority consent and allies’ support in securing it. The inchoate array of quasi-public institutions functioned as accessory in a putative national endeavour, inter alia helping keep dissent to the margins.
Five months later, Black Lives Matter protests crossed the Atlantic. A ban on public gatherings was in this instance lifted. London’s might have been the largest, but Bristol’s in southwest England was the most spectacular, as a statue of Edward Colston — seventeenth-century philanthropist, Tory, churchman, local dignitary, and (now most relevant) investor in the slave trade — was toppled into the city’s harbour at the occasion’s climax. A sudden national atmosphere of extreme fervour, kindled as much as amplified by broadcasting and social media, took hold. It acted as release both from Covid-19’s restrictions and into a new phase (even era) of identitarian preferment.
Defining the moment, a spate of institutions from London outwards — grand and modest, public and quasi-public alike — converged in a frenzy of abrogative entrenchment. The process would span nomenclature, auto-histories, board memberships, mission statements, PR messages, gallery exhibits, publishing rosters, broadcasting schedules, museum captions, campus life, library stock, the whole shebang. The delirium was propulsive: ever more partisan in its agendas, coercive in imposing them, censorious in policing them, intolerant of difference, stranger to doubt. The coup de grace: as imprimatur to the BLM upsurge, the delirium remade the moment as a power-play in anti-system dress. In short, a top-down cultural revolution. British-style, of course.
It was evident, not least from the concurrent instantaneity of events, that base-level psychic shifts were again in motion. Devotion to an exclusive version of reality, absolute self-assurance, a sense of undimmed rectitude: all familiar from the Remain movement. And naturally so, for the same institutional and sensory tide was then still also coursing through pro-EU veins. At each juncture, the impulse to self-preservation belied claims to high-minded reform and progress. And in any case, soi-disant disrupters and rebels had long stocked the ranks of comfortable society: it was uncool to be anything else. Now they were even better fortified against the lower orders.
Get in! But who…? How…? And what next?
Thus had a trio of major crises from 2016 been tinder for a vehement social divide. Brexit had released its fever, Covid-19 herded it, BLM actuated it. In successive campaigns, institutions and movements connected to the status quo drew toward the state’s ambience. Britain’s long shapeshifting class divides had played another card: insiders versus outsiders. In the process the insiders had accreted a hitherto unavailable degree of self-consciousness. And from at latest 2022, when the inane Liz Truss took forty-five days to seal her (Tory) party’s reputational ruin, their primary choice at the next election was clear: Labour.
Why Labour? Towards 2024, it was palpable: to get the Tories out. Labour’s by then fourteen years in opposition were an interminable lesson in the pitfalls of boldness. Now that victory looked assured, why take risks? Moreover, Starmer himself was the very incarnation of safety-first. So, as a cipher of his artful chief adviser Morgan McSweeney — the gist of Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund’s riveting book, Get In: The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer — the party crept to office with minimal policy baggage and (as above) no plan. Today, its leader’s motto might be: “If you seek my (own) ruin, look around.”
Since 2024, then, voting choices for the “lanyard class” (Blue Labour guide Maurice Glasman’s coinage) are more complicated. The answer now to the “why?” question is, in part, because insiders have to vote for someone. Zack Polanski’s new Green left-populism is a gamble, Ed Davey’s LibDem outfit is at best a coalition back-up, the Conservatives’ penance has long to run, Nigel Farage’s Reform Party is of the distasteful right. So, Labour it is; but Starmer?
Okay. Get in a PM who can do the job. Problem solved? Not yet! Labour’s parliamentary party leans left, its members more so. Its MPs could well choose a leader of the same mien (pro-trade union, welfare, high taxes and spending, a good dose of class war thrown in), just as the economy craves a different recipe. The bond markets wouldn’t like that one bit. Back to the drawing-board?
A wider problem is Britain’s cross-party deficit of leadership, now lasting a decade. Is David Cameron, who resigned on the morning of the Brexit vote, a pillar of statesmanship then? By what came after, a reluctant yes. Brexit, Covid-19 and BLM all unfolded while the UK was nominally governed by the Conservatives. That party, for all its wrongs, was never quite in charge; no one was. During the period, Labour was led by Jeremy Corbyn, and thus nugatory. (The party’s four leaders since 2007 — Gordon Brown, Ed Miliband, Corbyn and Starmer — have been duds.) The full extent of the debilitation will be grasped only when, or indeed if, the pattern ends.
But social changes and political trends also influence leadership and its prospects. Labour’s middle-class entryism is one: while 80 per cent of the party’s vote was working-class in the mid-1980s, and 50 per cent in 1997, from 2010 a majority were middle-class. Higher-earning people agree: 36 per cent in the ABC1 category voted Labour in 2024, and 40 per cent of those earning £70,000 (A$141,000), against 25 per cent and 22 per cent Conservative.
The figures back up the long familiar reality of a party turning more upmarket in its personnel and priorities, which also means more North London-centric, as with four of its last five leaders. Indeed, five of its last nine (Michael Foot the other) make the cut, two more being Welsh and two Scottish; the last Englishman — no women here, though the Tories have elevated four — was Harold Wilson in the 1960s–70s. In such details lie the contours of a profound mutual disaffection.
Everyone in Westminster’s parochial, compelling political arena is now imagining the circumstances of Starmer and Reeves’s eventual downfall and what may come next. How will the sequence affect the country’s grasp of its predicament? The FT’s Janan Ganesh knows. In a September piece, Ganesh — the Lionel Messi of columnists — sees anger at the government’s “predictable flop” (which he did, in fact, predict) as futile, since Labour was “merely acting according to its nature.” In its ebb lies one consolation:
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For voters to accept painful reforms, the status quo has to be tested to failure. That means both of the main political parties must disappoint in government. As long as Britain was stagnant under the Tories, voters could tell themselves that a management switch would get things moving again. If Labour fails too, that hope becomes harder to sustain. It might dawn on people that no one party is the issue so much as an unfit state, which can’t be fixed without creating losers. The triple-locked pensions, the benefits system riddled with perverse incentives, a health service that is forever having to be “saved”: when the slightest reform of these things is tabled, protests fill Whitehall. Perhaps, four years down the line, such resistance will start to look like the problem…
In other words, the failure of this government might be — if the left will lend its language to me for a moment — historically necessary.
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Ganesh sees “this theme of useful failure” as illustrating people’s readiness to “interpret the problems of the day with reference to whoever is in charge.” When the left presides, a malaise is pinned on a stifling public sector; the right, and it’s unchecked individualism. This can account for politics lagging thought: free-market ideas broke through in the US and the UK only in the 1980s, when under left-of-centre incumbents, “voters could define the sickness of the age as big government. If there is a failed Labour administration circa 2028, expect the same clarity.”
Starmer might then play the role of “the end-of-an-era figure, who gives the existing way of doing things one more diligent and sincere heave, just to remove all doubt that a new approach is needed.” But “[who] is Thatcher in this dialectic?” Not Farage, nor yet a Tory, nor the (probably leftward) next Labour leader. Instead:
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My sense is that politicians will take their cue from voters, rather than the other way around. The problem is not that governments lack the desire to reform… There just hasn’t been the public stomach for it. If and when that changes, a political entrepreneur won’t fail to capitalise. Who had Clement Attlee down as a transformational figure before 1945? The precondition for serious reform is a mood of total national exasperation, not just frustration. Labour seems all too willing to oblige.
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Ganesh’s longer view and emphasis on voters’ initiative are respite from two inert fads, each an inversion of its target: scorning “nostalgia” (a licence for presentism) and scolding the “corrosive narrative of decline that now seems to dominate our national life” (a permit for boosterism.) En passant too, his argument bypasses the catastrophism and elite-centricity that impel many a funk-driven rant. That said, my opening para stands.
A Labour government born in one vacuous promise is in more peril than it knows. Its unwinding (pace Ganesh, a steady Brexit critic) may yet precede a landmark UK anniversary: the decision of 23 June 2016. How will the British people, maybe even by then, come to think about a decade of misgovernance and turmoil? And how will they seek to move beyond? •
