The Critic Magazine
The broken state of Britain | David Shipley | The Critic Magazine
In the UK there are signs of state failure everywhere for those with eyes to see. Dominic Cummings says that “the whole wider Whitehall system is...
The British people know their state is broken. In the 2024 British Social Attitudes survey 79% of us said that our system of governing “could be improved a lot/a great deal”. In truth this is unsurprising. We live under a regime which hasn’t built a reservoir since 1992, hasn’t brought a nuclear power plant online since 1995, which struggles to complete a high speed rail link between two cities a mere 130 miles apart, in which GDP per capita has barely grown in almost 20 years, in which energy costs are ruinously high, youth unemployment is rising and which is unable to defend its own borders, or keep its citizens safe from a wave of serious crime committed by recent migrants. But the government’s proposed solutions are rather pathetic. Starmer’s goals of achieving “mutual recognition” of professional qualifications and reducing barriers for touring artists will not make the economy boom. His proposed youth mobility scheme with the EU is not going to reduce our record high youth unemployment. And Labour’s reliance on energy price caps to suppress the cost of living are merely ensuring that Britain’s economy remains fake and distorted. Of course this isn’t just a Labour problem. During the Sunak government the key priorities were banning smoking and A Level reform. But it’s on illegal migration that this government is at its most feeble. There’s the “one-in, one-out” deal agreed with France in the summer, under which a very small number of illegal arrivals are supposed to be sent back to France (and at least 80 are laying the groundwork for a legal challenge), not to mention the brilliant plan to close the asylum seeker hotels and disperse these men into HMOs and even new council houses.
Our politicians, our parliaments, decided to create every single one of them, and under Britain’s constitutional settlement, all of them could be swept away with a single Act of Parliament. If Parliament wants a nuclear reactor, a high speed rail line or a reservoir built it can just pass a law to make it happen. If Parliament no longer wants to admit illegal migrants, it can just pass a law to do that too. And yet our political class seem unable to even conceive of the power they possess. Part of this is no doubt because of the “social conformity” which Tom Jones has identified. Our party system selects for obedient conformists, who are unlikely to embrace radical change. Perhaps too there’s an element of learned helplessness, with politicians having forgotten the power they can wield, if they have the will.
