A country on the slide

Perhaps no phrase more neatly sums up the past fifteen or so years of British politics than “Broken Britain”. The expression, which actually started on the right to describe the apparent social decay under Gordon Brown, has become a catch-all refrain for every inconvenience and disappointment that defines life in modern Britain: late trains, cancelled trains, extortionately expensive trains; long waits to see a doctor; parasitic landlords; mean and unreliable public services; last orders at the pub at 10pm; yet another prime minister; rivers filled with sewage; a low-wage economy that undervalues everyone from social workers to book critics. “Broken Britain” is the shared lament, perhaps one of the few unifying feelings Britons have left.

Broken Britain has also become a subgenre in publishing. Titles such as Isabel Hardman’s Why We Get the Wrong Politicians (2018), Ian Dunt’s How Westminster Works … and Why it Doesn’t (2023), James O’Brien’s How They Broke Britain (2023) and Danny Dorling’s Shattered Nation (2023) tell their own story. Sam Freedman’s even more bluntly titled Failed State: Why nothing works and how we fix it is the latest addition to this catalogue, and it is unlikely to be the last. That as sober a political commentator as Freedman – a former government adviser and the author of a wonkish and widely read Substack – can write a book with such a bleak title and not be accused of hysteria is itself a grim reflection of where the country is. Everyone can agree on one thing, Freedman writes in his introduction: “the system is broken”.

It was once said that to be born British was to have won the lottery in life. Failed State suggests that, relative to being born in neighbouring countries, it is now somewhat of a misfortune. Although Britain’s top 3 per cent of earners remain comfortably among the global elite, “the average Brit is considerably poorer than their Western European counterparts, let alone Americans”. On current trends the average British household will be behind the average Slovenian one soon, and the average Polish one by the end of the 2020s. On top of their economic woes and rundown public services, Britons are also forced to suffer a chronically dysfunctional political system. Symptoms range from shortsightedness in policymaking to widespread disillusionment among the public. Freedman’s diagnosis of the condition is damning.

It is not that British politicians are uniquely incompetent or base. But it is possible that few democratic systems are as vulnerable to political incompetence and baseness as Britain’s is. This wasn’t always the case. Freedman shows how, while the nation’s ramshackle style of norms-based government has always relied on “good chaps” being in charge, four decades of intense centralization – initially turbocharged by Margaret Thatcher’s hatred of local government – has created one of the most powerful and ill-equipped executives in the democratic world. For elites with lots of money and a vested interest in hijacking government – press barons, oligarchs, property tycoons, CEOs of outsourcing companies – this centralization is a huge opportunity: accessing the control room of the British state couldn’t be simpler or more rewarding. You just walk into No 10 or find someone else who can. The opportunities for ordinary citizens to shape their local communities, by contrast, are rather harder to find.

Freedman doesn’t go into it, but Brexit might be the starkest expression of the system’s susceptibility to its own politicians. Rather than reflecting a great exercise in democracy or “the will of the British people”, Brexit ultimately revealed the astonishing power of the executive in British politics. The total absence of checks and balances was laid bare. There was no consultation process, no threshold as to what type of majority vote would be needed to shape the country’s fate in such a radical way, no explicit elaboration of what was even being voted for (it turned out that “leave the EU” could mean many things). In effect, a prime minister could flip a coin on the nation’s future because he felt it politically expedient to do so and had a hunch that he would win – hence, at least in part, the laissez-faire approach to losing. Britain’s decision to leave the EU ultimately occurred with less planning than many family holidays to the EU.

Freedman is clear-eyed about what solutions are needed: dispersing agency and resources to local government, reinstating councils’ ability to raise revenue through setting taxes on residents and local businesses, reversing Thatcher’s power grab. David Cameron’s project of austerity – continued at least in some form by every Tory leader to follow him – was particularly bruising. What Cameron called “the big society” was really a DIY society. The dramatic reduction in funding for local councils has led to widespread closures and contractions of public services and amenities. Councils are left to fight for ever-stingier grants from central government to keep their shows on the road, a process that is time-intensive, unpredictable and expensive: the main beneficiaries often seem to be consultants and outsourcing companies. Lucky councils receive money to build a public toilet, remove gum from the pavement or place a chess table in a local park; unlucky ones go bankrupt.

If Freedman’s book is the product of his close attention to and immersion in British politics, Michael Peel’s What Everyone Knows About Britain*: *Except the British springs from the author’s distance. Having spent two decades abroad reporting for the Financial Times, Peel now sees his country and its delusions of grandeur and stability with a foreign correspondent’s eyes. This is easy to believe – but the shock of the old can be misleading. Sometimes what strikes the returning hero as new or strange may simply reflect an amnesia born of absence.

Peel writes as if – in his own analogy – “Britain were a person” who needs “its friends to sit down and deliver it a few home truths”. And he eagerly volunteers himself for the role. But good advice is hard to give, and Peel provides more platitudes than revelations. He reveals that the country’s beloved tea is actually of Asian origin, and that its Oxbridge networks make it “prone to nepotism”, and he schoolmarmishly concludes: “I have developed a strong sense that Britain must do better, in its dealing with both its own people and the rest of the world”.

He is more illuminating on the countries he has reported from (including Japan and Nigeria, the Philippines and Thailand), and occasionally his international comparisons are enlightening. The chapter on North Sea oil, with its contrast between how Britain squandered its miraculous fortune and other countries, such as Norway and the UAE, saved theirs, is particularly valuable. Peel interviews one expert who suggests that the UK would now have one of the world’s top five largest sovereign wealth funds had its resources been managed differently. Instead, there is no sovereign wealth fund and the money is long gone.

The chief culprit is Thatcher. Even many of her purported opponents still see her as a thrifty figure who brought the country and its finances to order. In reality she may be the most profligate prime minister Britain has ever had. She blew a generational piece of good luck – the discovery of North Sea oil in 1969, followed by soaring prices in the wake of the 1979 energy crisis – on tax cuts and privatizations that overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy, fuelling inequality instead of investing the money for greater financial returns and into long-term public infrastructure projects. “It is remarkable that there is not more debate about what was done with Britain’s historic resource windfall”, Peel writes.

Remarkable but unsurprising. Thatcher worship is such a potent force in the UK that even the Labour Party adheres to its rituals. Writing in the Daily Telegraph last December, Keir Starmer praised her for dragging “Britain out of its stupor by setting loose our natural entrepreneurialism”. In March, Rachel Reeves, now the chancellor, called Thatcher a “visionary leader”. In a dispiriting inversion of J. M. Keynes’s dictum “anything we can do, we can afford”, Reeves recently declared: “if we cannot afford it, we cannot do it”. Thatcher would surely applaud this parsimonious interpretation of what we want from our politicians.

In Reeves’s framing, Britain is both broken and too broke to do anything about it. The Tories capsized the economy, so Labour shouldn’t rock the boat any further. This is far from the radicalism that Sam Freedman sees as necessary for fixing the country. He calls for “change on the scale of universal suffrage”, including a “restructuring of the state to shift power down from Whitehall to regional government”, adding that “Incremental improvements are not enough.” Neither of Britain’s two main parties seems likely to take his ideas up any time soon, but he is hopeful that this will change, if only because it must: Britain cannot afford to do otherwise.

Samuel Earle is the author of Tory Nation: The dark legacy of the world’s most successful political party, 2023

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