As Sir Keir Starmer and Labour take power, the air is filled with their lamentations about inheriting “broken” health and prison services and “the worst set of circumstances since the Second World War”.
Clearly, it is a sound political tactic to blame the outgoing government for all ills in the country and set a low bar for your own success. But it is essential to try to get a less partisan take on how far the UK really is “broken” – economically, socially, politically, administratively – and how much the new Government can feasibly do to fix its myriad problems and incipient crises.
I travelled around England in the six weeks before the general election, visiting places like Dover, Newcastle and Herefordshire, which I had written about in some detail five years earlier at the height of the Brexit crisis in 2019, shortly before Boris Johnson became prime minister.
Both then and now, I found this an encouraging experience because, wherever I went, I met intelligent and public-spirited people holding well-informed and nuanced opinions. This was uplifting to the spirits because I seldom see people like this in “vox pop” interviews on television and radio that often give the impression that the UK is heavily populated by inarticulate dolts.
Cheery gloom is arguably the default position of the English character, so one should be wary of believing that those who declare the country “broken” really believe anything of the sort. They know that the UK has not collapsed like Lebanon or Libya, but they do feel that the country is more or less moribund and the powers that be have failed to do much about it.
‘Angry and resigned’
“The vote for Brexit was a cry of despair,” says John Tomaney, professor of urban and regional planning at University College London, speaking of why people in North East England voted for Brexit. “People were asked if they were happy with the way things were and they said they were not.”
The EU was the power centre against which voters in a de-industrialised, deprived region like this chose to kick back in 2016. Eight years later much the same feeling of anger fuelled the overwhelming rejection of the Tories on 4 July. In both cases, the majority of voters were determined on getting rid of an unacceptable status quo, but dubious about how far the future is likely to become significantly better.
“They are not angry and apathetic, but angry and resigned,” commented one observer in Tyneside who did not want his name published.
Such popular scepticism is realistic. After two years reassuring the political, media and financial establishments that they are the exact opposite of Jeremy Corbyn, Starmer and his team will not easily change their political spots now.
“I think Starmer will play it safe like [Tony] Blair,” says Alex Snowdon, a teacher who lives in Hexham in Northumberland. “If the Labour leaders are not radical out of office, I doubt if they will change much once they form the Government.” He pointed to their manifesto pledge to recruit 6,500 extra teachers as but one underwhelming sign of their ambitions, but he nevertheless intended to vote for Labour, correctly predicting that Hexham, a rural constituency, would turn against the Tories for the first time in a century.
A greater role for the state
Labour campaigned under the single word slogan “Change”, but made clear that the transformation it had in mind was above all else an absence of Tory chaos. In terms of new policy departures, Starmer has offered thin gruel, emphasising that his government would not have the money to improve social services degraded by austerity, neglect and under investment. Nevertheless, the civil service background of Starmer and his top lieutenants suggested a greater role for the state in promoting growth, while the discredited ideological mantras of Thatcherism about the virtues of privatisation, outsourcing and a small state are abandoned.
Yet greater government willingness to use state power begs a more fundamental question about how great its capacity to get things done really is these days. Is the UK state still powerful enough to grapple with a vast array of social and economic issues? A positive answer to these questions is by no means certain after decades during which government agencies have been hollowed out and de-skilled by ferocious cuts in budgets, over-reliance on outside consultants, and a dizzying merry-go-round of government ministers supposedly in charge.
Simply put, has the British state by now sawed through so many of the branches on which it traditionally sits that it is now chronically unstable and no longer has the strength to rescue itself?
The magic wand of compulsory housing targets
The UK is not a failed state, but a state that has recently clocked up a long and depressing tally of failures. During the Covid-19 pandemic, tens of billions of pounds were wasted on a non-operative test and trace system and disastrous PPE procurement.
The government defended itself by claiming that the dire nature of the emergency explained and excused its errors. But the fiasco of the vastly expensive HS2 rail project, cancelled last year by Rishi Sunak, is stark evidence that the UK is no longer able to plan or implement big and complex projects. Despite this, Chancellor Rachel Reeves confidently announced her plan to force local councils to build 1.5 million houses over five years by waving the magic wand of compulsory housing targets and planning deregulation.
Intractable challenges face all post-industrial economies like the UK’s, and both Tory and Labour governments have tried and failed to cope with them since the 1950s. Even successful policies have not delivered as much as hoped. For example, one approach that did appear to work at first was the modernisation of the centres of cities like Birmingham, Manchester, Cardiff, Newcastle so they would become a hub for universities, high-tech and creative industries, and financial institutions. These would in turn jump-start economic development in the rest of the urban area.
To a degree this worked as city centres became attractive places to work or visit. Yet, with the possible exception of Manchester, city centres owe more to public funding than the private sector, and where the latter does play a role it is often in commercial property development.
An all-purpose wrecking ball
The “levelling up” agenda of the Boris Johnson government and its successors – the name has just been scrapped by Labour – was a recognition of the need for state aid for “left behind” Britain. Ian Lavery, a left-wing Labour MP for Blyth and Ashington in the former mining, shipbuilding and heavy engineering area of south-east Northumberland, says that although “levelling up was a slogan, it was an important one”, as it focused attention on deprivation of the North.
Its implementation was scatter gun and ill-planned, but it did produce a new £300m railway connection between Blyth and Newcastle along with other government-financed projects. But Britishvolt, a private company which was to manufacture electric batteries for vehicles and provide 3,000 well-paid jobs never got off the ground, despite a £100m state subsidy, and went into administration after two years in 2023.
Tory failure may not explain everything that has gone wrong in Britain, but on occasion it has acted as an all-purpose wrecking ball. One of the UK’s most important successes has been higher education, with its universities attracting first year international students in 2021-22 worth an estimated £41.9bn to the economy in the course of their studies.
The high fees paid by foreign students, the majority from China, India and Nigeria – three times the £9,250 in annual tuition fees paid by British students – subsidised the latter and kept the university sector afloat. But the vagaries of British immigration and visa policy are now capsizing this highly successful industry by deterring foreign students and potentially lumbering the British Government with either raising fees for British students or bailing out the weaker universities.
“I don’t see students as immigrants anyway,” says Chris Day, vice chancellor of Newcastle University and chair of the Russel Group of 24 top universities. “It doesn’t make sense.”
Short-sighted
Some administrative branches providing crucial support to the British state have been sawn through during the last decade and are beginning to fall. Some universities may go bankrupt in the near future, but several local councils are already far down this dark road.
The reason is simply that government drastically cut its payments to them, while calls on their services soared. Starved of central government funding, they today collectively owe an astonishing £97.8bn to lenders, or £1,400 per person in the UK. In Woking, the debt is no less than £19,000 per person and the council proposes to shut everything from public toilets to football pitches.
Yet these shrunken over-burdened local councils are to be at the centre of Rachel Reeves’s plan to build 1.5 million houses, which necessarily means constructing new sewage and water systems, roads, schools and medical facilities.
I suspect that the Government is underestimating the popular resistance it will face as it seeks to impose giant housing schemes on communities that do not want them. Cavalierly dismissing those seeking to defend the places where they live as selfish Nimbys (“not in my backyard”) is a short-sighted approach for which Labour may pay a heavy political price.
But unresponsive governments are not the main reason why so many in the UK feel that their lives are ever more determined by forces they cannot control, influence or even identify. I found the same sense of vulnerability expressed by a former seafarer in Dover, a farmer in Herefordshire, and a teacher in Tyneside. They know that globalisation and privatisation have created a more precarious world in which to live and there is not much they or even the Government can do about it.
The pollution problem
On 17 March, 2022, for instance, P&O Ferries, owned by Dubai-based DP World, suddenly sacked without consultation some 786 workers on its cross-channel ferries, a move that the company admitted was against the law. Those fired came mostly from Dover and the east Kent coast and they were replaced by agency workers from all over the world, some of whom were to be paid as little as £4.87 an hour. Transport minister Grant Shapps furiously denounced the mass sacking, but did nothing effective to reverse it.
A few weeks later, I was speaking to Stephen Ware, a farmer from near Weobley in Hereford, who pointed to a hillside where a cider apple orchard had just been grubbed up and to another orchard to which the same thing was about to happen. He used to have 65,000 apple trees, but had cut the number by a third because Heineken, the main purchaser of the apples, is less interested in cider these days. He has been left with large and expensive storage facilities for cider apples that he no longer needs.
An important issue in this part of Herefordshire, a long-held Conservative seat won by the Greens on 4 July, is the pollution of the River Wye by phosphate from the 23 million chickens that are being reared at any one time in the county. Chicken numbers increased sharply when Avara Foods, part owned by Cargill, the giant food company based in Minnesota, expanded its chicken processing plant in Hereford in 2014.
It now says it will move 160,000 tons of chicken manure a year out of the county, though local anti-pollution activists are doubtful if this will solve the pollution problem.
Not radical
More generally, Labour will struggle to reverse the comparative decline of a country that has had the lowest total investment in the G7 for 24 out of the last 30 years, according to the Institute for Public Policy Research.
Its manifesto pledges and policy announcements this week about planning, devolution and state investment are timid and paltry when set beside the multiple problems besetting the UK. Just as the new Government declared that increased private investment is the key to greater growth, the vacuum cleaner and air filter manufacturer Dyson announced that it is cutting 1,000 jobs in the UK.
Labour’s heavily criticised vagueness on policy proved a spectacularly successful strategy during the general election campaign. The party avoided alienating or giving ammunition to other important players such as the media, business and political establishments. Pundits point out that Labour won only one third of the vote, but the right is shattered and divided as never before over the last 200 years.
Labour is in a very powerful political position for the moment, but voters opposing the EU in 2016 and the Tories in 2024 frequently detest the UK establishment of all political stripes. The centre left benefited from this revulsion this time, but a realigned Conservative/Reform UK alliance might do so next time around.
A more stable and less chaotic government brings undoubted benefits, but a badly wounded UK state, in a country damaged if not broken, needs to do much more if it is to escape an increasingly toxic status quo.
Starmer, Reeves and others newly in charge are not radical by background and temperament, but they may become so by necessity.
Patrick Cockburn has written a series of essays, illustrated by his son Henry, about the state of the UK. You can read his dispatch from Canterbury here; Dover here; Newcastle here; and Herefordshire here