The week that showed why voters are so angry with Britain's politicians

Telegraph

5 hours ago

If you were to try and sum up the British state this week, you would be spoiled for choice. After a few days in which failure after failure came to light – from the damning review into the official response to grooming gangs to the slow-motion crash of the High Speed 2 project to the ability of pro-Palestine activists to damage RAF planes on an airfield unhindered – you might charitably opt for 'incompetent'. A better phrase would be 'head in the sand'.
The failures in these cases, as with the inability of the Westminster system to respond to public demands on migration, rein in the out-of-control spending of the benefits system or perform its most fundamental function of providing security from criminals, all have different underlying causes.
But at the core of each is a strange lassitude, a body politic that no longer responds to crises that seem startlingly obvious to voters, remaining instead locked in a spiral of internal obsessions, agonising over the idea that to confront gangs might trigger episodes of racism and continuing with projects that long ago failed any sane cost-benefit analysis.
The result is a state that is less 'managed decline' than 'unmanaged collapse', with no obvious pressure valve in sight prior to the next election. One way or another, something will happen to force the British state to pull its head from the sand. The question is whether it happens in time to prevent an explosion. Or not.
A week of failures
In recent years it became popular to discuss the 'volatility' of the British electorate. People who had previously voted loyally for one party were suddenly up for grabs; votes swung wildly between parties, giving first one, then the other a crushing majority or unexpected defeat at the ballot box.
It's true that one way of reading this pattern is to simply say that voters are less loyal to an ideal than they were in the past. Another interpretation, however, would be to view these as attempts by voters to find some way – any way – of shocking Westminster out of its default pathway. If there were any doubt remaining, the failures laid bare over the last week illustrate just how badly a course correction is needed.
First, we had Baroness Casey's review into the grooming gangs scandal. This made for tough reading. It laid out how police officers had responded to children pleading for their help: 'sometimes turning a blind eye but often actively enabling abuse', and accused some of being 'incompetent at best' and 'corrupt at worst'. It showed how officials had attempted to dismiss the issue of ethnicity out of hand, uncomfortable with the implications for Britain's multicultural success story, terrified of 'community tensions'. It all but accused the Home Office of fabricating data to maintain there was no particular problem with men from Pakistani backgrounds. Worse still, in doing so it told us very little we didn't already know.
We knew that officials were tacitly or actively complicit in what unfolded. We knew that they had effectively deemed it better for society if children were raped and government covered it up, than to risk 'tensions' by intervening. We knew that they had arrested parents who had tried to save their children.
News reports and official reviews had laid this story bare for over a decade. Yet even with the failures visible to all, Westminster has proved utterly unwilling to look closely at the extent of offending across Britain, to learn the lessons necessary to fight ongoing abuse, and to deliver justice to those who were wronged. It was more important to protect what was left of the narrative of a diverse nation united than to look honestly at the consequences of previous waves of migration.
This is still going on. Casey's review highlighted that 'a significant proportion' of the live police cases she examined involved foreign nationals and asylum seekers. Examining the extent of criminal activity by these groups is hard, given that the Government refuses regularly to publish data on the subject. But data from Freedom of Information requests has shown that a quarter of all sex assaults on women successfully prosecuted in Britain are carried out by foreign nationals, with another 8 per cent by offenders of 'unknown' nationalities.
One response to this would be to publish this evidence, alongside data on fiscal contributions and benefits withdrawals, and use it to inform policy on migration. Yet for a political class that sees immigration less as a tool to reshape the country for the better and more as a necessity, the economic and cultural lifeblood of the nation, these are figures to be hidden away. Indeed, for those who see it as an axiomatic good with no need for supporting evidence, there is a moral imperative to crush opposition to it. Virtue comes not in addressing associated problems – the province of populists – but in being blind to them.
High speed to nowhere
And this scandal is only one manifestation of a deeper disease: Britain appears to be effectively incapable of changing course, locked into assumptions and decisions made decades ago.
The unravelling of the High Speed 2 project is another prime example from the last week. The economic case for the project collapsed almost as soon as it was published. A project linking London, Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds, originally set to cost £53 billion in today's money, grew out of all control, with costs spiralling past £120 billion before the sheer scale of the failure triggered the Conservative government's decision to slash the project down to a far less ambitious link between London and Birmingham. Even this, however, is set to cost £67 billion. A project that has been slashed in scope has still somehow risen in price.
In the process, the cost-benefit ratio has crumbled. We can attribute some mistakes to naivety at the outset; beliefs about greater efficiencies, or the correct way to allocate risk between the government and contractors. But over the course of the project, even as costs rose, the value of the line somehow kept pace – until suddenly it didn't.
The project is now delayed again, with inquiries underway into how the cost of infrastructure has grown so rapidly and the Cabinet Office facing accusations of ignoring concerns over fraud and financial mismanagement.
The grooming of children and failed infrastructure projects are about as far away as it is possible to be in policy terms. The manner of the failures, though, is instructive: signals that something is going awry are getting scrambled, incentives for individuals to act are lacking. No-one capable is across the details and willing to speak out about failures.
A failed state
The list of policy failures in Britain is long. Some symptoms are directly visible in the state's activities. Take the sheer size of NHS waiting lists in a system that translated a 27 per cent cash increase in the budget from 2019 to 2022 into an absolute reduction in the number of people it treated. A 16 per cent rise in the number of full-time equivalent junior doctors alongside an 11 per cent increase in the number of nurses, has led to productivity levels 8 per cent below the 2019 baseline.
We could also talk about the spiralling levels of debt, and the fiscal plans that have caused the Office for Budget Responsibility to warn that we are on an unsustainable course, or the benefits system which appears utterly unable to distinguish between the disabled and the workshy.
Into this category, also, goes the shoplifting epidemic, the release of prisoners to make room in overcrowded jails, the inability of the state to combat actual crime paired with its obsession with policing speech in case stray thoughts ignite the riots politicians fear are permanently just around the corner.
Other signs of failure are in the private sector, in inflation-adjusted wages that are still below their 2008 peak, in housing that remains stubbornly out of reach of those without substantial assistance from the bank of mum and dad.
People in Western countries know what failed states look like. They look like Somalia, or South Sudan. The government's grip disintegrates, power fragments and society fragments with it. Basic services collapse and with it the safety of the population.
But as the American economist Mancur Olson has pointed out, developed states have a different failure mode. They become too stable, insulated from political upheaval, bound up by interest groups that use their grasp on the institutions to strangle anything which might disrupt their position.
Britain's failure mode looks a lot more like the second than the first. We might not be matching the fall of Rome for debauchery, but we are certainly doing our best with a particular form of decadent self-indulgence: from social capital to physical capital, our leaders are eating the seed-corn, running the country down without replacing what they take out.
'There's a bunch of obvious, relatively surface phenomena, like the NHS, or the stupid boats, that are the visible manifestations of things not working,' says Dominic Cummings, the former adviser to Boris Johnson, in an interview with The Telegraph that you can read in full on Sunday.
'But I think what's happening at a deeper level is we are living through the same cycle that you see repeatedly in history play out, which is that over a few generations, the institutions and ideas of the elites start to come out of whack with reality.
'The ideas don't match, the institutions can't cope. And what you see repeatedly is this cycle of elite blindness, the institutions crumbling – and then suddenly crisis kicks in and then institutions collapse.'
The Blob
For a useful short-hand, we can borrow the description of these elites which is often attributed to Cummings: 'the Blob' – an emergent phenomenon with no governing intelligence and no clear leaders, instead resulting from people from the same classes, with the same beliefs and the same incentives, taking the same decisions across public life.
Where do the civil servants on the prestigious Fast Stream (a program to accelerate the careers of graduates coming into Whitehall) come from? From families who overwhelmingly had university-educated parents working in 'higher managerial, administrative and professional occupations', arriving in government after education at Oxbridge or other Russell Group universities where the consensus is stifling: one in five academics feel unable to teach controversial views. Given that one in five academics vote for Right-wing parties, and three quarters for the Left, it's not terribly hard to work out which views might count as controversial in this milieu.
We might equally ask where Cabinet ministers, senior judges – and, yes, newspaper columnists – come from. The resulting gaps between the political classes and the public can be vast. Shortly after the 2019 election, one study concluded that Conservative MPs were not only more socially liberal than Conservative voters, but of the median for all voters, adopting positions not that far away from Labour's base.
The result is that even when signals of voter discontent do cut through the noise surrounding Westminster, they are sometimes simply ignored. In 2010, 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2019 the party or cause offering reductions in migration won. The electorate's reward for this was Boris Johnson's systematic dismantling of our borders, a quadrupling in net migration over its 2019 level to 906,000 per year.
There's nothing wrong with having some merit in your meritocracy, but when people are drawn from the same backgrounds, they will tend to think in the same ways. In the political system, this manifests as a blindness to the idea that the values of politicians can drift from those held by voters, an unwillingness to deliver what the population want; self-centred governance by an establishment class propped up by its hold on the traditional party duopoly and the major institutional organs of British life.
One manifestation of this group's beliefs is a form of pathological compassion driven by insulation from its effects: an unwillingness to jail prisoners, turn away illegal migrants or crack down on benefits cheats because to do so would be cruel. The end result of this 'kindness' is often to kill the system that provided for those who were genuinely in need.
In toxic combination with these beliefs is a political structure that works actively to evade accountability, with decision-makers rarely facing serious consequences for their failures; so long as they follow process, scrutiny is generally evaded.
The crisis of competence
Alongside the problem of willingness is the problem of ability. Public fury with politicians is not helped at all by their willingness to make grandiose claims that they fail to live up to. In the words of political strategist James Frayne, 'politicians of all parties have created a toxic climate by assuring voters they can solve practically any problem regardless of size and complexity, while permanently under-delivering'.
This has 'fuelled immense public cynicism because voters assume failure derives from incompetence and corruption – always moral corruption, sometimes even financial corruption. This cynicism has become one of the most defining and corrosive aspects of modern electoral politics. Voters increasingly think the worst of politicians and what drives them. They are prone to think they're mostly interested in lining their own pockets or clinging on to power.'
'On HS2, people will be asking whether politicians found themselves under the influence of big businesses, rather than delivering jobs for the North. On the grooming gangs, others will be asking whether politicians sacrificed vulnerable kids to make sure they didn't lose friends and votes. Such feelings absolutely aren't levelled at any party in particular. While Labour will get more short-term anger on grooming gangs, that's only because they were forthright in suggesting calls for proper investigations were politically-motivated. There is a widespread sense that all politicians are the same.'
This leaves open a fundamental question: is there a fundamental limit on the British state's ability to deliver things that it seemed able to do just two decades ago? Or, is the disconnect between reality and the signals reaching politicians (through the ideological predisposition of their civil servants) so great that many MPs and ministers are no longer capable of reaching sane evaluations?
Reforming the state
In Nigel Farage's view, 'everything the British state touches collapses, regardless of colour'. With his party surging in the polls – the beneficiary of two decades of failed red and blue governance – he has every right to pin the blame for these failures on the selection into government of a certain cadre of establishment true believer.
'There are two types of people in politics; those who want to be something, and those who want to do something', Farage says. 'And the be-something's have dominated for decades: Oxbridge kids who want to be PM, cabinet minister, MP – not driven by thoughts about how to make the country better.'
The resulting consensus is stifling. 'Everyone wants to be nice. If you're nice, you're liked and socially acceptable. And anyone with a different opinion is unacceptable'. But this doesn't work when the state is failing: 'When Starmer u-turns on rhetoric, don't believe it will lead to reality because it won't. He's saying it to fend off Reform. He has no intention of acting on it.'
Competence, too comes in for a blast. 'As a result, we get cabinets full of people lacking in real life experience. They haven't run businesses. They haven't achieved anything. It's mediocrity – we're governed by people who are unqualified to be a middle manager in an Asda in Birmingham'.
For Farage, there is only one way left out. 'This country needs political surgery through every single sector of public life. We need a very gentle, British, political revolution. I'm the moderate. If I don't succeed, watch what comes after me.'
The canonisation of Saint Luigi
The appearance of a new piece of graffiti under a paint-spattered archway in east London would normally draw no more attention than the tagged scrawl it overwrote. In February, however, a new painting briefly drew attention from segments of the world's press. The artwork shows Luigi Mangione, in his green hoodie, framed by the yellow painted bricks of the arch – a halo against a black background.
In December 2024, Mangione was arrested on suspicion of the murder of Brian Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare who was gunned down in the street. And almost overnight, he became a cult hero for an extraordinary number of disaffected Americans, who described him as 'Saint Luigi' – a description that images of Mangione bearing a red sacred heart, right hand raised in blessing, make almost literal.
Whatever else we might think about Mangione, on this specific and narrow point, it is probably not a good signal of the health of society when its elite class is widely despised. In Britain, this has thankfully achieved expression primarily through political means, although last year's Southport riots were a warning sign about what might come if failures continue.
King's College Professor David Betz made headlines with his prediction that Britain could fall into civil war without a change of course. Yet his concerns are shared by some of those on the ground. In the words of one former police officer, in the aftermath of recent public disorder police forces set about working out what to do in response, handling 'resourcing, moving people around the country, calling in the Armed Forces if needed. What they've never really thought about is what they would do if officers decided the risk was too great, and simply didn't come to work. Policing might be able to fill gaps by cancelling days off and extending shifts, but that tempo can't be maintained for long.'
More ominously still, 'they've never really considered what would happen in a conflict where officers identified with one side enough to join it. Police officers are vetted, but not with that in mind. And police equipment already goes missing at rather an alarming rate. It's not unlikely that if serious violence started officers might start disappearing to defend their homes and families with their issued weapons – including firearms – if they lose faith in the state's ability to do so.'
One more roll for the ballot box
Adam Smith's remark that there is 'a great deal of ruin in a nation' was not meant to be an invitation to politicians to attempt to quantify the exact degree. Regrettably, generations of British leaders seem to have acted as if things will probably be fine whether they succeed or fail.
The last year of British politics has given every indication of a system under intolerable strain. With the establishment facade beginning to crack, Westminster has a short window in which to change course voluntarily. If that passes, revolution – whether in the form of Prime Minister Nigel Farage, or something more dramatic – could be the result.