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New Statesman
2 days ago
- Politics
- New Statesman
The decline and fall of Great Britain
Illustration by Gary Waters / Ikon Images The truly unnerving thing about the fall of Rome (yes, I'm going there again, sorry) was that most Romans probably didn't notice it had happened. The final western emperor was formally deposed on 4 September 476 – but everyone, including the bloke who'd deposed him, assumed the place was just being run from Constantinople now, and it took a couple more centuries of sackings, plague and things breaking and not being fixed before anyone decided the empire had actually ended long ago. To those who'd lived through it, the story was more one of decline than fall. Things breaking and not being fixed – the sneaking suspicion that things might just keep getting worse – has been a theme of British life of late. In too many towns, boarded up shopfronts predominate; shops and restaurants that closed during Covid and never reopened, or did reopen, but as low-value and slightly suspect operations like vape shops or nail bars. A general air of scuzziness has crept in, as councils make their final metamorphosis from the once proud local corporations that built this country, to struggling and underfunded social care funding bodies with an occasional sideline in bins. Meanwhile, social media is awash with stories of police ignoring petty crimes, and immediately marking inquiries as closed, as if there's no value in investigating and nothing to be done. (When someone is caught expressing support for Palestine, at least, Kent police are on it.) Even in London, which for all its problems remains far richer than the country it governs, commentators whine about graffiti on tube trains, station lifts out of use due to unspecified motor faults, the year it'll take to replace just four escalators at Cutty Sark station. Such criticisms are heard most often from the right-wingers who seek to demonise the city and its liberal Muslim mayor alike – but they resonate nonetheless, because they're not entirely wrong. It does feel absurd that a city that just a few years ago was New York's only plausible challenger for the title of 'capital of the world' now can't find the parts to fix a bloody lift. Consider the sorry saga of Hammersmith Bridge, which connects two districts of plush west London. In the 1820s, the bridge took just three years to build; in the 1880s, just five to replace after a boat smacked into it. Now, it's been closed to motor traffic for six years and counting – the cars may not matter; the buses surely do – and no one has offered a timetable for when that might change. Everyone is waiting on someone else to pay. I could keep banging on about both the sense of decline and the apparent inability of our government to arrest it – I've not even mentioned, say, the looming collapse of the university sector, taking a bunch of regional economies with it, or the 20-year failure to even think about social care. But I want to devote the rest of my wordcount instead to the psychic cost of all this. For quite a while this country was blessed with a sense of, for want of a better word, progress. Many lived hard lives; for certain people in certain places, things could get worse as well as better. But if you look at the state of the nation as a whole at any point in the 19th or 20th century, you could generally rely on things having improved visibly over the previous, say, 20 years. That no longer seems to hold true. We're not significantly richer than we were in 2005, but the cost of living is significantly higher, and the cost of having somewhere to live higher still. Worse, a lot of basic state functions are in remission. We no longer trust that the police will come when called, or you can see a doctor when sick. And we have a prime minister who doesn't recognise that anything has broken. Perhaps the idea of progress was an aberration. For much of history, even the bits that didn't have Rome to look back on, the golden age was assumed to lay behind, not ahead, of the present. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe But that sense that things would get better made a whole load of otherwise near impossible things plausible. You could redistribute resources, because the size of the pie was growing. You could ask people to make sacrifices, because tomorrow would be better than today. How do you do that when too many people don't have enough, and no longer trust their sacrifice will even help? How can you have progressive politics without any sense of progress? Tomorrow is not looking better than today. Thanks to a combination of demographics and economics, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, there are excellent reasons to imagine it might actually be worse. At least when the Tories were in office, we had the day that they'd lose to look forward to. Now the only plausible change in the offing is Nigel bloody Farage. The emperor isn't coming to save us. He may yet be the one to cut the aqueducts. [See also: Gaza will radicalise a generation] Related
New Statesman
09-07-2025
- Politics
- New Statesman
Can jury-less trials save our justice system?
Illustration by Gary Waters / Ikon Images It's hard to establish quite where the legal maxim 'justice delayed is justice denied' comes from. The Justice Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, likes saying it, as did her predecessor, Alex Chalk, and his predecessor-but-one, Brandon Lewis. It's often attributed to William Gladstone, but the notion that the timely conclusion of a legal issue is fundamental to a functioning justice system pre-dates the Victorian prime minister by hundreds of years. One such variation can even be found in the Magna Carta: 'To no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay right or justice.' Echoing the sentiment is the retired judge Brian Leveson, who is chairing the government's review into a broken courts system. Leveson recently warned that radical reform is required to tackle a backlog of almost 80,000 cases that is causing trials for serious criminal offences to be postponed until as late as 2029. Picking up on a theme trailed in recent months by the justice minister, Sarah Sackman, one of the review's key recommendations will be to scale back a pillar of the legal system also enshrined in the Magna Carta: the right to a trial by jury. There is precedent. Less serious 'summary offences' such as driving violations and minor assaults are already heard not by 12 of a defendant's peers but by a panel, including a district judge and two magistrates (who are unpaid and do not require legal qualifications). Serious offences, such as murder or rape, can only be heard by a Crown court with a jury. In the middle sit offences – burglary, drug possession, fraud – where the defendant can choose where they would like their case to be heard. Leveson's proposal is to restrict these defendants' right to a jury, setting up an intermediate court to hear some of these 'either way' cases. 'There's no choice. We cannot carry on with the present system,' he told the Observer. 'Justice delayed is justice denied.' The disintegration of the justice system is one of the most underexamined crises of the past decade. In December 2019, before reports of coronavirus hit the headlines, the Crown court backlog was more than 37,400, and it already took more than a year for the most serious cases to come to trial. Then, in the early months of the pandemic, hearings were suspended completely. This came after a decade in which the Ministry of Justice became a poster department for austerity, its budget slashed and a third of court buildings sold off between 2010 and 2019 in the name of economy. The money received into government coffers in return was pitiful: the sale of 126 courts yielded just £34m. Several of these buildings subsequently became film sets for legal dramas. In January 2021, when the court backlog was more than 54,000 and so-called Nightingale courts were being hurriedly set up to deal with it, Blackfriars Crown Court was filled not with judges, defendants and legal personnel, but with Netflix producers shooting the crime thriller Top Boy. Her Majesty's Court & Tribunal Service even inquired about hiring the building it had once owned to hear actual cases, rather than fictional ones. The consequences of this catastrophe are lives put on hold: defendants losing jobs and relationships as they await the chance to clear their name; victims trapped in limbo, unable to process their trauma. As trials are listed far in the future, witnesses withdraw and cases collapse, enabling dangerous perpetrators to walk free and reoffend. The witness attrition rate for rape and sexual assault is particularly dire, with 325 out of 4,317 prosecutions derailed last year – a fivefold increase since 2019. This national scandal should be a source of shame for the Tories – but no one wants to relitigate the Covid era now, any more than they want to look too hard at whose decision it was to scale back access to justice, as though fewer courthouses would lead to a decline in crime. It is the job of Mahmood to mitigate the damage inflicted by the likes of Chris Grayling. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe And so jury trials, which cost ten times that of magistrate hearings, are in the firing line. Replacing them with a judge will not be an easy case to make (not least as there is a 300,000-case backlog in magistrates courts too). Back in June 2020 when I interviewed legal professionals about the impact of the pandemic, one leading barrister warned that the 'jury trial has a Magna Carterish Brexity resonance to it that brings liberals and traditionalists together; restricting it would be picking a fight with Keir Starmer and Jacob Rees-Mogg at the same time'. Five years and a doubled courts backlog later, expect the backlash to Leveson's proposals to be furious. There will be much railing about 'two-tier justice' – a favourite phrase of the shadow justice secretary, Robert Jenrick. It will be interpreted as yet another Labour betrayal, a sign of this country's decline, the hacking away at public services to save cash. The government will be hoping that radical reform can speed up cases and thus restore faith in a system that is failing everyone except criminals. The status quo is both unjust and unjustifiable, and the idea of trading the right to a jury for swifter trials has been backed by many legal specialists, among them five former lord chancellors (several of them Tories) and two former lord chief justices. But the public may not be so easily convinced. The risk is that, with confidence already damaged by years of deterioration, this creates the perception of justice on the cheap, removing a right etched into the British consciousness by centuries of tradition and cemented there by legal dramas filmed in the very courthouses we sold off. [See also: Robert Jenrick and the myth of 'two-tier justice'] Related
New Statesman
18-06-2025
- Business
- New Statesman
Labour needs to be honest about tax rises
Illustration by Gary Waters / Ikon Images If you wanted a single poll to explain how we all got into this mess, you could do worse than the YouGov one dated 2 June. Asked what they think should be done about defence spending, 49% of British voters think it should be increased, 22% that it should remain the same and only 11% that it should decrease. That, for a question about a normally abstruse corner of public policy, feels a fairly compelling result. Asked their views on who should pay for it, though, and the picture gets a lot cloudier: only 29% support an increase in taxes on people like themselves, while 57% oppose it. Restrict the poll to those who say they strongly hold those views, those numbers become 6% strongly support, 33% strongly oppose. That, there, is British politics in a nutshell. We want the thing. We just think someone else should pay for the thing. I suspect you could repeat this exercise with most bits of public policy. Many people worry about the social care system that may await them or their loved ones in old age, not to mention terrible pay rates for those who work there. But nobody thinks that they are the ones who should put their hands in their pockets to fix it, and any politician who suggests otherwise is effectively signing their own suicide note. And so the local councils that built so much of this country continue their gradual transformation into insolvent social care funding bodies with an unprofitable side hustle in bins. It's not that people don't understand that these things cost money: it's just money that they assume will come from elsewhere. I'm unavoidably reminded of the 1998 episode of The Simpsons in which Homer is elected sanitation commissioner after campaigning under the slogan 'Can't someone else do it?' and promptly ruins the town. If the public are deluded about the mismatch between the demands they place on the state, and the taxes they're willing to pay, then they've been encouraged in this delusion by the political class. The economic booms of Thatcher were built on unrepeatable giveaways of state assets or tax cuts funded by North Sea oil. New Labour used the proceeds of big finance to rebuild the state while keeping income taxes low, which worked brilliantly, until one day it didn't. Then David Cameron and George Osborne preached austerity and the need to shrink the state, all the while making sure that the bits that mattered to their voters remained protected. At every point, those in power have been distinctly reluctant to tell the electorate the awkward truth that they might need to contribute more. After all that, is it any wonder that we ended up with Boris Johnson, a prime minister who'd elevated cake-ism into an ideology? For decades the public has been told they can have US tax rates and European public services. The country has been led somewhere closer to the opposite. The current government has two big problems. (Actually, it has dozens, but let's focus on two.) One is in having inherited a mess. The other is the lack of a clear message or organising principle. At risk of committing the columnist's cardinal sin ('This latest news shows why they should do what I've always wanted them to do anyway'), I think there's a single solution to both these problems: Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Tell the truth. Be the government that levels with the electorate about what it and can't do with current levels of resources, and what choices we realistically have about the future. Tell them that, as things stand, the state is broken, and that if we want to fix it we have to pay. That would make it easier to make the case for the further tax rises that, I'm sorry, are almost certainly coming. It would allow the Prime Minister to adopt a tone of moral seriousness that fits both the geopolitical moment and his own personality, while framing Reform and the Tories as an irresponsible bunch of chancers treating the electorate like children. And it'd help sell the painful choices that lie ahead. Being able to explain things like the now reversed Winter Fuel Allowance cuts would never have made them popular – but it would at least make them explicable. Without the narrative to explain it, policies like that just look mean. I'm not saying 'if you want to fix stuff, we'll all need to contribute more' will be popular: if it were, someone would have tried it by now. But it does at least have the advantage of being true. The government is almost certainly going to have to raise taxes: they have to find a way to do it. [See more: Abortion's unwelcome return to British politics] Related
New Statesman
21-05-2025
- General
- New Statesman
Britain is failing children in care
Illustration by Gary Waters / Ikon Images There is no denying that, for so many looked-after children, growing up in care can be brutal and traumatic. I should know. I was looked after for most of my childhood, shunted between a range of foster homes in south-east London, as well as doing a stint in a residential care home with pre-teen boys of a similar age. In my case, it was necessary. But what concerns me is children being placed into care when it's avoidable – when there's a better alternative. The number of looked-after children in England is high – more than 80,000. And although statistics from the Department for Education show that only a small proportion of children in care are there due to being in 'low income' homes, that doesn't disprove that poverty is a significant factor for children entering the system. The UK's most senior family court judge, Andrew McFarlane, cites poverty as a key reason. It's also the case that poverty is often the trigger behind some of the other reasons children are placed into care – issues such as neglect and abuse. It demands concern that poverty can play such a vicious role in upending the life of a vulnerable child. Shouldn't the levers of the state be robust enough to prevent a child from being ripped apart from loved family members? Just as concerning are the distances some of them are being sent to live, away from their homes and that which they hold dear. According to research from Become, a charity for care leavers, one in five children in care in England is placed more than 20 miles from their family, friends, school and wider community. When the care system works, it can save the life of a child and steer them on to a positive path. I had the fortune of being supported by some incredible foster carers, care-home workers and social workers, all of whom played a critical role in my development and self-esteem. The fact remains, however, that many children in care are being let down. At its worst, time spent in care can compound trauma, deepen a child's sense of abandonment and diminish their life chances. Placing a child into the care system should only ever be a last resort. A greater emphasis should be placed on preventative measures, keeping families together wherever it's safe and possible to do so. A few years ago, I presented a BBC3 documentary, Split Up in Care, about the frequency of siblings being separated in the care system; it was rooted in my experience of sibling estrangement. I explored how some local authorities were pioneering preventative strategies. During the pandemic, Derby City Council introduced a rapid-response team to support vulnerable families and prevent more children from entering the system. In 15 months, they helped 60 families to stay together and prevented 50 sibling groups from being split up. While such measures form part of the solution, we must also recognise the challenge that leaving care presents for thousands of young people. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Despite a string of school suspensions and one exclusion, I studied history at the University of Cambridge. It was something my local authority celebrated: a care-experienced student had been accepted into Oxbridge. To them, it was a case of social care having 'worked well'. Yet, despite me being on the receiving end of platitudes and adulation, the reality of leaving care was tumultuous. My foster family let me go when I was 18. As well as studying for my A-levels, I had to prepare for independent living and moving into a council flat. Alongside sorting out student bursaries and loans, I also had to bid for council properties and budget for home furnishings. I should have been able to focus solely on my education, but that 'luxury' was never afforded to me. Perhaps most challenging was that I wouldn't receive funding for both student accommodation and a London council flat. I could either stay in London and get a council flat, or go to Cambridge and lose my bidding priority for the flat. This was problematic because my Cambridge college didn't offer year-round accommodation. Only after I contacted my local MP did I receive the support to both attend my university of choice and have a home. Why should any teenager have to be so resilient? So overwhelming were the pressures of leaving care that I nearly declined my Cambridge offer. How many young people, on the cusp of leaving care, are giving up on their ambitions and potential because of the immediacy of survival? University and other forms of higher education are not being pursued by many leaving care. I'd suggest this is not due to a lack of interest or ability, but the suffocating demands care leavers face when it comes to independence. The chance to dream is a privilege that many leaving care aren't given. This stunted potential affects society deeply, including care-experienced people forming large proportions of the homeless, young offending and adult offending populations. In 2022, the Welsh government piloted a basic income scheme for those leaving care. While its success is yet to be determined, one must appreciate the effort made to ease the pressure on those confronting the brutality of adulthood and independence. So many in care have known poverty – we must offer them a route out of it. The case for better support for those leaving care is beyond clear. Hopefully, our authorities are prudent enough to ensure that the children's care system ends up doing what it says on the tin: caring. Ashley John-Baptiste is the author of 'Looked After: A Childhood in Care' (Hodder) [See also: The brain behind Labour's EU deal] Related
