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 fundamentally broken’. He isn’t alone. More than half of MPs polled think Whitehall is working ‘badly’, and even our machine-man Prime Minister has observed that ‘too many people in Whitehall are comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline.’ Even the ‘delight’ with which ministers welcomed Alaa Abd El-Fattah to Britain has been blamed on ‘the supremacy of the Stakeholder State’ by Starmer’s former Director of Strategy, Paul Ovenden.
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 bought 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.
Politicians do seem to recognise there is a problem. This weekend, the Prime Minister said ‘The truth is since the crash in ’08, most people haven’t seen their living standards improve, they haven’t seen their public services move in the right direction, they’ve seen them move in the wrong direction, and they’ve lost trust in politics.’ Similarly, I believe that the Home Secretary means it when she describes the asylum system as ‘broken’.
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 government’s 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.
More recently, the Home Office announced new powers for Border Force. Under these rules, officers will be allowed to search migrants who have illegally entered our country. Our guardians will now be able to order migrants to remove their coats, jackets and even gloves in order to search for mobile phones and SIM cards. The aim of all this is to allow police to gather intelligence in order to ‘smash the gangs’.
The first, obvious response to this news is astonishment. It’s already a crime to enter the country without permission, carrying a maximum sentence of four years in prison. Every single illegal Channel arrival could have been arrested and searched under existing powers. The fact that we didn’t search the 41,472 people who illegally crossed the Channel in 2025 is shocking — and equally pitiful. We are facing a crisis which threatens not just the government, but the very legitimacy of the British state. These responses, these minor adjustments to a failed system, will not avert disaster. And so, the British state rumbles on towards some kind of collapse or another.
These responses, these minor adjustments to a failed system, will not avert disaster
There is much discussion about why the British state has become so incapable. Michael Gove blamed ‘the blob’. Politicians have often blamed quangos, and the decentralisation of authority brought about during the Blair governments, or legal obligations, such as those found in the Human Rights Act, the Modern Slavery Act and the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act. Tom Jones, of this parish, has written about this, describing:
This is the paradox of ‘shallow sovereignty’: governments appear to rule, but cannot act. Their authority is formal, but not functional. The real answer to Britain’s governing problems is that the decision space – the viable political choices available to leaders – of our politicians is collapsing, constrained by quangos, international obligations, legal activism, bureaucratic resistance, fiscal oversight, activist pressure and the growing social conformity of an increasingly narrow political class.
While there is some truth to this, it’s important to recognise that these limitations are entirely voluntary. 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.
But it goes further than that. Those who govern us seem unable to imagine a society which doesn’t function (or rather fails to function) pretty much like the UK today. The legal and conceptual framework we exist within is treated as though it’s geography, or weather – something to be accepted, or adapted to. The reality is that all these limitations are tools of our own making. They are tools which have long since ceased to work.
Despite this, almost our entire political and media class seem unable to imagine a world without those broken tools. And so our nation remains bound in a cage entirely of our own making, which we could shatter with a word.
