This article is taken from the March 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
Political instability does not necessarily produce disorderly administration. In the 1950s, smug Britons joked that they were off to Paris for the weekend to watch the changing of the government. Indeed, the French Fourth Republic got through more than twenty governments in twelve years.
This rapid succession of chain-smoking men with identical receding hairlines failed politically — most calamitously in Algeria and Indochina. Yet, the French administrative state carried on regardless and so did the pursuit of profit, heralding the trente glorieuses, 30 years of economic growth and widening prosperity. Italy kept the carousel of revolving ministries rotating for even longer, during which time Italian living standards soared.
Of course, this game of French and Italian musical chairs was less disruptive than it seemed. Faces changed, but governing orthodoxies remained. Italy was mostly led by Christian Democrats. Centre-right politicians ruled France. All along, the administrative state carried on as the stabilising counterbalance to the petty machinations of the chief ministers.
Those with an eye for paradox claim that since the 2016 Brexit referendum British politics has become more European. This is superficially true: there is fluidity, fragmentation and rapid replacement of prime ministers who have proved differently inadequate. Whilst these have not been glorious years of economic growth for Britain, neither have they been for comparable EU nations.
If anything, the short tenure of most recent British prime and cabinet ministers has resulted in a strengthening of the Whitehall orthodoxy. It seems no politician has the endurance in office, let alone the conviction, to upend it.
Even Brexit, the one seismic opportunity for radical change, was masterfully sidestepped. Despite its title, the purpose of the 2018 Great Repeal Act ensured continuity by enshrining EU law into British law. Except in some defined areas, the economy is still regulated by the unamended corpus of EU laws as if they were unimprovable.
21st century British orthodoxy has held certain truths to be self-evident: that energy supply should be decarbonised regardless of cost and consequence; that economic growth depends on an expanding population that needs unprecedented levels of immigration because native Britons are neither young enough nor numerous enough to undertake the low-skilled jobs, nor (oddly, given there have never been more graduates) sufficiently able to master the high-talent jobs; that the failure of the public sector to record any productivity gains this century is a fact of life, not a priority for action, and so on.
Successive governments have tinkered with the NHS, but none have undone the worst excesses of managerialism
Neither Labour nor Conservative governments seriously challenged these certainties, partly through cowardice, mostly because they shared them.
This issue of The Critic explores some of the consequences for our institutions. Successive governments have tinkered with the NHS, but none have undone the worst excesses of managerialism that — as Sebastian Milbank argues in his article on nursing — has damaged the structure and quality of hospital care.
Meanwhile, some of the failings of university governance date to the Major government’s 1992 Further and Higher Education Act, which undermined academic autonomy and empowered university councils filled with external lay trustees to make universities more accountable and “worldly”. It achieved the latter only in the sense that they are deeper in debt.
The distinguished economist Tim Congdon warns in this issue about the risk of campus asset-stripping that may now result. As for the state, it seems unable to contemplate policies that would put higher education on a firmer footing.
Amongst the most deeply embedded national orthodoxies is that ethnic and gender diversity is not only the measure of British society’s moral worth but also a driver of higher performance. Public sector recruitment policies are shaped by this understanding.
The belief that better outcomes will result not through encouraging greater diversity of thought, knowledge and experience, but by prioritising applicants according to the colour of their skin or gender preferences is entirely unevidenced. Yet, it is routinely trotted-out as canonical truth.
This is not just because “diversity is strength” is a slogan posing as a scientific fact. More importantly, it remains government policy, supported by a raft of state-backed initiatives.
It is why, as David Spencer explains in our cover story, the Metropolitan Police overrode its vetting procedures to recruit those with criminal records — including one accused of child rape — in order to boost ethnic minority representation.
Police integrity and public safety were secondary to tackling “race disparities” in the ranks. Mr Spencer’s article explains how successive governments made possible such unabashed institutional racism (to borrow the potent phrase of the late Sir William Macpherson).
As British politics goes through another convulsion and the disgrace of Peter Mandelson is reimagined as Blairism’s sordid swansong, it is worth asking what may change. Are we to believe that switching prime minister from Keir Starmer to Wes Streeting — a Mandelson protégé — signals a change of direction? Or that Ed Miliband, Yvette Cooper and David Lammy are (as yet well concealed) agents of change?
What hope is there that the Conservatives will recant their deeds if Kemi Badenoch is replaced by James Cleverly, a man who thoughtlessly champions some of the centrist orthodoxy?
We see these Westminster contenders as Macbeth saw life:
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
