Britain is Broken: What it means and where are we going?
Sunday National, 29 August 2025
Gerry Hassan
Britain is in crisis. Doom and gloom are everywhere. The right see this as an existential mess where everything they detest can be torn down. Meanwhile what passes for the centre-left shifts ever rightward to appease the increasingly emboldened right.
The UK has been in crisis before. The early 1960s saw widespread debate about national decline and the UK’s inability to economically modernise. The late 1970s and early 1980s witnessed similar discussions about the UK’s laggard economic performance and how to remove obstacles to growth.
Neither period addressed the fundamentals. The Wilson government of the 1960s talked a good game of change but was broken on the rocks of Treasury orthodoxy and UK economic weakness – from the Balance of Payments to delayed devaluation – while being over-exposed by the UK’s global commitments.
The Thatcher government talked a triumphalist game which still transfixes the right. But shorn of this it was another abject failure. There was no “British economic miracle”, but instead prosperity for those in work – driven by North Sea Oil, privatisation and an explosion of household debt. And yet the mirage of Thatcherism, like Banquo’s ghost, has continued to haunt British politics and transfix the right.
It is impossible to understand the present state of Britain without reference to these past failures. It is through these – and the post-Thatcherite consensus, New Labour’s accommodation with it, the Cameron Conservative accommodation with New Labour, and the 2008 banking crash – that today’s predicaments have come to pass.
The mainstream is part of the problem
The current state of the UK is not a good one. While the baying right-wing media mob’s prospectus of the UK as on the brink of economic, social and moral collapse is over-the-top it draws upon deeply felt anxieties, fears and emotions.
Thus, while the UK’s fraying economic and social fabric can be talked about by polite society as related to low growth, stalled living standards and endemically low productivity this does not address how people feel.
Many across the UK feel that political, corporate and other elites have not only ignored them, but also disrespected them, regarding them as stupid dupes who can be fed non-stop soundbites and misinformation.
In this context the burning dismay, anger and fury which defines so much of the UK is easily understandable. Mainstream politics and institutions have failed people. Not only that, they have been dishonest and caricature and stereotype many in the population, further amplifying the powerlessness and helplessness that they feel.
It is into this mix that first Brexit happened and now, what can be seen as its sequel with the return of Faragism and an unapologetic, revanchist English nationalism whose main message has morphed from “Take Back Control” to “We want our country back.”
Part of England is being whipped up by a right-wing media seeking scapegoats and people to target and demonise in a modern-day witch-hunt led by what Guardian columnist Rafael Behr calls “the courtier commentariat.”
There are several layers to this. The number of people taking part in anti-asylum and immigration protests has been very small so far. But there is a wider constituency of anger and discontent seen in the flag-waving campaign around the St George’s Cross and Union Jack. Former Labour MP, now academic, John Denham says that “the English and British flags cannot be left uncontested to the far right and that these flags belong to everyone.”
Herein lies a huge debate about the ambivalence and problematic relationship of many people to these flags. Are they as academic Kehinde Andrews said on Channel 4 News this week “the flags of racism, slavery and Empire” which they undoubtedly are, or can they be that – and something more? And why suddenly are flags and their symbolism and meaning so important and what does that tell us about the present?
The cul-de-sac of Starmerism and the demise of unionism
Starmer’s Labour have offered no story about their mission and purpose. At their heart is a void, with no story to fill it that talks about modern Britain, about what is wrong, what they intend to put right, and the future Britain they want to create. Historian Anthony Seldon, author of numerous studies of UK PMs, observes that (leaving aside Liz Truss) “this is the most inept Premiership of modern times” since Anthony Eden and his ill-fated Suez debacle in 1956.
One deliberate omission in Starmer’s Labour is talking about England. This is a subject that Labour and the left have avoided for decades instead preferring to roll Englishness up into a supposedly progressive Britishness. But the results of this self-denying ordinance has been disastrous: namely to cede the territory of England as an idea to the right.
Hence, Brexit was a predominantly English revolt, of “England outside London” as Anthony Barnett called it, against the metropolitan elites. Farage and the populist right mobilised an English majority that had not been spoken to or invoked in many years, drawing from and amplifying the deep-seated strain of English Euro-scepticism which, as Tom McTague puts in his new book Between the Waves, has always been there awaiting someone to give it voice.
Nearly a decade after the Brexit vote not only are we still living with the consequences and the diminished Britain all around us, but this English dynamic has now become one of the main factors determining UK politics and slowly destroying the fabric of the very union it allegedly represents.
Not unrelated to this, Scottish and Welsh unionism are now in a state of collapse. This is not just about the electoral fortune of the Tory Party. Rather unionism in Scotland at its peak in the early 20th century celebrated Scottish autonomy, nationhood and traditions, and made the claim that Scotland could be respected as a historic nation while enjoying the benefits of the union.
The collapse of that unionism has opened the door to an aggressive pro-UK argument which does not understand, and disrespects the idea of, the union and believes in places there should be “a great British nation building project”. This perspective can be found not only in Reform circles, but amongst Faragist Tories.
A powerful emotive strand in this is the increasing fixation on Britain’s past by the right. As constitutional expert W. Elliot Bulmer puts it, this is more about the allure of “imperial nostalgia” than actual “imperial delusion”. By this he means that the right are not so delusional to think they can return to the days of Empire, but rather they believe in a certain kind of Britishness (white) and hierarchy and order both domestically and internationally. It is a revolt against the present – and against the modern world.
Groundhog Day Britain
There is no salvation in mainstream politics. There is no chance of a return to normality. Or stability. The UK is affected by a confluence of different factors. The limits of the Treasury mindset which has held a vice-like grip through the decades of decline has been a major contribution – from Attlee through Wilson and Thatcherism – to the present, where Rachel Reeves is high-bound and constrained by Treasury groupthink.
The Treasury view of the UK is founded in short-term micro-management of public spending, an absence of long-term strategy supporting growth and investment, and a refusal to address the UK’s deep-seated structural problems from public service renewal to regional inequalities and the overbearing shadow of the City and finance capitalism, divorced as it is from the everyday needs of real businesses.
The UK’s economic problems are not at their source caused by the 2008 banking crash or Brexit. These have merely exasperated the fundamental problems and weaknesses of the UK economy: the deep-seated issues unaddressed by the 1960s and 1980s. And yet again like a Groundhog Day Britain today’s political classes are shying away from looking for fundamental causes of the UK’s woes and reform.
Add to this a list of disruptive shocks in recent years. Not just COVID and Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, but the effect on food prices and inflation of the drought in the Mediterranean and its impact on the olive harvest; combined with unprecedented rainfall followed by severe drought knocking out cocoa production in West Africa.
The UK’s restricted fiscal and monetary tools for macro-economic management are not equipped for such geopolitical instability and environmental crisis. “The Bank of England base rate cannot stop Vladimir Putin invading Ukraine nor end a drought in Ghana” notes economist James Meadway. He observes that: “The entire fiscal and monetary setup of recent decades, the combination of central bank ‘independence’ and a minimal role for government spending and economic intervention, stands exposed.”
In this volatile world the right are invoking the inevitability of an IMF 1970s style bailout and humiliation of the UK; the previous IMF crisis of 1976 calling time on the UK’s then flailing social democratic settlement. As David Smith, Economics Editor of the Sunday Times pointed out this week such an IMF intervention will not happen because it would not address the short- or long-term problems of the UK economy.
Similarly, many on the left and centre-left have an underlying pessimism. One Labour grandee said this week that “this could deteriorate further and become the worst Labour government in history.” Add to this David Blunkett and Jack Straw have aligned themselves with calls from Maurice Glasman of Blue Labour for the UK to leave the European Convention on Human Rights: a move supported by Tory Malcolm Rifkind.
Author Darren McGarvey has stated that the forward march of Farage and Reform is inevitable and “has to run its natural course” arguing: ‘The politics of Farage will only relent once it has proven itself ill-equipped to confront the problems of the 21st century” and concluded stating: “Only once he takes power do we have a realistic chance at charting a new course.” All of which carries with it whiffs of both appeasement – and of helplessness.
There is a Different Way: Where is our “French Sixth Republic”?
There is a different way of addressing this British crisis. The Treasury needs to be dismantled; economic growth should have its own department. Limits of the central British state needs to be tackled – including its micro-management and over-centralisation. The principle of Scottish and Welsh self-determination needs to be recognised; Northern Ireland’s special status and right to reunify with the South respected.
The left need to talk about England; understand the importance of symbols, flags and emotions, and wake up and realise how abandoned so many people feel. And maybe even dare to talk about class, about working class traditions and pride, and inequality.
This territory cannot be left abandoned and uncontested to the right. Otherwise it will have severe consequences. All around the world are examples of inspiring politics and fightbacks against the right and populism.
There is the Spanish government’s bold moves protecting consumers and challenging Europe’s debt rules, and the Mexican left-wing Presidency is having the courage to stand up to Trump. Political leaders breaking with the insipid mainstream and daring to challenge the right.
Last week I was speaking to a French academic and left-wing activist visiting Scotland. He talked of the French left’s vision of a “French Sixth Republic”. By this he meant transcending the imperialist grandeur of the French Fifth Republic with its omnipotent Gaullist Presidency and set of structures which have concentrated power in the centre and continued France’s own obsession with its version of imperial nostalgia.
There is no comparable British left vision: a democratising, egalitarian, republican in the widest sense, project. Not from the left of Labour. Corbyn. The Greens. And there is no equivalent political programme such as a modern-day Charter 88.
But then such is the British polycrisis that the radical imagination requires even more than constitutional tinkering. It requires a project to address the structural issues that 1960s Wilsonism and 1980s Thatcherism failed to change. And alongside this it needs a set of popular stories connected to emotions and hopes which allow people to see a world where things can get better, which counter and defeat Faragism and shape the future.
If this does not happen the future will be defined by the forces of the populist right including those who brought us a hard Brexit and shown no responsibility or remorse. These are high stakes. But clinging to the old norms and the mainstream will not do in UK politics – or in Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland.
