Requiem for a Failing State

The psychopathology of Tory reign to New(er) Labour.

Political parties are vehicles for socio-cultural expression, which inherently forms part of politics. As such, they are vulnerable to being possessed by the Zeitgeist, while haunted by ghosts of governments past. Possession by Zeitgeist, looming spectres of ideology, or a mix of both, can often be too much to bear, leading even the most successful political party in democratic history to self-destruct in a death spiral of intoxicating nostalgia, delusion, and self-harm. 14 years ago, the British Conservative Party returned to power desperate to prove itself to its late mother, Maggie Thatcher. And in true Freudian style, psychopathology always comes back to Mummy. You see, Mummy was always very disappointed in the mediocrity of the men around her, in their lack of conviction and talent, in their entitlement and hereditary arrogance. But her party offspring so desperately wanted Mummy just to say, “Well done, boys”, and were determined to make her proud when they returned to power in 2010. The 2008 banking crash presented them with the perfect opportunity.

Like children who come in with their crayon scrawling looking for a simple “Wow, did you do that? It’s so good!”, Cameron and Osborne would hold up their scratchings; “Look, Mummy, we’ve gutted welfare! We’ve privatised and offshored everything! Aren’t we austere, Mummy?” But Mummy gave no praise, no words of encouragement, no love. And then she died. Her progeny couldn’t cope and slid into despairing self-destructive behaviours. Emotionally stunted public schoolboys could be seen wandering Westminster, muttering things like “small state” in between sobs. “What did Mummy want?”, they cried to the heavens. As it happened, Mummy hated Europe, so her flock of below-average boys thought they would heal their internal scars by crashing England out of Europe, taking the remainder of the Disunited Kingdom with them. For the empathetically crippled women in the party, things were much worse; they started cosplaying Mummy, styling their hair and wardrobe just like Mummy looked. They could be found in the bathrooms in Westminster, standing in front of the mirror, hissing, “We’ll show those mediocre men, Mummy, we’ll smash the poor and unleash massive tax cuts! You’ll be so proud of us! Like the hair, Mummy?”

Shakespearean analogies have been commonplace to describe the past decade-and-a-half of Tory reign, yet they remain apt. The Conservative Party have blended comedy with tragedy in a fratricidal power struggle, with Mummy playing the role of King Lear and five prime ministers in 15 years locked in internecine quarrels for the burdened Tory crown. Mummy’s shadow rendered heavy the crown, crushing each temporary pretender under the weight of hubristic expectations and lifeless old ideologies. The Tory crown passed from Mummy’s head and crushed John Major, David Cameron, Teresa May, Boris Johnson, and Liz Truss. Rishi Sunak was crushed before he put it on, the only difference between Dishy Rishi and the rest being he’s so wealthy none of it mattered anyway. On this sinking ship, Rishi is the only one getting personally airlifted off the stern. An n = 1 rescue operation for a man whose personal finances are in better shape than the entire nation. The rest have gone down with the ship. Mummy didn’t just break the miners; she broke the Conservative Party, crushed under the weight of her shadow.

For this final death spiral, the Tories were a party deeply confused about their politics, resulting in a bewildering 14 years in power. They embraced the hard neoliberalism of austerity and free market anti-socialisation, policies championed for four decades by the Right, while presiding over a veritable open-door mass immigration policy, policies ostensibly championed by the Left. Yet this seeming contradiction is a false dichotomy; strip back the “small boats” and virulent anti-immigrant rhetoric of the Tories and mass immigration is entirely congruent with their hard neoliberal model, in which economic growth relies on a small cabal of finance institutions and a mass pool of cheap, expendable, exploitable immigrant labour for the rest of the economy to eke out some more “growth”. The Tories treated Britain like a car-boot sale, the nation’s assets to be sold off to the highest bidder. Now dirty trains that don’t arrive are run by foreign companies that reel in windfall profits, while shit is pumped into waterways by offshore water companies that reel in windfall profits, while people can’t heat their homes but energy companies reel in windfall profits, London properties are owned by Russian oligarchs and Arab oil barons, and U.S. funds hover like vultures over the NHS.

Yet contradictions abounded. They tried to combine their hard austerity with increasingly “anti-woke” rhetoric in recent years, while toying with identity politics by pointing to the fact that, yes, it was the Conservative Party and not Labour that produced the most ethnically diverse cabinets in British parliamentary history. And yet as Labour may learn the hard way, such political voyeurism won’t hide the realities of the abattoir of the State, and whether the Tories were comprised of the most diverse or homogenous cabinet is irrelevant to the outcomes they stand over after attempting to govern for a decade-and-a-half. All they’ve known is butchery; slashing and hacking their way through every element of a functioning state. Cut London out of the map and Britain is a developing country. Food bank use went through the roof while, wage growth is at its lowest level since the early 1800s, life expectancy outside of London is declining in low-income strata of the population, living standards are at their lowest since the days Dickens was writing Bleak House, per capita public spending has been slashed, schools are falling apart, the housing market is an asset-hoarded rentier capitalist calamity, law courts throughout the country have been closed and the legal system is arguably in worse condition than the NHS. Patients wait on trollies in hospitals while victims wait for justice that never comes. And the “Brexit dividend” has turned out to be worthless, crippling growth in British exports after crashing out of the European single market. The Tories leave behind a failing British state.

What renders this disaster so embittering for the citizens that make up the state the Tories leave behind is that this catastrophe of governance is not merely the result of incompetence. For 14 years they have governed with malevolence, spite, vindictiveness, and contempt. The moral bankruptcy permeated their entire repugnant reign; eight ministers accused of sexual misconduct, voting against expanding the free school meals program and plunging millions of children below the poverty line, and the sight of Queen Elizabeth, the model of duty and service to the state, sitting alone at Prince Phillip’s funeral during Covid restrictions while the party of profligates treated Downing Street like a Bullingdon Club banquet. The Conservatives were not merely well-intended individuals who were just out of their depth. After all, these are the scions of Eton and other venerable public schools that serve the cream of Britain's richest and thickest. This is a country completely at ease with such entitled dimwits exercising their self-regarded “right to rule”, throwing out Classical references and the odd Latin maxim to mask their glaring intellectual inadequacies. Mere incompetence could have been forgiven, at least excused. But the malevolence and contempt towards the country that these deficient degenerates displayed during their death spiral rubbed salt in a gaping wound.

The electorate has returned the contempt in kind, delivering the most comprehensive Tory electoral defeat in the nearly 200-year history of the Conservative Party. And yet in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. The open question now is whether the Labour Party even have one eye to claim such a hollow crown. In a two-party state like Britain, it can be difficult to interpret whether a landslide victory is an emphatic endorsement of the opposition or a damning indictment of the incumbent. The vagaries of the British electoral system offer some clues; despite Labour’s 411 parliamentary seats, their share of the vote at ~34%, only marginally higher than their 2019 vote share when Labour won 202 seats. The 2024 election represents more a verdict on the Tories rather than an unequivocal mandate for Labour. Nevertheless, a popular mandate takes a backseat to an unassailable parliamentary majority for the next five years. Such a majority is, however, no guarantee of the ability to govern; the Tories won 365 seats in the 2019 election, and 43.6% of the vote share, and remained incompetent and incapacitated as a government. The incapacity of governance during the 2019–2024 period of Tory reign is a warning to Labour if they’ll heed it: ideology detached from reality is a dangerous potion. Hard Brexit has been an economic catastrophe; Lettuce Truss’s hare-brained economic experiment plunged the country into further economic crisis.

Labour comes into office with its own haunting ghosts and vulnerability to the Zeitgeist. While one may describe Britain as a “two-party state”, that in fact conveys a false sense of equivalence of time in office, akin to the Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. In reality, however, it is more appropriate to consider Britain a “one-party state with an intermittent alternative”, the latter of which is the Labour Party. For the vast majority of the past 200 years, Britain has been a nation of Conservative governance over a conservative people, and Labour has served as temporary respite when the Tories have outstayed their welcome from time to time. Just four times since the end of the Second World War the British people opted for such periodic respite, and one of those took a Blitz and bombed-out cities to push the electorate toward Clement Atlee’s government in 1945. That government is the ghost that has haunted the Labour Party since, a government of true Blue Labour, grounded in body and soul to the British working class, a government of integrity and competence that enacted a bold program of social democracy and welfare capitalism. If you’re an outsider to Britain looking in and have ever wondered why the National Health Service is so fundamental to the identity of post-war Britain, Atlee’s government is the answer; the NHS represents the post-war social contract, a minimum standard of living for all citizens. And two large chunks of Tory reign, the 18 years of Thatcher-Major and the past 14 years of successive degenerates have shredded that social contract. The flailing NHS is thus a metaphor, and microcosm, of a flailing, failing state.

But the current Labour Party is as far removed from Atlee’s as it is removed from today’s British working class, the core voter base of the contemporary Labour Party cemented in Tony Blair’s cohort of London-based professionals. Blair’s New Labour represented the subtle shift to soft neoliberalism that wanted to be seen to preserve some elements of the post-war social contract in areas like education while adopting the hubris of the mid-1990s assumption that “more markets” and globalisation would forevermore provide the golden goose of “growth”. New(er) Labour under Chancellor Rachel Reeves appear poised to resume this strategy, and if you close your eyes Reeve’s rhetoric of being the most “pro-growth” government in history could sound like Liz Truss. Indeed, they are adopting the fiscal rules laid down by the Tories designed to limit and lower the debt-to-GDP ratio, in a country that is ranked last of all G7 countries in its ratio of investment-to-GDP. But in an economy defined by sclerotic productivity, the holy grail of Growth remains elusive, reliant on the private sector when that sector is dominated by property and finance and Growth is confined to private and corporate bank accounts. And with no economic free lunch, public services remain the sacrificial lamb they have been since 1979. Why restructure corporate taxation or address rentier capitalism when you can just run a public service into the ground and then sell it off? The UK’s economic problems are structural, and a change of colour in parliament doesn’t alter that reality, it merely places New(er) Labour as the custodians of decline.

It is difficult to see how, at least with the policies on the table, there is any outcome other than Growth remaining stalled, the cost of borrowing high, Britain’s economic order sauntering on, public services remaining desperate for investment that won’t come, and the inequality ripping the fabric of the country apart no doubt continuing. Unwilling and unable to adopt any bold program of economic reform, ignoring Atlee’s ghosts in the room, to be seen to govern New(er) Labour will no doubt desire to be seen to embarking instead on a program of social reform, doubling down on the shibboleths of the young urban professionals in whose name New(er) Labour will govern: environment and identity. The former, in the words of David Lammy, includes “tripling solar power, quadrupling offshore wind power, doubling onshore wind power”, and what he termed “faster growth, slower warming”. How exactly such policies may help redress the corrosive inequality at the core of Britain’s economic woes is as unclear as Lammy was silent on the issue. “Growth”, or something. And New(er) Labour will no doubt also satisfy their base by championing atomised individualism that characterises the modern Left. In his victory speech, Starmer said, “our task is nothing less than renewing the ideas which hold this country together...national renewal...” But the liberal internationalism of New(er) Labour’s voting base doesn’t believe in the ideas that once held Britain together, concepts of community and culture now viewed under the nebulous idiom of “problematic”, and are more likely to be found wearing a keffiyeh in Piccadilly of a Saturday afternoon; the Anywheres sneering at the Somewheres desperately searching for what it means to be British in 2024.

And so Britain, this rudderless raft of despair, floats on with a new government of milquetoast managers, haunted by ghosts of governments past, brandishing a rhetoric of “national renewal” in a country that barely recognises itself.