Britain isn’t ungovernable. It’s just been badly governed

With Labour MPs seemingly railroading the country towards its seventh prime minister in little more than 10 years, the cry goes up once more: “Britain is ungovernable.” Or, for those wishing not to appear too overwrought, “Britain is becoming ungovernable”. 

It is a seductive notion, one that especially appeals to those seeking proof points against Brexit. Just two years after a landslide election victory, Sir Keir Starmer is being herded towards the exit. And he is not an outlier. Theresa May and Boris Johnson got three years each; Liz Truss managed 49 days, Rishi Sunak, 20 months. 

Political historians declare the premiership an “impossible” job. Starmer is not the first to complain of a sense of powerlessness, that nothing happens when you pull the levers. The UK is over-centralised while the Whitehall machine at its heart is no longer fit for the demands upon it. The state needs rethinking for the AI era. The union is under threat. Brexit stymied the economy. Austerity hollowed out public services. The country is stuck in a low-growth doom loop of debt. You can see the argument.

And yet there is another explanation. Britain is not ungovernable. It has just been very badly governed. In particular, it has endured a decade of woefully inept leadership. An era of slogans in place of details. It is this political weakness that should dominate the conversations Labour is having with itself while the country is left on hold. “Show us the plan” should be the demand made of every prime ministerial pretender.

The challenges are unarguably huge. Anaemic growth and two decades of largely stagnant real household incomes have embedded disenchantment. The pandemic and the Ukraine energy shock took debt to 94 per cent of GDP, saddling the UK with crippling interest payments. An ageing population makes ever more demands on health and welfare budgets. Above all the UK has lost its economic model. 

Yet the greater the problems, the less fit Britain’s recent governments have been to face them. Instead of careful programmes, parties have succumbed to factionalism and fantasy politics, eschewing honest conversations about trade-offs for “with one bound we are free” policies. These range from Brexit to Labour’s essential notion that the mere fact of electing it would reset the economy to recent witless talk about defying the bond markets.

At the election both parties offered fictional manifestos that implied no meaningful tax rises or painful spending cuts. Labour went on to raise £66bn in extra taxes in its first two budgets.

Starmer had not worked through a detailed programme before entering government or squared his party for the hard choices. Naturally, when presented with some on welfare reform, his MPs revolted. Nor has he addressed the contradictions in his policies, heaping extra taxes on business as he proclaims growth his priority.

Parties have long chosen leaders on vibes, ideology and electability but until recently they did not discount ability to govern. This now seems less true, which is how Britain ended up with Johnson and Truss. In addition, recent premiers have treated MPs as an inconvenience to be coerced, not co-opted. 

There are some structural issues. The civil service could be nimbler and more focused on outcomes. Judicial reviews and regulation stifle initiatives and infrastructure. But these are things a focused government can address. Lack of money does not make a country ungovernable, but it does demand ruthless prioritisation.

And for all the talk of an obstructive Whitehall “blob”, the civil service responds to clear leads, as Michael Gove, the man who popularised the term, demonstrated as education secretary. It also helps if ministers are left in their jobs long enough.

But it was not structural flaws that ran down defence spending, mishandled water privatisation so that no new reservoirs have been delivered since 1992, spent decades ducking the social care crisis or produced the Truss budget. It was not ungovernability, but prioritising party unity that led David Cameron to hold a Brexit referendum. Whatever the obstacles, the key failings here were short-termism and poor choices.

Parallels with the 1970s are overdone but it is instructive to recall the declinist fatalism that took root as governments looked powerless in the face of financial crises and trade union excess. Britain appears to be approaching a similar moment to 1979, when it turned to Margaret Thatcher’s radical conservatism to break the country’s logjams.

The worry is that the beneficiary this time may be Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, the party most explicitly offering a break from the failing status quo, but without Thatcher’s innate seriousness or the intellectual underpinning provided by heavyweight think-tanks helping to shape her programme in advance.

There are two ways to run the country badly. The first is incompetence. The second is confident pursuit of a mistaken programme. What the UK has lacked of late is methodical but confident leadership. A prime minister with intellectual clarity, a coherent plan and the political skills to argue the case to the nation.

There is as yet no reason to believe Labour’s machinations are about to deliver this. But it is an unavoidable if unhelpful truism. What makes a country governable is good government.

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