October 2026
We just as a nation, seem to drift from one crisis to another. You can take your pick of a number of major issues facing us at the moment. The massive debt overhang of over £1 trillion with high interest making servicing it a huge strain on the economy. Our lack of investment in defence which if we were ever tested by an outside force, would reveal us to be woefully unprepared.
Young people, almost a million of them, unable to get gainful employment yet saddled with massive debts. A housing crisis partly the result of the ‘right to buy’ and not allowing receipts to be reinvested in new houses. A health service creaking at the seams and heavily reliant on overseas medical staff. Care of the elderly still not provided for despite promises and reports aplenty.
And so on. At the same time a few amassing great fortunes and for whom the tax system is voluntary with an army of specialists able to finagle the system for them.
We experience 14 years under the Conservatives with for a while, I believe to be the worst Chancellor in the modern era, George Osborne, who used the bank crisis to enact a regime of cuts which has bedevilled a generation. And of course Brexit, a monumental disaster which has reduced our national income by around 8% and which has made exporting to Europe a pipe dream for tens of thousands of small firms.
We voted in a Labour government with a massive majority but which seems unable to do the ‘big stuff’ as witnessed by this week’s budget which was a series of tinkerings and to quote Kemi Badenoch the leader of the oppositions ‘is that it?’
What’s wrong?
So what’s wrong? Why do governments come and go, with bold statements and manifestos, optimistic speeches and then – well they just fizzle out? Is there any point to the various elections with their attendant brouhaha and endless debates, and then once ensconced, we get little change? I know we can point to Trump with all his activities and tariffs and their harmful effects cannot be denied but our national failures seem to be deeper than that and in any event, predate the arrival of the orange one.
Although we can talk policies and parties, but for me, the issues go deeper than that. A major problem is the electorate itself. After the budget, I watched or listened to reporters going to various towns and interviewing members of the public. Those interviews are in my view important. You can forget the high-minded speeches and interviews on College Green or on the TV, these vox pops give you an insight into how scores of ordinary people think and react. They are after all, the voters and it is they through the ballot box who will decide who runs the country.
Beyond that, it is their beliefs and attitudes to which a politician must respond if he or she wants to get elected. It is of little use a politician having a profound understanding of the nation’s problems and how to fix them, if the people who will be giving him or her the chance do not agree or do not have an understanding of those issues. And it is my contention that on the whole they don’t.
To listen to the interviews is to hear of people with very limited perspectives. The recent crop after the budget saw many saying the Chancellor has done nothing for the cost of living and their heating bills. They all complained that they will not be better off. One responded when asked about the £100 the Chancellor has offered, said it wouldn’t make any difference.
You never hear people talk about investment or skills. Never does the word ‘productivity’ come into the conversation. There is nothing of a strategic nature in other words. Is it any wonder therefore, that politicians feel under pressure to respond to these concerns and seek to twiddle the system to do a bit here and a bit there?
There are often cries for politicians to be ‘more honest’ with the public. I am tempted to respond – would it make the slightest bit of difference? Take the whole issue of benefits which suddenly is a talking point. I’ve heard several say they are ‘out of control’ and a young man interviewed said they were too easy to get. The Conservatives are claiming this as well. There were echoes of George Osborne’s infamous scrounger rhetoric. This is a world away from the thousands of young people who are sending off hundreds of job applications and some who are weighed down by debt. Most out of work want to find a job. Benefits are not easy to come by. Have any of those tried it?
That half the benefits bill is made up of pensions is not understood by those interviewed. If you said to the older ones, the government is proposing to end the triple lock, great would be the shock and anger. But they want the benefits to be brought under control. Ah yes, I get it: they are scroungers, I’m a deserving cause. ‘I’ve paid into my pension so I deserve it’. Actually, you haven’t.
Benefits are not ‘out of control’. As a proportion of GDP they are broadly static. Yet it has become accepted wisdom that they are and need to be cut.
Political failure
Politicians have to engage with a public stuffed full of misunderstanding and false notions. I could mention immigration which has resulted in an earthquake in our political parties. However many come over by boat, the effects overall are tiny. The ‘boat people’ are a small proportion of the total immigration numbers. Yet they loom large in the political discourse with Reform riding high (until recently) in the polls and both main parties having to scramble to find policies to tackle the ‘problem’. You almost get the impression from those interviewed that solve the boat crossings and our national problems will be over. Put another way, the cause of our problems are the illegal crossings.
These beliefs are promoted not just by the likes of Reform or the various sons and daughters of immigrants who become Home Secretaries (how bizarre is that?) but by large chunks of the media. It sells papers of course in a kind of circularity of ignorance: the public believes it so we’ll write stories about it and so they believe it still more and before you know it’s become a national issue.
Various theories have been proposed including George Lakoff’s argument about ‘framing’ a debate. Some talk of ‘controlling the narrative’ or more recently, ‘flooding the zone’. Basically the same idea of ensuring the basic idea – in this instance neoliberalism or illegal immigration – are the key arguments which makes putting forward counter arguments difficult.
But where are the stories about the massive banking failure that led to the current era’s problems? Where are the stories about promising firms who have to leave the UK to get capital? Where are the stories and investigations about our food industry which is selling sugary and salt laden foods leading to obesity, diabetes and thousands of young children going to hospital to have their teeth removed? You won’t find many. Where are the analyses of Brexit?
Distraction
This leads me to the main point. All these stories about boat people and scroungers, are a form of distraction or deflection. They are about people who for the most part are unable to defend themselves. There is no form of justice for those at the bottom of our society. They are easy meat for politicians and journalists to criticise or sneer at. Try criticising the real culprits and you’ll get an expensive writ for defamation. Petty cash for them, but a huge hole in a budget for a publication.
They are a means to distract from those who are truly responsible for our national failings. The politicians who have not addressed the big issues. The elite in our society who want to maintain their lifestyles, need to find those they can claim are the culprits. Solve the boats crisis, not tackle the failings at the top of the system. Like the boss of a water board who in addition to a massive pay packet and bonus took an additional £1.9m in undisclosed monies despite the failure of the board to do its job properly.
The immigration and scrounger stories are easier to tell and relate to. It seems to be a weird fact that people can understand and get angered by someone getting a benefit of a few thousand pounds that they shouldn’t, but they find it hard to grasp someone in the City for example, stealing millions or involved in some massive financial scam. It results in considerable over attention being paid to the minnows of skulduggery but little to the truly massive. We can picture a thousand pounds say and what it would mean in terms of things to buy, but a fraud or theft of a hundred million pounds is somehow beyond our comprehension.
This is about fraud but the same arguments apply to government spending. The grotesque mismanagement of our defence budget is barely understood or commented on. It concerns the corruption of the ‘revolving door’ with hundreds of military chiefs, politicians and civil servants going off into the defence industry and lucrative directorships. It results in monumental loss and mismanagement for example the armoured personnel carrier Ajax: millions over budget, unusable and still to be delivered. It may never be available despite £5.5bn spent on it.
The mismanagement of this one project probably exceeds all those wrongly claiming disability benefits and seen running half-marathons or playing cricket a hundred fold, yet these get all the attention and anger whereas the former is largely unknown. Ask anyone about the Ajax project and see what gives.
Are we ungovernable therefore?
If we continue in this way, yes I would argue. So how do we change? An informed electorate is clearly the key. If the vast majority are unaware of the big issues and allow themselves to be easily distracted into blaming immigrants and scroungers for our ills, then this is what will drive the political class to follow and pander to them. It has made Nigel Farage what he is and he has skilfully created this atmosphere for almost a decade. Let us not forget how he appeared on the BBC’s Question Time more times than any other guest during Brexit (only exceeded over a much longer period by Ken Clarke MP).
It’s all very well arguing for politicians to be more honest as I’ve said, but it’s a lonely place and a quiet one. One problem is the esoteric nature of some of the big issue arguments which are difficult to boil down to a slogan. ‘Immigrants Out!’ is a hell of a lot easier than ‘we need to tackle the equity gap to ensure unicorn businesses can prosper and grow in the UK’. Try getting a crowd to turn out for that, with or without balaclavas.
Overall, I’m pessimistic. I’ve mentioned care for the elderly. If you reach that time of life where you need to go into a nursing home, it will mean selling your house (unless your partner is still alive and living in it). Some kind of insurance system has been proposed many times with an upper limit. It has never happened and once the Daily Mail called it a ‘Death tax’ it was dead in the water and Theresa May went with it. The positive arguments barely got made. This is an example of how a slogan can drive a policy or a lack of one. Politicians, honest or otherwise, know it’s a major problem but dare not touch it because it’s just too toxic. The Mail has a massive readership and nearly all politicians are wary of it.
Unless some way can be found to focus attention on the bigger issues, I can only see a continuation of the situation as it is. Living standards are projected to fall to their lowest level in decades next year. I cannot see among any of our political parties policies designed to address the ‘big issues’ needed to tackle them.
What I think might happen is some massive event occurs which will force the nation to face up to some basic realities. It might be climate, it might be financial or it might be IT related, who knows. But like war, it forces a rethink and the public can be rallied to deal with it. It is a great pity I think that we do not seem to have the political mechanisms to recognise, address and discuss the ‘big issues’ as I call them. We seem stuck in a groove of trivia, distraction and watching hooded men screaming insults at immigrants as though that was the biggest problem facing the nation.
Peter Curbishley
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