A cage entirely of our own making

David Shipley has a very useful Critic piece on the self-imposed nature of Britain’s governing crisis. It's the weird aspect of our political problems, that they are so obvious and suitable legislative remedies are not obscure. 


The broken state of Britain

Britain’s governing crisis is not imposed from outside – it is chosen

In the UK there are signs of state failure everywhere for those with eyes to see. Dominic Cummings says that “the whole wider Whitehall system is fundamentally broken”. He isn’t alone. More than half of MPs polled think Whitehall is working “badly”, and even our machine-man Prime Minister has observed that “too many people in Whitehall are comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline”. Even the “delight” with which ministers welcomed Alaa Abd El-Fattah to Britain has been blamed on “the supremacy of the Stakeholder State” by Starmer’s former Director of Strategy, Paul Ovenden.

The British people know their state is broken. In the 2024 British Social Attitudes survey 79% of us said that our system of governing “could be improved a lot/a great deal”. In truth this is unsurprising. We live under a regime which hasn’t built a reservoir since 1992, hasn’t brought a nuclear power plant online since 1995, which struggles to complete a high speed rail link between two cities a mere 130 miles apart, in which GDP per capita has barely grown in almost 20 years, in which energy costs are ruinously high, youth unemployment is rising and which is unable to defend its own borders, or keep its citizens safe from a wave of serious crime committed by recent migrants.


The whole piece is well worth reading as a reminder that Mr Shipley is right, the mess we're in is obvious and could be remedied by appropriate acts of Parliament. As he says, our cage could be shattered with a word. 

Yet when we consider the issue in terms of a cage, we enter the murky world of human behaviour, conditioning, comfort zones and ambitious charlatans. 


Those who govern us seem unable to imagine a society which doesn’t function (or rather fails to function) pretty much like the UK today. The legal and conceptual framework we exist within is treated as though it’s geography, or weather — something to be accepted, or adapted to. The reality is that all these limitations are tools of our own making. They are tools which have long since ceased to work.

Despite this, almost our entire political and media class seem unable to imagine a world without those broken tools. And so our nation remains bound in a cage entirely of our own making, which we could shatter with a word.