Good morning. This is Tom McTague, editor-in-chief of the New Statesman.
In this week’s cover story I examine the problems Britain refuses to face. We have now spent the better part of a decade rotating prime ministers through the same storm, each unable to calm or weather it. There is a temptation to treat this as novelty. But its roots lie deeper than they seem on first appearance. In 1980, Michael Foot reflected on how easily the House of Commons could be carried away by “those swelling tempers when it converts itself into a mob”.
Across Whitehall, the inability to respond to the crises engulfing our nation is staggering. It costs more to build, borrow or power Britain than any of our competitors. The scale of the challenge is no longer in doubt. Economic stagnation, strained public services, and rising political fragmentation are now familiar features of the landscape. It’s easy to reach for the 1970s and 80s as a metaphor for the times we live in, but I think the 1840s is more instructive. Now, like then, everything is simultaneously in flux: technology, capitalism, religion, democracy.
Yet if these revolutions are now underway, who do we have to rise to the level of events? Where is our Disraeli? Where is our Marx?
There is energy on the populist right, and fragments of renewal across the centre and left, but no settled account of what Britain is becoming, or how it should be governed in response.
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Have a great day. Thank you for you reading.
It seems ironic that you blame politicians for creating a swelling mob
It seems to me that the media delight in the fall of a leader
The whole pro-palestinian "gaza vote" thing also has the quality of a moral panic or mass delusion ... and this particular delusion has added to the fragmentation and even general level of violence in politics.