The Daily Telegraph - Saturday
Britain is fast becoming a failed state. Faith in the system is beginning to collapse
Rishi Sunak’s warning earlier this week of a “growing consensus that mob rule is replacing democratic rule” – a theme he returned to yesterday afternoon – is a disturbing and damning indictment of a modern-day Britain that many consider to be “broken”. Ochlocracy or “mob rule” is something we associate with the Gordon Riots or Salem Witch Trials – not life in the UK in 2024.
The mere notion of the Prime Minister having to tell the police that they should be better protecting the public from what he described as a “pattern of increasingly violent and intimidatory behaviour… intended to shout down free debate and stop elected representatives doing their job” marks a new low for a nation with a proud tradition as a beacon of freedom and democracy.
Should he really need to issue a reminder that protecting the “values that we all hold dear” is not only “fundamental to our democratic system” but also “vital for maintaining public confidence in the police”?
If the mob is ruling, then of course it is for the Prime Minister to do something about it, and we are promised concrete action soon. But sadly the authority of the state is collapsing wherever we look.
Crime appears to be out of control, with videos circulating almost daily of machete-wielding thugs trying to carve each other to pieces while a bewildered public helplessly looks on. In the old days, anti-social youths used to be given a clip around the ear. Now people are scared of even approaching them for fear of being attacked. The other week, we had reports of a man threatening a bus full of passengers in south London with what was alleged to be acid – as if carrying around corrosive substances has now become a new norm.
Thieves have effectively been given a licence to shoplift goods up to the value of £200, while we have seen an increase in the number of unsolved crimes – now at around 6,000 per day according to the Home Office’s own figures. The odds clearly seem to be stacked in favour of the criminals.
If it wasn’t bad enough that law-abiding citizens have to put up with the disruption caused by the virtue-signalling extremists of Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion, they have been expected to sit back and watch unruly protesters taking to the streets of our capital to call for “jihad” and projecting the antiSemitic slogan “from the river to the sea” on to Big Ben, one of our most iconic national monuments.
Such is the level of influence exerted by these vocal minorities – be they Islamists, eco-fanatics, criminal gangs, or far-Right thugs – that the majority is left either massively inconvenienced or fearful in their own neighbourhoods. Little wonder, then, that faith in the police is at an all-time low, exacerbated by the Sarah Everard scandal, which has caused officers to be viewed with even more suspicion than they were already.
Our porous borders are another example of the authority of the state being completely undermined. The revelations of whistleblower David Neal – who has warned of shocking migration system failings, including passport checkpoints left unmanned – are all the more extraordinary given the nonchalance with which the
Home Office appears to have allowed complete scandals to fester without doing anything about it.
We now learn that a flagship humanitarian scheme set up to help Afghans fleeing the Taliban was opened to “individuals who had never been to Afghanistan”; that persistent problems with those pesky passport e-gates mean “protection of the border is neither effective nor efficient”; that Border Force X-ray equipment is failing to detect clandestine migrants hidden in lorries; that British airports have a “lack of anti-smuggling capability”; that Customs channels were repeatedly left unnamed; and that immigration officers conducting raids are relying on Google Maps.
Amid all this bungling, we also discovered this week that the number of foreign workers handed permission to come to Britain by the Home Office surged to a record high of 616,000 last year – a 46 per cent increase on the year before. Having promised, in its 2019 manifesto, to introduce “an Australian-style points-based system to control immigration”, the Conservative Party is doing the exact opposite of what people voted for, destroying trust in the state to deliver on its promises.
Not only is legal migration at a record high but the boats haven’t been stopped and no one has been deported to Rwanda despite the deal being set to cost the taxpayer £500million by 2026. The phrase “You had one job” springs to mind.
Defence – or more accurately, our lack of it – also highlights the extent to which the state is giving up on even its most basic duties. The British Army is the smallest it has been since the Napoleonic Wars. The statistics show that, if it continues to lose troops at the current rate, the number of regular soldiers will fall to 67,741 by 2026, an extraordinary decline of 40 per cent since 2010.
We now learn that Chancellor Jeremy Hunt is minded not to increase defence spending, despite Dutch admiral Rob Bauer, chair of Nato’s military committee, warning that the alliance could be at war with Russia within 20 years.
Who could disagree with General Lord Dannatt, the former chief of the general staff, when he says: “The woeful state of our Armed Forces in the mid-1930s failed to deter Hitler or prevent the Second World War and
Easy way in: Passport control in arrivals in Terminal 2 at Heathrow Airport
the Holocaust. There is a serious danger of history repeating itself ”?
With Britain giving every appearance of becoming a failed state, is it any wonder that people are giving up any sort of responsibility, even for themselves and their families? School absence is at crisis levels and severe absence is at record levels. Worklessness is becoming an epidemic, with people in their 20s more likely to claim they are too ill to work than those in their 30s and 40s, according to analysis of Office for National Statistic (ONS) data by the Resolution Foundation and Health Foundation think tanks.
This is particularly disturbing when you consider that we are going to become increasingly reliant on this younger generation to pull its weight, as the number of retirees continues to grow and will put added strain on our already stretched NHS (waiting list approaching eight million).
The number of people not seeking employment because of a health condition is now 2.6 million, up by half a million or almost 25 per cent since the pandemic. While there is no doubt that some represented in these figures are indeed unfit to work, there appears to be a growing number of people who are able to work but choose not to. The contract between the state and the people has been broken, possibly beyond all repair. elected representative to argue the case for Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour and its policies.
Isn’t this a depressing sign of the times? Sadly the Left aren’t the only ones bottling debates. The Thursday before last I appeared on
where Tory bigwigs have been conspicuous by their absence for months.
What on earth are they afraid of? Politicians on both sides of the divide appear to be increasingly unwilling to make the argument for what they believe in, preferring instead to rely on soundbites spoon-fed to them by their special advisers and press officers.
Margaret Thatcher famously once declared: “I love argument, I love debate. I don’t expect anyone just to sit there and agree with me, that’s not their job.” The very best MPs have always been the ones who relished the cut and thrust of taking the fight to the other side. But the confused response to the Lee Anderson furore suggests that most of the current crop are scared of having an opinion, let alone expressing one.