Failure is the new normal in second-rate Britain

From the police, to trains, to the NHS, we’ve become used to nothing working quite as it is meant to

As small children, my brother, cousin and I inhaled a few too many Famous Fives and fancied ourselves as amateur sleuths. So we established the “Detective Club”. We’d write letters in invisible ink, climb trees and hover over passers-by with binoculars; or spend car journeys noting down the number-plates of other motorists. To put it mildly, we were a bit odd. And astonishing as this may seem, we never succeeded in foiling any crimes.

Until now. When my brother was scammed out of an expensive laptop, out came our sleuthing hats after more than a 20-year absence. We tracked the laptop’s progress on “Find My Mac” and watched as it plodded from London to an address in Portsmouth. My brother wrote to Action Fraud and even joined the community app of that street in the hope of finding out more about the scammer. Yet although he handed over the exact address to police, with a range of corroborating information, officers insisted they couldn’t send someone to intercept the laptop or intervene – it was just “not a priority”.

Thanks to the miracles of technology, many victims of crime are enjoying the uniquely postmodern experience of watching their belongings work their way across the country; sometimes around the world. My colleague Ed Cumming wrote hilariously about tracing the progress of his stolen computer; first around London, then 1,000 miles away to a tower block in Algeria.

Another friend, searching for his sister’s missing bike, found it being sold online. After procuring the name and employment address of the perpetrator, plus a video of him nabbing the bike, he presented all this to the police – who once again said there was nothing they could do. (Presumably they were rushed off their feet with non-crime hate incidents.) Now we’re considering a visit to the restaurant where the thief works.

Police inaction is making vigilantes of us all, and it’s becoming a running joke. But it shouldn’t be. What bothers me – more, even, than the inaction itself – is the mundane predictability of this saga. Such experiences have been utterly normalised. We appear resigned to the authorities doing nothing about certain crimes; or worse than nothing, as when police refused to move the XR protestors who’d blocked central London. Instead they prosecuted those who tried to move them along. Failure is the new normal, in a host of areas.

Commuting by train, you often encounter not just industrial action but a more surreal kind of chaos. After recent planned strikes were called off, we arrived to find mass cancellations anyway; the operator hadn’t managed to change staff rotas in time.

There are echoes of the 1970s: strikes, industries prioritising employees over consumers, poor performance and a real lack of accountability. The respective bargaining clout may be very different – today’s strikers can’t go full Scargill and bring the country to its knees. But what they can do is disrupt things just enough to make ordinary life a bit more difficult for everyone on a semi-regular basis – consistent second-rateness instead of earthshattering disruption. And we all just tolerate it – like characters in a Chekhov play, imagining ourselves at the whim of forces of destiny beyond our control.

A similar effect is visible in the NHS, which, it emerged this week, is now performing fewer operations than before the pandemic, even though its funding is 12 per cent higher. Staffing levels are higher, too; with 13 per cent more doctors than in 2019, 11 per cent more nurses, and 10 per cent more support staff. Yet inputs simply aren’t translating into outputs.

Given that NHS failure infects all areas of social and economic life, such as the growing numbers of people inactive due to poor health, and given that health spending now represents 45 per cent of overall government expenditure on goods and services, it is remarkable that we still can’t talk about meaningful reform. Yet the subject remains a taboo.

Perhaps an enduring belief that the NHS is “free”, and an illusion that we face a binary choice between this and a Us-style private healthcare dystopia, keeps patients relatively willing to wait and endure their frustrations. Maybe the pooling of accountability means those frustrations are channelled towards the Government, rather than the NHS and its organisational structure.

Many simply blame problems on “underfunding” – and no doubt the blank cheques of an unreformed healthcare system and the pensions triple-lock will always capture an overwhelming share of spending and mean other departments are neglected. But I rarely return from my interactions with the state – whether securing a GP appointment, or the Kafkaesque ordeal of trying to speak to someone from HMRC – wishing government would “do more”. I simply wonder what has happened to our money.

The writer Jeremy Driver has identified a particular kind of defeatism, common to officialdom, which he calls “Cheems Mindset” – “the reflexive belief that barriers to policy outcomes are natural laws that we should not waste our time considering how to overcome”. In other words, there are simply things we can’t do, policies we can’t implement because it would be too complicated; too tricky even to contemplate. “Cheems Mindset” feels horribly relevant right now – and perhaps its flipside is the public’s readiness to accept a rotten status quo.