Winters of Discontent are coming Peevish petitions won't fix broken Britain

I was expecting Starmer to be awful. But less than six months into his premiership, his government’s prissy authoritarianism, student-union self-righteousness, and vindictive taxation has plunged Labour from a net favourability rating of +6 on taking power in July to just one point above the hated Conservatives today. Two in five Britons actually believe they’re worse off since Starmer’s election.

Over the weekend, a petition was launched calling for a new General Election. It has now passed two million signatures — including a surprising number of MPs. Elon Musk hailed it as evidence of Britain’s dislike of the Starmerist “police state”.

And yet, we might retort: who cares? As the PM pointed out on Monday, e-petitions aren’t how we choose governments. But, in any case, what difference would a General Election make? Surely we haven’t already forgotten that Starmer owed his landslide not to voters’ love of the Labour Party but to their hatred of the incumbent Tories. And whoever is in power, the issues they face are structural. Politics feels stuck because it is stuck. And what’s sticking it is a cross-party consensus: certain features of the political landscape are categorically off the table in policy terms.

In this sense, our predicament today is comparable with that of the Seventies. In that unhappy decade, post-war recovery proved so difficult because Britain had recently lost many of its former imperial markets and supply chains. We’d nationalised major industries, leaving the country with a vast state apparatus responsible for almost everything, and with dwindling funds to pay for it. Meanwhile well-organised trade unions responded to any effort to constrain wages in these industries by going on strike, effectively holding the taxpayer to ransom — all while a civil service raised to govern a global empire set about justifying its much-reduced existence by inventing new problems to solve. Each stakeholder had, from their own perspective, a legitimate set of interests; but the aggregate result was stasis. Rubbish went un-collected in the street. Dead bodies weren’t taken away. There were rolling blackouts across the country, as miners picketed power stations and railway workers refused to move fuel around the country.

Today, this winter promises to be every bit as discontented. And that won’t change, no matter how many prime ministers we go through, so long as both parties remain committed to the beliefs and institutions that make change impossible. It’s just the pillars of stagnation that are different. In the Seventies it was national ownership, industry, and the unions. Today it’s non-contributory welfare (including the NHS), and a morality industry shaped by a monolithically progressive “third sector”, and enforced by an activist judiciary armed with “human rights”. It’s all underwritten by the third pillar: the mass immigration that keeps the whole show on the road.

Much as in the Seventies, the livelihoods of millions depend on these pillars remaining politically off-limits. And much as then, today’s settlement is running out of road, via its own internal logic. We can’t cut taxes because how else are we supposed to fund the NHS? But we can’t raise them either, because otherwise we’ll plunge people into poverty and then they’ll be on benefits, which requires raising taxes and sets off a shrill chorus from the “third sector”. Meanwhile, the wider economy that sustains it is a confected, empty thing of bum-wiping and consumer credit, kept in fragile homeostasis by increasingly punitive demands on a shrinking base of real businesses and productive workers. This is shored up with borrowing and what Starmer (like the Tories before him) calls making Britain “a world-leading hub for investment” and everyone else calls “flogging national assets to Blackrock”. In this unwelcoming climate, then, productive sector after productive sector crumples, sells up, or moves overseas. The Tories immiserated SMEs; under Labour, it’s the turn of farmers. After that, who knows? Perhaps HMRC will resort to robbing ice cream vans.

Then, whatever colour their rosette, the appetite of successive governments for deferring disaster by importing warm bodies is the most consistent revealed preference of all. Boris Johnson has admitted he opened the spigots with the aim of tackling inflation after Covid. And to date Labour seem to be continuing this long-established Tory policy, of making rude gestures at would-be immigrants with one hand while holding the door open with the other. Then, too, you can’t challenge this or you’ll set the morality industry off, and you can’t even point out its potential deleterious effects on welfare because the government doesn’t collect those statistics. And meanwhile the social solidarity and shared cultural references that comprise a polity’s real unwritten constitution continue their long, slow dissolution, assailed by the second-order effects of this human quantitative easing.

For most of today’s younger Left-wingers, Margaret Thatcher is a figure from distant demonology: an unfathomable, snooty sociopath whose context is lost in the mists of time. But she was swept to power on a wave of anger and frustration at a social contract that had ground Britain to a halt. Voters chose her because she promised — and delivered — radical solutions. In Thatcher’s assessment, Britain’s problems could only be solved by tackling the power-bases that held the country to ransom. That meant taking industries out of state hands, and kneecapping the unions who used their collective bargaining power against those industries. She embarked on her notorious privatisation campaign, then broke the unions by closing the mines and de-industrialising the country, in favour of the service economy that now dominates Britain.

Looking back, the net result was (to say the least) two-sided. It broke the stalemate and got at least parts of the country moving again. But the cost was terrible: great swathes of Britain were impoverished. She never got a grip on the Blob, but rather grew it; meanwhile, our former industrial cities have languished, our service economy is hopelessly lop-sided, and an alarmingly high proportion of Britain’s former national assets are now foreign-owned. Sir Keir is apparently salivating at the prospect of selling still more to his friends in Big Finance.

But perhaps the worst second-order consequence of her vision has been the stranglehold it still exerts over mainstream British politics. Warmed-up Thatcherism can still induce a spasm of enthusiasm among even the most fossilised Tory grandee: one need only make the right noises about “markets” and “private enterprise” to have them all lurching from their sarcophagi and rallying behind the latest (preferably female) avatar of this creed. But the aspect of Thatcher that the Conservative Party (and, arguably the country) actually needs is not the specific policy platform or indeed the possession of two X chromosomes. It’s her vision, radicalism, and courage.

This doesn’t just mean someone who likes free markets and tank-based photo opportunities. It means someone willing to exit our current care-home mentality and go directly at the sacred pillars of stagnation, based on a coherent, positive vision of Britain’s future.

That would mean making the case against non-contributory welfare, and for insurance-based healthcare. It would mean kneecapping the NGOcracy — from defunding the pseudo-independent “third sector” policy launderers to reining in an activist judiciary, and modernising the now widely loathed architecture of “human rights” that privileges the safety of foreign paedophiles over that of British nationals. And it would mean closing the borders, reforming asylum policy and naturalisation rights, and riding out the screeching that would follow from every vested interest. It would likely also mean abandoning the fiction of Civil Service “neutrality”, at least in important roles. This achieved, we might be in a position to shake out the economy so it rewards what Brits have historically been good at: inventing, making, and selling stuff.

We might even look to the most radical policy shift of all: leaving behind the fantasy of “global Britain” for some form of re-unification with Greater Britain, which is to say the historic Anglosphere. This done, we might even stand a chance of taming Thatcherism’s worst legacy — the asset-strippers of global finance — a feat modern Britain is unlikely to manage alone.

Taken singly, each of these measures is provocative. Together, the package would be explosive. And we can also be sure that cutting all these Gordian knots would have costs — perhaps as terrible as those of unsticking Seventies Britain. But we might also ask: what would the costs have been, back then, of doing nothing? And what will those costs be if we continue on our current path? Pace Elon Musk, modern Britain is a long way from being a genuine police state. But if we continue on this track, that’s what we will have to become, to suppress with the fury that I already feel approaching boiling point — especially among the shrinking proportion of the population that makes things, pays up, pitches in, and picks up litter.

I expect several more winters of discontent before Britain’s cup of bitterness is drained. The General Election petition may be a therapeutic exercise in displacement politics, but the sentiment behind it is real and will grow more visceral before this unhappy era is over. And still our politicians are nowhere near the point of realisation. So we can expect administration after administration to fall in succession, only to be replaced by another just as hated. More petitions, more unrest, more polls. Perhaps more riots, and certainly more two-tier policing.

The only routes out are either to become what Elon Musk thinks we already are. Or, alternatively, to find a leader who is both in tune with vox populi, and also willing to ignore its protests. Who actually likes ordinary British people. And who will do whatever it takes — even the currently unthinkable — to free us from this death-spiral.

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Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at UnHerd.

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