Britain Is Broken. No One Knows How. No One Was There.
An amazing coincidence involving five former Conservative MPs who have shambled over to Reform UK. Weird.
Yesterday at Reform’s weekly defection event, Suella Braverman told us in no uncertain terms that Britain is broken.
I will, to a large extent be trying to control my gag reflex when I say this, but she is not completely off the mark. Where I do recover from the violent nausea that this thought has just caused though is when I have to note that people who have violently spent years swinging a sledgehammer at a wall don’t usually get credit for accurately identifying the rubble.
That said, that message of brokenness is, sadly, understandable.
The country feels like it’s thinner now. Public services are hollowed out, local government feels like it’s a palliative care service administering end-of-life care to library, youth services, bus routes and roads and politics has for all intents and purposes completely curdled into what now feels like a state of perma-pantomime.
The basic machinery of the state honestly feels like it’s wheezing in the background and currently being held together by some sticky tape and the heroic efforts of woefully underpaid public servants.
All in all, things feel just a bit… shit, so when someone tells you that they feel that Britain is broken, it would be gaslighting of the highest order to try and convince them otherwise.
Braverman herself put it like this:
“Britain is indeed broken. She is suffering. She is not well. Immigration is out of control. Our public services are on their knees. People don’t feel safe.”
There is a genuinely uncomfortable level of truth in this. Public services are on their knees. People don’t feel safe - not economically, not socially and definitely not institutionally. The language used by Braverman works because it recognises issues rather than dismissing it.
What it very carefully does not do is explain how Britain got here.
The thing, however, that is a complete fabrication from the perspective of Braverman and co, is just how, exactly, everything got broken.
Because, if you didn’t learn this when you were about five years old1, stuff doesn’t normally break through no outside intervention. They tend not to be acts of God, nor do broken things just appear like an unexplained rash.
They are broken by people. Through decisions. Over a period of time - say 14 years or so.
Which leads me neatly back to the parade of political defectors who have recently joined Reform from the Conservative and Unionist Party now apparently discovering for the first time that everything is a mess.
Nadhim Zahawi, Danny Kruger, Andrew Rosindell, Robert Jenrick and now Suella Braverman herself have all found themselves gravitating towards Reform with what is a very similar line between them:
Britain is broken, the establishment is in denial and only a truly radical and disruptive mindset can save us all now - and by God are they making a terribly earnest performance of it!
Except, that performance is not slightly undermined by the fact that none of the people shouting loudly about just how fucked we are were not sitting, watching events in the cheap seats. No, no. They were right there in the thick of it, in charge pulling at every single lever they could find.
Suella Braverman herself was Home Secretary. She was not an activist, commentator or some xenophobic Cassandra shouting warnings into the voice - she was literally in charge of immigration. She spent her time in cabinet presiding over a system that she herself made ever more theatrical and dysfunctional. She revelled in a system that turned to cruelty over competence, and spent her time telling anyone who would listen that the numerous administrative failures under her watch were actually moral toughness. The whole of the immigration system collapsed while she was Home Secretary, but to her it was all a televised vibe.
Robert Jenrick on the other hand during his time as Housing Secretary watched a system in which things kept getting more unaffordable. In which planning was weaponised for culture war purposes2 and “community cohesion” was justified mainly as a way of doing absolutely nothing of practical use. He didn’t stumble blindly into a broken housing market - he actively helped to maintain it, and then fucked off to the Home Office to get terribly worked up about paintings of cartoon characters on the walls of a welcome centre for child refugees.
Nadhim Zahawi held two of the most senior positions in the country - Chancellor of the Exchequer and Education Secretary - during years of fiscal chaos and institutional drift, yet now speaks about how broken the country is with the attitude of a man looking at someone else work instead of the piling mess that he left behind himself.
Danny Kruger, while not having held cabinet positions, held an influential place in the Conservative Party and spent many years shaping social policy - offering solemn lectures about family values and moral renewal3, while very actively supporting multiple governments that removed the economic foundations desperately needed to sustain both of those concepts. It honestly takes a particularly brassy neck to scold society for fraying at the seams while you’re actively ripping away at the threads.
Finally, Andrew Rosindell was the culture-wars pioneer - he has spent years railing against symbolic enemies while backing administrations that completely hollowed out the state that he now supposedly mourns4.
Not a single one of these five were rebels of any kind. They are not insurgents, nor are they plucky outsiders storming the gates. Each one of them is either an experienced officer holder who actively made decisions, or they were part of the party apparatus that allowed for some of the most damaging policies that this country has ever seen.
But according to them, Britain is broken.
On the face of it, it sounds honest. It acknowledges that things have gone wrong. But while doing so, it does something else - it turns decline into inevitability, and most importantly for this quintet of grievance and failure, it detaches damage from authorship. It invites all those people who are being lured into the Reform UK narrative to experience the time we’re living now as a kind of natural disaster instead of the completely predictable outcome of choices made. By them. Loudly. Proudly.
Repeatedly.
In their narrative of brokenness, the country did’t get broken by policy. It’s just… broken. There isn’t a single fingerprint to be found, and a timeline finds itself conspicuously absent. There is, of course, no need to ask who held the pen, gave the orders or waved laws through parliament - which is extraordinarily convenient for people with such illuminating CVs.
If these new Reform MPs can just stick to that line - the broken one - the one that’s borderline abstract and almost metaphysical in sense, then no one has to do that awkward thing where they have to explain how fourteen years of Conservative governments contributed to that. We don’t have to mention Brexit, Austerity, the mishandling of COVID, the open corruption, the grifting, the moral fucking rot that set in under them. All of that blurs. Decisions become vague and there are excuses of “but I promise I wanted to do things differently, and I wasn’t allowed to. Poor. Poor me.”
Instead of telling them all to fuck off though, there is a hazard here - because this whole situation they’ve created is exactly where Reform’s appeal lies. It allows people to feel radical without actually confronting the continuity of events that led up to where we are. It accurately names the collapse while very carefully misplacing the responsibility. You helpfully get both anger without memory, and diagnosis without accountability.
For people who I now like to call “Reform Curious”, this, from the outside, feels like honesty. Late to the show, but someone finally said it. Someone who is in power (or power adjacent) is finally agreeing with them that their wait for a hip replacement, that the unfixable pothole outside their house, that the lack of opportunities for them and their children is real.
That is cathartic. And it’s also a smokescreen. Because what Braverman et al are selling us isn’t courage. It’s outright theatre. We’re being told that they’re insurgents, but what they are is five people looking for absolution.
I said at the very start of this piece that the country feels broken. Because it does. Anyone pretending otherwise isn’t being wholly truthful.
The takeaway from this piece though should be that recognising damage isn’t the same thing, in any way or form, as understanding it. Shouting “everything is broken!” is not radical if it’s followed by a stolid refusal to explain exactly how it got to this point, when it happened and, most importantly of all, by whom it was broken.
Reform’s five new MPs that have grieviously stumbled their way over aren’t offering honesty, but rather a very selective and public sort of amnesia. They’re serving us politics that validates the Reform curious’s anger, while carefully asking them to not ask too many pointed questions.
That anger is in and of itself emotionally satisfying - but it won’t fix a single pothole, shorten a single waiting list or rebuild a single public service.
We will only ever get to the point of repair when we start talking about responsibility - and that can only start with the admission that Britain’s problems were neither inevitable and abstract, nor were they imported from elsewhere.
No. It’s sadly far simpler than that.
Each issue we now face was made. Deliberately. Recently and by the exact people who are now loudly pointing at the rubble, but strangely reluctant to discuss who was holding the sledgehammer.
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I tried to convince my grandmother that three of her china plates had just fallen off the side cabinet and had absolutely nothing to do with the ball my sister and I were chucking at each other with the intent to maim. It did not go well for me.
Very oddly, and if you didn’t know, houses don’t actually get built by shouting at migrants, benefit claimants or trans people. Weird that, right?
Women and Homosexuals seem to make him particularly uncomfortable.
Though to be fair, grief does look different in different people - and especially so when you’re the one who helped break things.
They're saying nobody feels safe and everything's gone to shit - true - but then heaping the blame onto immigrants and transpeople. Classic far right diversion tactics.
The Tory government that trashed so much of value in this country was cruel, greedy and lacking any shred of care or responsibility for the people they were elected to serve. It's hard to imagine any of them adding popularity to Reform. Let's hope.