Long Read: Brexit, Burnham and Britain’s Permanent Restlessness

Six Prime Ministers later and we're still no closer to solving the foundational issues in this country

Photo by Jannes Van den wouwer on Unsplash

It appears that we are on the cusp of yet another new Prime Minister.

You would think that with the past decade of experiencing a rotation of them we’d be used to it by now. That this would feel like just another turn of the political musical chairs we’ve become so used to.

Cameron to May, May to Johnson, Johnson to Truss, Truss to Sunak, Sunak to Starmer. Six different leaders over ten years, giving us an average of a new resident of No. 10 every twenty months or so, which by my reckoning is a PM lasting barely longer than a pair of my best M&S pants.

That, my friends, is not normal. It feels more like something that should be happening in Italy rather than Blighty where we’ve seen PMs go on and on for well over a decade.

Yet here we find ourselves.

Journalists are staking out Downing Street. MPs are pretending they definitely aren’t briefing against each other while somehow all managing to use exactly the same phrases. Political correspondents are once again standing outside Number 10 looking as though they’ve been trapped in a hostage situation for several weeks. The rest of us are refreshing our phones waiting to find out whether Keir Starmer is about to survive, resign, or engage in some sort of gladiatorial combat with Andy Burnham for possession of the nation’s increasingly cursed house keys.

While melting gently in my flat over the past few days, I’ve found myself thinking about the timing of all this, because tomorrow, if you had somewhat missed it, marks ten years since the Brexit referendum.

Now, don’t panic, this is not going to be another article about Brexit.

There are already enough of those. By the time this week is over, every newspaper in Britain will have produced approximately seventeen think pieces explaining either why Brexit destroyed the country, saved the country, wasn’t real Brexit, was too much Brexit or somehow simultaneously both. We have now spent a decade arguing about Brexit with a level of commitment normally reserved for full blown vendettas and inheritance disputes.

What interests me more is something else entirely, because the longer I look at the current chaos around Starmer, Burnham and Labour, the more it reminds me of the atmosphere that existed before Brexit happened.

Not the politics per se, but rather the feeling. The sense that something deeper isn’t working. Because one of the strangest things about the modern United Kingdom is just how unstable it has become while still talking about itself as though it is stable.

If I describe a country that has had six Prime Ministers in ten years, experienced the largest constitutional shock in generations, endured years of political paralysis, cycled through multiple economic crises, witnessed the collapse of trust in institutions, and now appears to be contemplating yet another leadership battle despite electing a government barely two years ago, most people would assume I was talking about somewhere undergoing serious upheaval.

Instead, we describe this as normal democratic politics. It really, really isn’t, and I say that as somebody who grew up in South Africa.

South Africans are generally accustomed to political drama. We produce enough of it to keep several Netflix writers employed full time. The UK, by contrast, used to have a reputation for being reassuringly dull. Governments changed, certainly, but institutions endured. Prime Ministers came and went, but usually after years rather than months. The machinery of state appeared slow, bureaucratic and occasionally frustrating, but fundamentally solid.

When I first moved here, that perception still existed very firmly in my mind. Now I’m increasingly convinced that what we’re seeing today didn’t begin with Brexit.

That Brexit was simply the moment the cracks became impossible to ignore, because those cracks stretch back decades and arguably began during the economic transformation of the 1980s.

The UK emerged from that period wealthier in many respects, but it also emerged fundamentally different. The old industrial economy was steadily dismantled, finance became increasingly dominant, state assets were sold off, and vast parts of the country found themselves living through an economic transition whose benefits often appeared to materialise somewhere else entirely. If you happened to work in the City of London, things were looking rather rosy. If you lived in a former mining town, shipbuilding community, or manufacturing hub, the view was somewhat less optimistic.

Now, to be clear, this isn’t a simplistic argument that everything before Thatcher was wonderful and everything afterwards was terrible, that sort of analysis is about as useful as a crochet condom. Britain genuinely faced serious economic problems during the 1970s. Inflation was rampant, productivity lagged behind competitors, and many nationalised industries required significant reform. Doing nothing was not a realistic option.

The trouble is that what began as economic reform gradually hardened into ideology. Markets were no longer treated as a tool but as an answer. Privatisation became not just a policy but a philosophy. Increasingly, the assumption seemed to be that if something could be sold, outsourced, deregulated or exposed to market forces, it probably should be.

Some parts of the country adapted remarkably well to this new reality. London became one of the world’s great financial centres. Professional services flourished. Property values surged. Entire sectors expanded at a remarkable pace. Britain created enormous amounts of wealth.

The problem was that prosperity did not always follow wealth.

The places that adapted prospered. The places that didn’t were left to fend for themselves. Communities built around industries that had sustained generations found themselves searching for a new economic purpose, and in many cases that purpose never fully arrived. Instead, what followed was a slow accumulation of grievances that would sit quietly beneath the surface for years. Not dramatic enough to dominate headlines, but persistent enough to shape how people viewed politics, government and the future.

For a while, however, there was enough growth to paper over many of those tensions. When New Labour arrived towards the end of the nineties, they invested heavily in public services. Schools genuinely improved. Hospitals were upgraded. Child poverty fell. There were genuine achievements, and it would be intellectually dishonest to pretend otherwise.

Yet even during those years, the UK continued placing an extraordinary amount of faith in finance, property and consumption as the sole engines of future prosperity. The underlying economic model remained largely intact. The assumption was that continued growth would generate enough wealth to smooth over the country’s deeper structural imbalances.

For a time, that looked like a perfectly reasonable bet.

Then 2008 arrived and informed everyone, in the most emphatic possible terms, that building so much of the national economy around financial services was not, in fact, the masterstroke many had assumed it to be.

Looking back from where I’m sitting now in 2026, I increasingly think that was the real turning point, the moment that tipped the world over into the chaos we’ve been living through this past decade. Not because it immediately transformed politics, but because it completely shattered trust. Millions of people watched governments rescue financial institutions while simultaneously being told that there was suddenly no money available for many of the things that affected their daily lives.

The result was austerity.

Most people didn’t encounter austerity through Treasury documents, they encountered it through the slow degradation and deterioration of the world around them.

The library closed. The bus route disappeared. The council struggled. The youth centre vanished. The waiting list grew longer. The local swimming pool reduced its opening hours. The potholes stopped being repaired quite so quickly. The high street lost another shop, then another one after that. Schools started sending increasingly desperate requests for tissues, glue sticks and basic supplies, while social care services were stretched so thin they were practically translucent.

None of these changes individually felt historic. Nobody stood in the street and declared that civilisation had ended because the number 47 bus was now running every forty minutes instead of every twenty. Yet taken together, decision after decision, cut after cut, they created something far more significant than any single cut ever could.

They created an atmosphere.

They created a growing, gnawing sense that things no longer worked quite as well as they once had. That public services were permanently operating one bad winter away from collapse. That every interaction with the state involved longer waits, fewer options and lower expectations. That the UK was somehow becoming a little more threadbare with each passing year, despite being constantly told by chancellor after chancellor that recovery was underway and that prosperity was just around the corner, they promise.

For many people, particularly in communities that had already weathered decades of economic decline, the message from Westminster increasingly seemed to be that things were getting better while the evidence outside their front door suggested otherwise.

That disconnect between what people were being told and what they were experiencing would prove politically explosive, because it turns out that if you spend long enough insisting everything is fine while the roof is leaking onto someone’s head, eventually they stop listening to you and start listening to whoever is offering a ladder, even if that ladder is being sold by Nigel Farage.

By the time the Brexit referendum arrived, millions of voters had already concluded that something was wrong. They may not have agreed on precisely what was wrong, but they knew they were dissatisfied. They knew they were frustrated. They knew they had lost confidence in a political class that seemed increasingly detached from their experiences.

Brexit provided a target for those frustrations. The issue is that it also provided a scapegoat.

Europe became the explanation for problems whose roots lay much closer to home. Immigration became the explanation for problems that had been developing for decades. The referendum transformed a broad and legitimate sense of discontent into a very specific political project that was never really capable of solving the underlying issues.

In hindsight, one of the strangest things about Brexit is how little it actually settled. The promise was that leaving the European Union would resolve the country’s tensions. Instead, it exposed how many of those tensions had very little to do with Europe in the first place.

Theresa May couldn’t resolve them. Boris Johnson couldn’t resolve them despite winning the largest Conservative majority in decades. Liz Truss somehow managed to make them substantially worse in under fifty days, which remains an achievement of sorts. Rishi Sunak mostly looked like a man who had accidentally wandered into somebody else’s crisis and was too polite to leave.

Now those same tensions sit on Keir Starmer’s desk.

Different governments. Different parties. Different slogans. Different promises to finally fix what was broken.

The same underlying frustrations.

And that, for me, is where the connection to today’s drama becomes so obvious.

Ten years later, the UK still hasn’t resolved any of the conditions that produced that discontent in the first place.

Housing remains absurdly expensive. Regional inequalities remain stark. Public services remain under extraordinary pressure. Trust in politics remains desperately low. Economic growth still feels disconnected from everyday life. Communities outside London still feel overlooked by governments of every colour.

What has changed is the political expression of those frustrations. In 2016 it was Brexit. A few years later it was Boris Johnson. Today it may well be Andy Burnham. In 2029, it could be Reform.

The names change, but the underlying search remains consistent. Voters continue looking for somebody capable of convincing them that decline is not inevitable and that the country’s best days are not permanently trapped in a nostalgic montage narrated by Jeremy Clarkson.

That is why I find the current situation so fascinating.

Most commentary treats the potential challenge to Starmer as a story about personalities, factions and internal Labour politics. Some of that is undoubtedly true. Westminster loves nothing more than reducing structural problems to interpersonal drama. It is much easier to discuss who texted whom than to ask why the electorate seems permanently restless.

But the restlessness is the story. It was the story before Brexit, it was the story during Brexit, and it remains the story now.

The deeper question facing the UK today isn’t whether Starmer survives this crisis or whether Burnham eventually reaches Number 10. It’s whether any government has yet figured out how to address the conditions that have been steadily eroding public confidence for the better part of forty years.

Until that happens, I suspect the instability will continue. Not because voters are irrational. Not because Britain has somehow become uniquely dysfunctional. But because people cannot be expected indefinitely to defend a system they increasingly feel isn’t delivering for them.

Brexit was one expression of that frustration. The extraordinary churn of Prime Ministers that followed was another. Whatever happens between Starmer and Burnham will almost certainly be another chapter in exactly the same story.

And that is why, ten years after the referendum, I find myself thinking less about Brexit itself and more about the UK that produced it, because if we continue treating Brexit as the cause rather than the symptom, we will spend another decade arguing about the wrong thing while the cracks underneath us continue to widen.

Six Prime Ministers in ten years is not normal. It’s what happens when root causes never get resolved. And until they are, we’re going to be stuck in this cycle.