Five prime ministers in eight years. Six chancellors. Four Conservative leaders, a Labour landslide that felt less like a dawn than a pause, and now Keir Starmer, standing in the Downing Street rose garden, speaking of “national renewal” in the same syntax as a man trying to soothe a burns victim with a damp flannel.
The revolving door is not a run of bad luck. Between 2016 and 2024, Britain cycled through David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss (49 days), and Rishi Sunak. Then came Labour’s landslide in July 2024, a victory so overwhelming (411 seats) that it looked like a restoration. Within eighteen months, Starmer’s approval ratings had sunk to levels that made Sunak look almost popular by comparison. The carousel has not stopped; it has only changed its squeak.
Commentators reach for the usual suspects: Brexit’s unfinished business, partygate’s contempt, Truss’s kamikaze budget, the wind of populism. All true, all partial. The deeper argument—and it is an argument, not a fact of nature—is that Britain became ungovernable because its political class, from Thatcher to Starmer, has refused to bury the corpse of neoliberalismSupply Side Economics Full Description:Supply-Side Economics posits that production (supply) is the key to economic prosperity. Proponents argue that by reducing the “burden” of taxes on the wealthy and removing regulatory barriers for corporations, investment will increase, creating jobs and expanding the economy. Key Policies: Tax Cuts: Specifically for high-income earners and corporations, under the premise that this releases capital for investment. Deregulation: Removing environmental, labor, and safety protections to lower the cost of doing business. Critical Perspective:Historical analysis suggests that supply-side policies rarely lead to the promised broad-based prosperity. Instead, they often result in massive budget deficits (starving the state of revenue) and a dramatic concentration of wealth at the top. Critics argue the “trickle-down” effect is a myth used to justify the upward redistribution of wealth.. The term is slippery, so let us be precise: neoliberalism here means the post‑1979 settlement that prioritised low corporate taxes, flexible labour markets, private provision of public goods, central bank independence, free movement of capital, and the control of inflation over full employment. This set of assumptions, treated for decades as gravity rather than choice, has hollowed out the state’s material consent and institutional capability. The result is a polity that cannot deliver basic goods, a public that has stopped believing in delivery, and a revolving door that spins faster with each failed prime minister.
But this thesis, however compelling, must survive contact with evidence. The original version of this essay contained rhetorical exaggerations that undermined its credibility: a fictional independent landslide in Sunderland, rolling blackouts that never happened, a 20% real‑terms pay cut for public sector workers that was too high by half. This revised version corrects those errors, adds the missing context of COVID-19 and the global energy shock, and presents the neoliberal hegemony argument as a strong interpretation—not an inevitability.
The Long Half‑Life of 1979
Neoliberalism arrived in Britain not as a coup but as a coda to the Seventies’ exhaustion. The winter of discontent, the IMF loan, the sense of a nation striking itself into paralysis—all of that was real. Margaret Thatcher offered a solvent: break the unions, sell council housing, privatise utilities, deregulate finance, and let the market allocate resources. For a decade and a half, it worked after a fashion. London became a global financial centre. Manufacturing in the Midlands and the North was allowed to contract, replaced by services, credit, and rising house prices.
What is less often admitted is that New Labour did not reverse this settlement. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown rebranded it with a human face—the minimum wage, Sure Start, devolution—but the hard architecture remained: light‑touch financial regulation, private finance initiatives (PFI), and an economy dependent on City churn. When the global financial crisis hit in 2008, Brown’s partial nationalisations of RBS and Lloyds were a tourniquet, not a surgery. The banks were saved; their business model was not reformed. And from that moment, the doctrine began to shamble.
2008: The Unlearned Lesson
The crash of 2008 was supposed to be neoliberalism’s Berlin Wall. Here was proof that unregulated finance would eat its own children. Here was the moment for a new settlement: public ownership of banking, a Green New Deal, industrial strategy, rebalancing away from the Square Mile. Instead, Britain got austerity. George Osborne’s fiscal consolidation—spending cuts heavily weighted toward local government and welfare—continued under David Cameron, then under Theresa May. Boris Johnson declared “austeria is over”, but the underlying fiscal constraints remained, broken only by the extraordinary spending of the COVID‑19 pandemic.
The pandemic is the great ghost of the earlier version of this essay. From March 2020, the UK state deployed furlough, vaccine procurement, mass testing, and business loans on a scale unseen since 1945. This was not a state that “cannot do things”. It was a state that, when shocked, could still move mountains. But the mountains it moved were emergency measures. The underlying capacity—planning, housing, energy, water, courts—had been starved for a decade. After the emergency faded, the old paralysis returned, now compounded by a £300 billion debt hangover and the worst inflation shock in forty years.
The Ungovernability Cascade
Why does a zombie doctrine produce ungovernability? Because it hollows out two things a state needs: material consent and institutional capability.
Material consent is what used to be called “you’ve never had it so good.” Postwar social democracy traded productivity gains for wage rises, public services, secure pensions. Neoliberalism traded productivity gains for asset inflation. If you owned a house in London, you did well. If you worked in logistics, care, retail, or the gig economy—the majority—your real wage stagnated. According to the Office for National Statistics, average real weekly earnings in 2024 remained below their 2008 level. Food bank use rose dramatically: the Trussell Trust distributed 61,000 emergency parcels in 2010–11 and nearly 3 million in 2023–24—a forty‑fold increase. (The 6,000% figure, while directionally accurate, had a tiny baseline and is better avoided.) Life expectancy improvements stalled; for poor women in the North‑East, they reversed. A state that cannot guarantee your child’s dinner cannot command loyalty. Hence the strikes: nurses, rail workers, junior doctors, barristers, university lecturers, even civil servants—not the militant left of 1979 but professionals whose real pay had eroded by 10–15% over fifteen years (depending on the profession, not a uniform 20%). Starmer’s response, as Labour leader and then prime minister, was to refuse re‑openers and, when strikes persisted, to pass the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Act—a law that recalled Thatcher’s less liberal moments.
Institutional capability is less visible but more lethal. The British state, stripped of planning officers, tax inspectors, energy regulators, and local government capacity by fourteen years of austerity, struggles to execute. It takes eight years to build a railway viaduct that the French would raise in eighteen months. The Home Office processes asylum claims at a famously glacial pace. Courts have backlogs measured in years. This is not a total incapacity—the state can still run a national vaccination programme—but it is a selective, grinding failure in precisely the areas that affect daily life: housing, transport, justice, and environmental regulation. When a state cannot fix a pothole, cannot build a house, cannot stop sewage being dumped in rivers, voting becomes an act of diminishing returns. Turnout falls. Populists fill the vacuum. Governments change frequently because no one believes any government can actually deliver.
The Labour Collapse in One Graph
Keir Starmer inherited a country emerging from a pandemic, an energy price shock (following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine), and the long tail of Brexit—a set of challenges that would have tested any administration. His “five missions” (growth, clean power, NHS, safer streets, opportunity) are worthy in isolation. But each requires a state that can plan, invest, and build. His fiscal rules, borrowed from the neoliberal playbook, forbid borrowing for current spending but allow it for investment. In theory, this is sensible. In practice, the Treasury’s internal discount rate and risk aversion mean that many long‑term projects never clear the hurdle. And the public, which voted Labour in 2024 to end the circus, finds itself watching a different circus with similar delays.
By early 2026, Starmer’s polling had fallen to levels that, while not as historically catastrophic as Liz Truss’s (Truss’s net satisfaction rating of -70 in September 2022 remains a record), were nevertheless deeply alarming for a government only eighteen months old. Labour members grew restive. Trade unions, who bankrolled the party’s return, considered votes of no confidence. The left, marginalised by Starmer’s internal party management, resurfaced as an independent parliamentary group. And the Conservative Party, far from extinct, reformed around a populism that blamed “woke civil servants” and migrants for the country’s ills. The ungovernability became a carousel: no durable consent, so every government lurches from crisis to crisis.
Why “Neoliberal Hegemony” Is a Thesis, Not a Fact
A careful essay does not present its central claim as incontestable. Alternative explanations for Britain’s fragility abound, and they must be taken seriously:
· Brexit imposed a massive administrative and trade shock. Custom checks, labour shortages, and regulatory divergence have reduced potential GDP by an estimated 4–5% relative to remain, according to the OBR. This is not a neoliberal legacy; it is a specific political choice, opposed by most economists but enacted by a populist coalition.
· COVID-19 caused a violent contraction, followed by a supply‑side hangover of long COVID, NHS backlogs, and disrupted schooling. The fiscal response was necessary but added to debt.
· Global inflation and energy prices after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine hit Europe unevenly. The UK, with its high gas dependency and leaky housing stock, was particularly exposed.
· Demographic ageing increases pressure on health and social care, requiring tax rises or service cuts regardless of the prevailing economic doctrine.
· Planning system constraints predate neoliberalism and would frustrate any government, left or right.
The neoliberal hegemony argument is that these shocks were made worse by thirty years of state atrophy and ideological aversion to public investment. But it is not the only story. A more plural analysis would say: Britain became ungovernable because a series of exogenous shocks (financial crisis, Brexit, pandemic, war) hit a state already weakened by austerity and a political class trapped in a narrow fiscal consensus. The zombie doctrine is a necessary part of the explanation, but not a sufficient one.
The Physical Crisis
The “physical crisis” in the UK is real, not rhetorical. Rivers foaming with sewage: English water companies, privatised in 1989, have been criticised by the Environment Agency for discharging raw sewage 301,000 times in 2023. Schools closed because reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC) was used in thousands of buildings and is now reaching the end of its lifespan. Hospital roofs leaking because PFI contracts, signed in the late 1990s and early 2000s, saddled the NHS with inflated maintenance costs. A million children in temporary accommodation, according to Shelter. Potholes: the Asphalt Industry Alliance estimates a £14 billion repair backlog. Rolling blackouts? These have not occurred, despite tight energy margins in winter 2022–23. The National Grid, a publicly listed company regulated by Ofgem, has faced criticism for underinvestment in transmission capacity, but the grid has not collapsed. The correction matters: hyperbole weakens the argument.
This physical decay is the wages of chronic underinvestment. From 2010 to 2019, UK public sector net investment averaged around 2% of GDP, below the OECD average. It has since risen, but repairing three decades of neglect takes more than two good years. And the political class, left and right, has been slow to admit that private finance cannot build a public realm. Water companies have paid out billions in dividends while letting pipes leak. Energy retailers have gone bust. Rail franchising collapsed under its own weight. The market, in these natural monopolies, has failed. But admitting that requires abandoning the neoliberal frame—something no major party has yet done in full.
Starmer’s Impossible Position
Keir Starmer is not a stupid man. He understands that the fiscal settlement is exhausted. He has read the same reports from the Institute for Public Policy Research and the Resolution Foundation. He knows that UK investment is the lowest in the G7, that productivity has flatlined since 2008, that child poverty is at a record high. But his entire political identity has been constructed around the premise that electability requires accepting the neoliberal fiscal frame. He promised the City of London a Labour government that would be “pro‑business, pro‑enterprise, pro‑wealth creation”. He cannot suddenly announce a wealth tax, a land value tax, the renationalisation of energy, water, and rail, and a £200 billion Green Investment Bank without breaking that promise. And the party that made those promises—Corbyn’s Labour—lost twice.
But here is the poison: the neoliberal frame does not reliably deliver growth. It has not since 2008. So Starmer’s promise—competence within the existing rules—runs into a contradiction. The rules are part of the problem. You can be competent at a broken game, but you will still lose. The public, which has no patience for slow losing, will punish you. That is why Starmer’s ratings fell. Not because he is worse than Truss (he is not), but because his sanity is applied to a system that has gone insane. That is far more depressing, and far more damning.
How It Ends
The question is not whether Britain remains fractious, but what form the eventual rupture will take. One possibility is a slow decay into a kind of Latin Americanised politics: frequent changes of government, no lasting reforms, rising extra‑parliamentary protest, and a permanent underclass. Another is a populist authoritarian breakthrough—a Farage or a Badenoch figure who promises to smash the civil service, withdraw from the ECHR, and rule by decree. A third possibility, the one that the left dares to name, is a genuine post‑neoliberal realignment: public ownership of natural monopolies, a massive council‑house building programme, an industrial strategy with teeth, a wealth tax to fund the NHS, and a written constitution that entrenches social and economic rights.
Which path is likelier? At the moment, the populist authoritarian breakthrough has the momentum. The collapse of Labour’s vote among working‑class constituencies (the “Red Wall”) is migrating not to the Conservatives but to Reform and to local independents. Starmer, by refusing to challenge neoliberalism, has vacated the ground on which a credible anti‑neoliberal coalition could be built. The left is fragmented, the centre is exhausted, and the right is angry. That is the recipe for a strongman.
Coda: The Silence, Revisited
There is a particular kind of silence that falls over a British town at twilight—not the gentle hush of a closing day, but something hollower, as if the place is holding its breath. That silence is not peace. It is the sound of a state that has forgotten how to speak. For half a century, British politics has told itself a story: markets know best, the state is a burden, inequality is the price of freedom. That story was always a partial truth; after 2008, it became a lie. The five prime ministers in eight years are not an anomaly. They are the political form of a rotting economic base, exacerbated by a pandemic, a war, and a self‑inflicted Brexit wound.
Keir Starmer could have been the person to name this. He has the majority and the mandate. Instead, he has chosen to manage decline. But decline, managed or not, produces its own political forms. The silence in Sunderland, and Doncaster, and Merthyr Tydfil—that silence is the sound of a people who have stopped asking for permission to imagine another world. They have not stopped hoping. But hope, without institutional form, curdles into rage. And rage, without democratic channels, curdles into something else entirely. The old words no longer work. The question is whether we can find new ones before the howl becomes a fire.
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