There is a foul panorama of violence blaring from our screens
Scrolling absentmindedly on the train home one evening, I stumbled across a video of Andy Burnham talking about potholes. Now, I know potholes are important both because they are enraging and because they are emblematic of something more revealing about the state of the country. And yet, almost in spite of myself, I winced at the exchange, at the smallness of it all. Is this what our politics has become? Without meaning to, my mind turned to John Major and his cones hotline, moaning about roadworks. There are times in British politics where we seem capable of looking up at the horizon, even the heavens – and there are others when we cannot stop staring at the holes beneath our feet.
This, in a sense, was Tony Blair’s lament in his essay-intervention the other week, where he warned that Britain risked being “marooned on an island of irrelevance”. Too fixated on our own petty problems, we no longer seemed capable of engaging with the world, he argued. Yet, as the economist George Yarrow pointed out in response, focusing on “insular” domestic issues like potholes and basic social cohesion does not distract from grand strategic objectives; it is, in fact, a necessary condition for being able to work towards them at all. “Success in achieving one facilitates success in achieving the other,” as he put it.
This was really just what Burnham was trying to say. If people cannot trust the state to maintain the basics of life, why should they trust the government to fix anything? And does anyone think the state today is doing the basics? “The streets are like Mad Max,” one potential Burnham voter told us last week in a focus group we ran in Makerfield. “Every single shop is either a barber shop or a vape shop… it’s horrendous.”
But why has this happened? Why has our public realm become so grim? Money surely has to be a large part of the answer. Put simply, there is now less to go around, and what there is has to go further. So everything deteriorates slowly and then, like bankruptcy, all at once. But why are we unable to address the causes of our ills before they become so chronic?
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Our cover story this week offers a startling account of what is going on. For months, Anoosh Chakelian has been looking into the reality of Britain’s modern outsourced state, where private companies offer the basics our governments no longer seem capable of providing themselves. Much of Anoosh’s reporting was focused on Wigan and its surroundings – the area now central to the future of British politics, where Burnham is standing for parliament. The story she uncovers is, however, far more profound than one simply of government retreat and private provision. Rather, it is one of systemic state failure so extensive it is undermining faith in democratic politics itself, where our failure to build and maintain a decent, humane asylum system has clashed with our failure to build and maintain enough homes – private and social – for the nation to live in. It is a story that should enrage as much as it enlightens.
In last week’s Editor’s Note, I mentioned the 1998 cartoon of Tony Blair walking on water framed against a cautionary outline of the Titanic floating in the distance – a warning, perhaps, of hubris, but also of unknown dangers to come. I wrote about how this image had stuck with me ever since, growing in my imagination.
I did not think I would return to it so quickly, but the appalling videos of what appeared to be a violent stabbing in Belfast earlier this week – and the reaction to it which followed – have only served to heighten my sense of portent. In one sense, I worry that we have become immune to such acts of terror, which now seem to hang over our national life like some dark drumbeat of violence playing on loop. But more – now – I fear the opposite: how these acts are changing us.
It is not just the violence itself, but the visceral nature of it, captured and distributed online, shared and amplified before any of us can make sense of it. The scenes bleed into one, from those first Isis beheadings to Axel Rudakubana. Meanwhile, on X, I see videos of soldiers being chased and blown up in Ukraine interspersed with constant scenes of horror from Gaza. This all creates a foul panorama of violence blaring from our screens, a radicalising, deforming vision of a world which appears on the edge, colliding with a vision of home that no longer works.
[Further reading: How Britain lost control]
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