Chapter 1: What changes have the UK experienced in the last decade?
For the last decade or so, we've looked on as the United States has radically changed itself.
But the UK has been changing too. The British people, famous for their aversion to radical and emotional politics, have embarked on a course that was supposed to take them back to the comforting certainties of the past... but instead has brought them into an uncertain new world. And all of this looks deeply strange to people like me who've lived in Britain and thought they knew the place.
It began with the huge shock of Brexit, which has delivered almost none of the benefits its backers claimed it would and led to a drop in living standards. Then there was the constant turnover of failed British Prime Ministers, including Liz Truss, His tenure in office was famously outlived by a head of lettuce.
In 2024, British Labor won government in a massive landslide on a sliver of the vote, which raised expectations that things would settle down. But now Keir Starmer is hanging on by his fingernails. And for those looking to the monarchy for a sense of continuity and national unity, well, that's not going too well either. So what on earth has happened to the land of toast and tea?
Ian Dunt is here today. Ian is a British political journalist with a reputation as an independent thinker. He appears regularly on Radio National's Late Night Live. Ian's also a man who understands how political dogma can lead a whole nation into a deep hole and how the natural response of the dogmatist is is to just keep digging.
Ian's most recent book is called How Westminster Works and Why It Doesn't. Hello, Ian. Hello. I was in London just before Christmas and things always feel a bit like they're falling apart in London at any one time, but it felt really bad when I was there. There was a kind of an obvious tension, despair.
Is this just business as usual in London or is the malaise in Britain more serious and more widespread than that?
Fundamentally, there is a British malaise, which is a core component of our personality. We are not a happy people. We don't really sort of trust happiness. And we're very suspicious of it when we see it in others. I have to say I like that about Britain too. That's one of the things I like about it. Yeah, no, I find happiness and optimism quite alienating personally.
And so I don't think there's ever been a period, you know, I'm sure even like the periods that we look back on as golden ages of sort of British history, let's say like, you know, triumph over the Nazis and the creation of the NHS, you know, 45, 50.
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Chapter 2: How did Brexit impact the living standards in the UK?
The economy has just been stagnating, basically comatose on a table, rarely going into recession but never really getting out of it either. You can't grow the pie.
So everything you give to someone, let's say you need more special educational needs provision in school, or to bolster your defence because you no longer have a reliable security partner in the US, well, that has to come from somewhere else. Either taxation or you take it out of another department. That makes politics really fraught. Things like prisons people don't really care about.
At least trains they care about. At least schools and hospitals they care about. Prisons they don't. So those areas, those unguarded budgets, just start getting sliced away and cut up until prisons turn into this very chaotic space. releasing prisoners who were more brutalised than they were when they went in, and your society starts to degrade in pretty significant ways.
Chapter 3: What led to the rise and fall of British Prime Ministers post-Brexit?
And that is where we've ended up.
In your most recent book, you say that the conversation in Britain at the moment is about the problems with the education system, the health system, the transport system, the prison system.
There's complex reasons why they're in trouble, as you say, but really, ultimately, they all point in the same direction, or the source of the problem points in the same direction to Westminster, the home of the British Parliament, the British government. How systemic is this problem?
Extremely severe. And this we've really had for quite a long time. This kind of image, the Westminster model, don't the Brits do it very well, very careful lawmaking, it's all complete nonsense. We write very bad law. And we write very bad law because we pick very poor people to write it and to scrutinize it. You look at the selection process for MPs in the UK. Like I spoke to hundreds of MPs.
And each time you ask them, at any point when you were selected as the candidate, did anyone... ask you how you're going to scrutinize legislation, which is after all, like we kind of get the job of the MP. That's their core constitutional function. Not a single one was able to tell me that anyone had asked them that question at any time. Why? Loads of them sit in safe seats.
So when they're picked as a candidate, they're basically being picked as an MP. And who are they picked by? the local party. They're picked by party activists, basically people with very firm political views who like spending their Sundays, rainy, cold Sundays, cramming leaflets through mailboxes. You know, that's a very specific kind of human being, right?
And they're not really interested in scrutinizing legislation. They just want other people like them who also want to spend their Sundays doing that sort of thing. And you get these party political, really pretty ignorant, you know, highly obedient thinkers who do what the party tells them to do. And then they sit in the Commons and legislation comes out and the government's got a majority.
And what scrutiny is happening? Nothing. It's just rubber stamp it, rubber stamp it, rubber stamp it. So that process you get in other countries, especially countries with any degree of proportional representation, where there's more of a mixture in the parliament, it's harder to get your legislation through where you've got to convince people of your proposals.
And that means that the opposition party will suddenly then go, oh, I accept that you're trying to achieve X. I have concerns, ABC. Address them as part of the method of how it's done. That process of the small improvements of legislation that makes good law, that does not take place in Britain, at least in the House of Commons. Because of that, we get bad law.
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Chapter 4: How has the British economy been affected since the 2008 financial crash?
And what that gives you is stupid government. Because for the reasons I outlined earlier, opposition parties can't really revise in the Commons. Doesn't matter what they say. They can stand up and become a modern day Cicero with their rhetoric. Makes no difference. The government's just going to do whatever it wants to do. So what do opposition parties do instead. They can't be constructive.
So they have to stand up and be like, you know what, you're just a shower of useless bastards. That's all that they can possibly say to the government. They hope that they get a clip in the evening news. They hope that someone uses the clip on social media, but nothing constructive. This is just performative then, performative opposition rather than constructive opposition. And barren.
And barren.
And so you get poor legislation because of the electoral system. There's also a thing called tactical voting as a result of first-past-the-post. I mean, I might be out by a couple of percentage points here, but off the top of my head, I recall Keir Starmer in the last election won two-thirds of the seats in the British Parliament on, what, 33%, 35% of the vote.
So he won two-thirds of the seats with a third of the vote. This is a result of what's called tactical voting. How does that work in the UK?
Yeah. Yeah, it's also partly a result of the thing I was telling you about as well, which is as a political party, you're just trying to get the most effective geographical distribution of your vote and trying not to get too many surplus votes in any particular seat because it's wasted resources. Then one of the ways that happens is tactical voting, just like you're a lefty.
You have to think, who's going to win here? You know, my main aim is stopping the Conservative Party from winning. Do I really care whether it's the Lib Dems or Labour or the Greens? Probably not. And so you pick whichever party is most likely to do it. And in some seats, like where I grew up, it's really obvious that that's the Liberal Democrats.
In some seats, it's really obvious that that's Labour. But in a lot of seats... it's not obvious which party it is. And so the danger of that system is you get really split, particularly progressive voting. You know, you'll get 30% for Labour, 30% for the Greens, 35% for the Conservatives, right?
And even though in that constituency there is a clear majority that are progressive voters, the minority Conservative Party can get in simply because they're monopolising one side of the vote. It's a really dangerous and very, very irrational way to organise your democracy.
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Chapter 5: What are the systemic issues within the UK government?
aspects of that idea of liberalism. So if you're in the US, classically, if you say I'm a liberal, they'll think that you're very left wing. If you're in France, you say I'm a liberal, they'll think you're very, very right wing, it just means you're sort of Anglo Saxon economic model. In Australia, there's the shadowing by virtue of the party.
And in the UK, it exists in this mercurial zone, where it's used much more broadly, and I think more accurately. But nevertheless, I mean, I read like two summers ago, I read two books on trans issues, one by very pro trans writer, and one by very anti trans writer. And both of them said that liberals were the enemy and the problem.
So, you know, even there, it's a pretty mercurial, messed up sort of, you know, vision.
You have an allergy to dogmatism. That comes from your own life experience. You've come to tours in your youth through different forms of strong dogmatic belief. The first one was in your teen years. While you were a fundamentalist Christian, would it be fair to say that? Yeah, I think so. How did that happen to you?
I had a sort of an emotional breakdown at around 13, which I think is more common than people make out. Just this point where the brain becomes adult enough to comprehend the world. And then very quickly starts asking, well, what's the point? What's the point of all this? And it's not immediately obvious that there's an answer to that question. I certainly don't have one now.
But you're sort of a bit too young to handle the emotional impact of the absence of an answer. So I was really quite ravaged by sort of by existential crisis and bleakness and just lack of point, really. And then I ended up in some summer camp, you know, archery and go karts and sort of things like that. And they were quite good about it. They were quite sensible.
I mean, they didn't do it too hard. They were not really to blame here. But, you know, they take you off at one point during the thing and sort of, you know, tell you about how much Jesus loves you and there's a point to all this and there's meaning. I remember at the time it felt like a life raft. You know, just grab the life raft because that makes things quite clear.
There's a forward line of direction and we can get rid of some of this crushing doubt that you're experiencing. But my interpretation of this stuff, I suppose, again, because you're full of these hormones, was much more vicious than the one that they put out. You know, within six months of this stuff, I was saying things which now I think back and obviously shudder.
Like, you know, if you don't believe, you're going to go to hell. Anyone that, you know, if you're having sex before marriage... It was all very... It had to get very black and white and brutal and unkind. Did you feel that self-righteousness or were you overcoming some kind of inner doubt as you said that? I remember feeling the self-righteousness.
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Chapter 6: How does the electoral system affect political outcomes in the UK?
This is our main defence ally, as it is for the UK as well. Our government at the moment doesn't tend to talk in public about this. Not like Mark Carney, the Prime Minister of Canada. Mind you, the United States hasn't threatened to invade Australia like they've threatened to invade Canada. Right. And nor have they threatened to invade the UK yet.
I think we're about three days away from that right now.
Three days away from that right now. Keir Starmer's pretty much saying the same thing. I think probably the strongest language they'd use about the Trump administration is that it's interesting or something like that.
Is Keir Starmer being nice to this 900-pound gorilla in the room who's chewing the curtains and throwing the crockery around to keep him sweet while he and the rest of Europe are trying to figure out how to defend themselves without the United States, which has suddenly become an unreliable ally?
That's exactly right. I think early on they just thought, I mean, this nonsense, it's clear they couldn't do it, the Trump whispering stuff, being like, oh, maybe this guy can Trump whisper, maybe this guy can Trump whisper. And Keir Starmer fancied himself a bit of a Trump whisperer. And it must be clear to anyone now that nothing's going to work.
The guy is just, he's just basically a rabid animal and he'll be nice to you one day and he'll be very, very not nice the next and he'll threaten to invade Greenland. And none of your little quiet cups of tea are going to stop that. But then there's the extent of your strategic reliance. So, for instance, France and Britain are very different positions when it comes to this issue.
France is a completely independent nuclear deterrent. It's its own system. It can use it when it likes, how it likes. as it likes. It's currently sat there going, you know what, we're going to offer to extend this nuclear deterrent to all of Europe.
Is that a distinctly different nuclear deterrent to Britain's, which is more interlocked with the United States?
Exactly.
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