Britain is rotting from top down as self-serving politicians dominate

Nothing works in Britain.

The nation is rotting from the top down and the ruling elites seem incapable of offering any solution. Instead, they cavil at anyone who wants to exit the carnival, particularly the uppity Scots.

Start with the British Parliament, that house of self-delusion. When I entered its precincts as an SNP MP in 2015, despite a lifetime in politics, I was surprised by how ineffectual and obsolete it was. It was a shock to discover that the motions debated on an Opposition Day (as per last week) were “not binding” on the government.

Who would have thought that the so-called Mother of Parliaments could hold a debate that was pure hot air. Why bother? Why, I thought, does the SNP continue with this charade?

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Last week, of course, Hoyle added to this daftness by prioritising a Labour amendment over the SNP’s, despite it being the Nats’ debate. Keir Starmer could have had his own Labour debate on Gaza any time since October but hasn’t.

The Labour front bench has no interest in democracy, merely in holding together their ramshackle coalition until the election. Then they can go on doing nothing but from the comfort of a ministerial limo and a grace-and-favour mansion.

Shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves is bent on emulating Treasury financial orthodoxy (aka spending cuts) in a way that Ramsay MacDonald would have applauded.

As a new MP, I quickly discovered that Parliament is so wrapped in arcane rules – whose provenance everyone has forgotten – that it can’t do its one real job: scrutinise legislation.

Now that most legislation is not about actually running the country but instead making a political statement, this lack of scrutiny is a disaster. I sat on the Bill Committee scrutinising the Budget, ie your taxes. The documentation from the Treasury was so obscure and labyrinthine, it would have taken years to figure out what it all meant. We barely had a matter of hours.

Westminster is a talking shop with absolutely no ability to hold the executive to account, unless the government does something so egregiously embarrassing – holding raucous illegal parties under lockdown then lying about it cavalierly – that it gets found out. The Government and Post Office persecute postmasters for years and none of them care until a chance TV drama cuts through the political smokescreen.

Speaking of which, the state broadcaster – the BBC – is now so corrupted by Tory placemen and so frit of having its license fee cut that it has ceased to provide reputable journalism. Once the Panorama programme or its ilk would have exposed the Post Office scandal. Now it takes a drama writer.

And that’s before we mention Jimmy Savile. Of course, the Tories used the Saville affair as a stick to bludgeon the BBC into political submission. But the Beeb is its own worst enemy, focussed on ratings rather than cultural aspiration. Another great institution flushed down the toilet.

Ah, but we still have our great universities. Or do we? In January, York University – part of the elite Russell Group – happily announced it was taking a “more flexible approach” to recruiting international students, ie lowering its entry requirements. Foreign students, of course, pay high fees.

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Then a Sunday Times investigation claimed to have uncovered professional agents acting for Durham and Exeter Universities, who told prospective foreign students with poor grades that they could gain entry through mickey mouse “foundation courses”.

There is a stench of financial corruption in England such as we have not seen since Restoration times when Pepys was happily selling favours at the Admiralty.

In June 2022, the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee found that of £12 billion spent on PPE during the pandemic, £4bn worth of kit did not meet NHS standards and was not used and a further £2.6bn was abandoned because it is not of the type preferred by NHS staff, even though it met the standards.

This public cash was dolled out without proper scrutiny using the Tory Party chumocracy rather than normal procurement rules. I mention no names but you know who I mean.

All this might not matter in the end if the NHS worked. But here the collapse in British institutions is most palpable. In January, a commission of experts convened by the British Medical Journal warned that NHS England is in such a dire state that the next government should declare it a national emergency.

This call came as it emerged that record numbers of patients in England are being denied timely cancer treatment. England is short of roughly 12,000 hospital doctors and more than 50,000 nurses and midwives, the worst workforce crisis in NHS history.

An analysis by the Health Foundation predicts that, if current trends continue, the waiting list for routine hospital treatment in England could rise to more than eight million by next summer.

Why? One reason is we are not spending enough.

The Tories claim taxes are too high, though they keep raising them. But if you compare UK taxes to the OECD average – the other industrial nations – we see something interesting. The percentage of total tax revenues in the UK coming from corporate profits and gains is one-fifth smaller than the OECD average.

That’s 2021 data, ie before the corporations started using inflation to bump up profits. Conclusion: the Tories are still protecting their friends in big business.

And we haven’t mentioned raw sewage in rivers, insane cost over-runs on new nuclear power stations and HS2, or the failure of the police to investigate – never mind prevent – crime. Yet according to the latest Crime Survey for England and Wales, there were just over 400,000 recorded offences in the year to September 2023, compared to 300,000 in the previous 12 months. That’s one hell of a jump.

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Whence then this English disease? Certainly, the political class has a lot to do with it. Under the Tories, Parliament has become supremely irrelevant because MPs were increasingly obsessed with Little Englander opposition to Europe. But it is also the case that the modern Tory Party has become a career vehicle of choice for a new generation of rich parvenus. Hence the chumocracy. As a result, democracy has been eroded and institutions have atrophied.

Labour are little better. Unmoored from the trades unions, the party has become a platform for a new generation of middle-class professionals bent on serving their own interests.

By expelling the left wholesale, Starmer has effectively divorced Labour from the working class. Leaderless, the English working class is prey to populist demagogues, further eroding democratic institutions.

The self-interest of a narrow rich and professional elite has come to dominate English politics and society. I don’t say it is different in Scotland.

This column has been trenchant in its criticism of the SNP leadership.

But when it comes to voting, Scotland still thinks in terms of the wider social need. Just a pity we don’t have our own state to do something about it.