Britain is not ungovernable - but we need better leaders

Difficult spending choices abound. Demographic and cost pressures on public services are rising just as long-term under-investment in their workforce and infrastructure is starting to bite.

Hospitals, schools and roads are crumbling, and public sector workers - nurses, care workers and teachers - are struggling in the face of the sharp increases in the cost of living.

Those increases in the expense of daily life are the sustained consequence of inflation driven up by multiple crises – from the economic shock of Brexit to the pandemic and war. These crises have created new demands for long-term spending, such as political consensus on the need to increase defence spending after years of cuts.

But the debt incurred by government in the short-term response to those crises has exacerbated fiscal constraints. Politicians cannot simply throw money at these problems as their predecessors might have.

Multiple crises have also created new policy problems or accelerated existing ones – see the mental and physical health impacts of the pandemic, as well as enduring increases in school absence.

Meanwhile, geopolitical events completely out of the UK's control – from the decisions of a capricious US president on trade policy to the Russian invasion of Ukraine – absorb days of ministerial time and have a rapid, direct impact on the domestic context.

As well as increasing the UK’s debt, another effect of – often successful - policy responses to major crises has been to ratchet up public expectations of government. Voters have become accustomed to the sort of sweeping government intervention we saw during the pandemic and Ukraine energy crises (think furlough and energy price guarantees). Understandably, people struggle to understand why ministers do not intervene to address today’s cost-of-living pressures.

Inflated public expectations have been aggravated by politicians' complete failure to present the public with the reality of the difficult trade-offs the country faces.

Cake-ism remains rife among political parties and the politicians seeking to lead them, who consistently focus on winning elections without giving sufficient consideration to the realities of governing once in power.

In their efforts to secure power, they set unrealistic expectations about the policy interventions they will make and the scale, speed, and degree of impact they will have on people’s lives.

But on taking office, successive leaders have discovered that their MPs are less inclined to back their policy objectives and obey the party whip, and even a substantial parliamentary majority is no guarantee of delivering manifesto promises.

Potential candidates seeking to replace Keir Starmer and those with the power to decide who should be our prime minister would do well to reflect on the lessons of the past decade.

Government has always been hard and is getting harder. But the UK is not ungovernable. What is needed are leaders with the right skills to govern and a plan for doing so.

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Hannah White is Director and CEO of the Institute for Government.

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