In his latest column, PopCon Director, Mark Littlewood comments that the first few days of 2025 have underscored how thoroughly broken the UK state really is.
Given the perilous state of the UK economy, we perhaps should be unsurprised that the media are reporting that Rachel Reeves is searching for new ideas on how to generate economic growth. She began this search by flying to China to talk to some leading communists.
The first few days of 2025 have underscored how thoroughly broken the UK state really is.
We are locked into a cycle of ever greater power being transferred to a bloated and inefficient public sector necessitating ever heavier burdens of the productive private sector. This leads to stagnation, diminishing tax receipts and higher (and more expensive) borrowing. The cycle then repeats itself as yet more regulation and state spending are embraced as the way out of the mess.
But we should not see the sorry plight of our country in purely economic terms. The centrepiece of our democracy, Parliamentary sovereignty, has been undermined by the emergence of an unaccountable quangocracy. On Liz Truss’s estimate, there are now 444 so-called “independent arms-length bodies” in the UK and they are essentially answerable to no one and wield incredible power.
The horrors of the Pakistani rape gangs show just how broken our system of government is. I support calls for a full, but rapid, national enquiry.
However, the real aim must be to bring to justice those state officials who allowed the rape and torture of so many young girls to happen on their watch. It is hard to precisely quantify, but I would think hundreds of state actors should be expecting to go to prison. Of course, the establishment will be desperate to “move on” and merely insist “lessons have been learned”.
If we do not fix and reset the way Britain is governed we will continue on this pathway to moral, economic and cultural decline.
We don’t just need an attractive array of well-thought-out policies, we need a complete overhaul of how our democracy works.
PopCon is determined to bring that about and I hope you’ll get involved in our online and our bricks and mortar events to help us achieve it.
Keep the flag of freedom flying