The Mess We're In

How Britain became ungovernable and, perhaps, unfixable.

As always, I am very grateful to you for reading The Debatable Land, more grateful still to those of you who have shared posts here with other people.

Over the course of the past 15 years the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland has had six prime ministers and I don’t think it’s breaking news to observe that none of the five who’ve been and gone are remembered especially fondly and that the sixth, Sir Keir Starmer, is currently on track to be dismissed as just another failure to be added to the long, long, list of prime ministerial disappointments. Why, right now his approval rating is as low as Boris Johnson’s when Johnson was at his lowest ebb. That’s some kind of an achievement, I suppose, at the end of your first year in office and when you have a parliamentary majority of 165.

David Cameron became prime minister because of the 2008 financial crisis that, while bad everywhere, was especially bad for a country like Britain that was a medium-sized power with an outsiz…