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“Something is rotten in the state of Britain,” Shakespeare might have written had he been alive today. With the resignation on Monday of Prime Minister Keir Starmer, the country is set to have its seventh head of government in just a decade. While Starmer’s own faults had much to do with his untimely downfall, his departure from number 10 Downing Street is reflective of a much deeper malaise in British society.

Starmer’s fall from grace is somewhat surprising in that he is less than two years into his term of office, and his party—Labour—enjoys a massive majority in the British House of Commons. But politicians look forward, not back. The fact that their leader won an election two years ago is much less important than the perception that he may be leading them to defeat two years hence. And the omens for Labour are dire. According to opinion polls, the party currently enjoys the support of only about 20 percent of the British public, on par with the Conservatives, and well behind the Reform Party led by one-time Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage. Even the safest Labour seat is no longer safe, and if nothing changes the party could face near extinction at the next general election.

Another leader could perhaps have weathered the storm, but Starmer appeared to lack basic political skills. He liked to portray himself as being not another politician but rather a competent manager, who could bring order to government following the chaos of the previous Conservative administration. But government is a political business, and Starmer’s neglect of the political arts cost him badly. Above all, he never seemed to learn how to engage with his fellow MPs, acquiring a reputation for being aloof and autocratic. Discontent with his leadership style within the parliamentary Labour Party seems to have been almost universal.

Again, this might not have been a fatal flaw. Had Starmer indeed been the competent administrator that he claimed to be, he might have survived. Unfortunately, a series of embarrassing U-turns, a scandal involving the British ambassador to the United States, Peter Mandelson, and continued economic troubles gave the public an entirely different impression, presenting a picture of the prime minister as a man out of his depth. Fearful for their futures, Labour MPs decided that he must go.

Having said all that, it is doubtful whether anybody else could have done a much better job, and similarly doubtful whether Starmer’s successor—most likely the former mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham—will be able to restore Britain’s fortunes. For the country’s troubles run far too deep.

In the past 20 years, a series of crises—the economic crash of 2008, Brexit, the pandemic, and wars in Ukraine and the Persian Gulf—have brought economic growth in the UK almost entirely to a halt. As The Atlantic magazine reports:

The country’s output per person is now only just above that of Mississippi, America’s poorest state—and that slight lead is only achieved thanks to London. Outside the capital, in places where tourists do not visit, living standards fall well below Mississippi’s. … British wages have lagged well behind those in the US, and also those in Germany, France, the Netherlands, Denmark; once you account for inflation, they’ve barely grown at all.

Like other European states, the UK has a rapidly declining birthrate and an aging population, putting a severe strain on its social services. The only solution that successive governments have found to these problems is mass immigration. Brexit was meant to put a stop to the latter—or at least that’s how its proponents sold it. Instead, the post-Brexit years have been marked by a huge increase in immigration into the UK. None of the other supposed benefits of Brexit have materialized either. The result is a powerful sense of betrayal among Brexit supporters, compounding an already existing distrust of the country’s political class. This helps explain the rapid shift to a multi-party era with the rise in popularity of Reform and the Greens and the simultaneous collapse in support for Britain’s two traditional political mainstays, Labour and the Conservatives.

At the same time, Britain, like other Western states, suffers from what one might call an ideological void. It is obvious to many that existing institutions are not working as they should. However, there is a complete lack of ideas about alternatives. The West’s victory in the Cold War has so firmly entrenched the idea of the correctness of Western systems as to eliminate any possibility of meaningful debate on issues of political philosophy. The political class (which in the UK is drawn from a remarkably small portion of the country’s population—as witnessed by the fact that all of its last six prime ministers studied at Oxford) is united across the political spectrum by its belief in the essential soundness of the system.

Politics is now almost entirely de-ideologized and has become largely an issue of who can claim to be more efficient that the other. Those who dare to differ are denounced as “populist,” “far-right,” or “far-left,” and ostracized (or in the case of former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, expelled from the party). Serious shocks—such as Brexit—are blamed on “foreign interference” (usually Russian) rather than inducing some much-needed self-reflection. And the state has become increasingly authoritarian, clamping down on dissent through measures such as anti-terrorism legislation, that are being interpreted far more broadly than their creators almost certainly ever imagined. The banning of the group Palestine Action is a case in point, as its main impact appears to be the arrest of scores of pensioners accused of terrorism for holding placards bearing the group’s name.

None of this addresses the UK’s deeper problems. But it does further alienate those already inclined to distrust those in authority. Sadly, the Labour Party under Starmer has accelerated this process. Traditionally, the party was a broad church relying on a delicate balance between pragmatic trade unionists and socialist intellectuals. The trade unions have long since lost their clout, but a core of socialist intellectuals did survive the end of the Cold War and continued to push the party in a leftward direction. Starmer thoroughly purged them, believing that they were a political liability. In the process, he moved Labour sharply to the right.

This has had the opposite effect to that intended. Labour’s victory in the 2025 general election was something of a fluke, made possible only by the split of the right-wing vote between the Conservatives and Reform. Labour gained a little less than 34 percent of the vote, substantially less than it had in 2017 under Corbyn, when it gained 40 percent, and only a fraction more than Corbyn managed in 2019, when Labour received a bit over 32 percent. Moving Labour to the right has not made the party more popular. On the contrary, it has further undermined it, as those on the left have fled in droves to other organizations, most notably the Greens, a process accelerated by Starmer’s apparent sympathies for Israel and his unwillingness to take a firm stand on the issue of Gaza.

In short, the UK suffers from severe structural problems which require some radical rethinking of the traditional approach to politics and governing. The response of the country’s rulers, however, has been to double down on what exists and to consolidate into a rather indistinguishable pack of centrists. When centrism is all that is on offer and it clearly isn’t working very well, popular discontent rises. The centre-right now isn’t offering any solutions. Its collapse should hardly come as a surprise.

Assuming that Andy Burnham does indeed become the UK’s next prime minister, he is going to inherit a very difficult position. We wish him luck. He is going to need it.

Original article: canadiandimension.com