“England's on the anvil - hear the hammers ring.”
The Anvil, Rudyard Kipling.
Britain is broken and this government is not fixing it. Immigration is still uncontrolled; the woke agenda is delivering two tier justice; the welfare system is too expensive and the routine services of government fail too often.
Immigration is at the forefront of political debate. As in the USA, the figures are terrible for both legal and illegal routes, even if legal ones have begun to fall slightly. In 2024, 956,000 residency visas were granted, and the fact that this was down by 32% on 2023 shows just how awful the situation has become.
The impact of the tightening of the rules in late 2023 was far too little, and asylum applications, almost all through illegal routes, have continued to rise. These were at the highest ever level of 108,000 in 2024, and show no signs of abating in 2025, as the government has no plan at all to deter the illegal channel crossings. As the weather has moderated in March, 1,168 people came over in small boats in the first four days of the month.
It is not only newcomer illegal arrivals that are challenging the system, but foreign criminals are not being deported at the end of their sentences for trivial reasons, even when they committed serious crimes.
There are so many examples of these, but of particular note is the Albanian who was involved in a £300,000 scam and was not deported because his son disliked foreign chicken nuggets.
Another Albanian, Xoni Leka, argued that he should stay to be a ‘role model’ for his daughter, perhaps preparing her for a life of crime; while both an Iraqi and a Polish criminal claimed that their long residence in this country made it impossible to go back, one for being too westernised, the other because he had forgotten how to speak Polish.
These cases all come about because of the Human Rights Act and its application of the European Human Rights Convention in domestic law. It seems to mock the law abiding in favour of the criminal, to the advantage of a particular category of wrongdoer, which now been taken further. Whereas the illegal asylum seeker pays no fees and will be housed in a hotel; the legal visa applicant will pay to apply, will be charged to use the NHS and will have to pay for their own accommodation. Thus, migrant crime pays.
In another example of unfair legal treatment, the Sentencing Council has decided that there should be two-tier justice for existing British citizens. In its latest rules, which are about to come into force, white males will be discriminated against. Anyone from a minority, or a woman, will normally have a pre-sentence report, which often leads to a lower sentence. White male Christians will not normally have such a report.
This is the excessive zeal of the woke agenda, applied by an officious bureaucracy.
In this case, the elected politicians have complained, only to be told by the Chairman of the Council, Lord Justice Davis, that they are undermining the ‘independent judiciary’.
He has written to the Lord Chancellor rejecting her reasonable criticisms and saying that if instructed by her to review the guidance, which she has a clear legal power to do, he will take his own legal advice to see if he has to comply.
The sheer arrogance, or potentially laziness, of the quangocracy is extraordinary. They hate to be criticised, yet happily attack those with a democratic mandate. They are behind many of the failures of this great nation. Voters are cast out as the quangos rule.
The chairman of another quango, Natural England's Tony Juniper, again with no electoral mandate (he lost as a Green candidate in 2010), has spoken out against golf courses and cheap food. No politician would deny affordable food for constituents. Only a quango can. Natural England has much responsibility for the failure of the planning system, which is not surprising as it is led by a green activist who does not value economic growth.
Hence, the standard of living is falling as GDP per capita declines, partly because of high immigration, but also because bureaucrats stop growth.
The woke agenda is also damaging national security. The RAF has belatedly realised that discriminating against white men was not only unlawful, but has led to a shortage of pilots, so the RAF bigwigs are asking men, whom they turned down for the political incorrectness of being male, to reapply. The target-led culture has failed in a time of international concern.
It is not just cultural aspects that are failing. Economically, high taxation is causing businesses to stop employing people and has led to a sharp decline in vacancies. This, in turn, is pushing up unemployment and the bloated welfare budget.
The number of people economically inactive has risen by over 1 million since 2019. Covid discouraged work and the removal of checks has led to an explosion in claimants for disability benefits, which will cost the taxpayer over £90 billion this fiscal year, or 3.5% of GDP, which is considerably more than the 2.5% target for defence spending.
The welfare budget is out of control, but any suggestion that it ought to be cut is met with rebellion in the Labour Party. Regrettably, welfare has become a lifestyle choice, and the excess of people on benefits shrinks the employment pool, which is then used as an argument for mass migration.
The combination is desperately damaging for the country. High taxation is needed to pay for the welfare budget while defence is squeezed.
Migrants may make up the employment shortfall but the high numbers arriving mean that many do not integrate. 1 million people in England alone do not speak English. Inevitably, this makes it hard for them to join in society and separates them from the nation's history and culture. It also creates tensions as communities remain separate.
In addition to this, the routine business of government is not being carried out well. Services provided by the state are inefficient and expensive.
The NHS has seen an 18% decline in productivity since 2019, in spite of generous pay increases. This cost taxpayers the stunning amount of £36 billion a year to pay for the same service, but with lower efficiency. This has led to waits at A&E and delays for operations.
The long-suffering taxpayer who is mulcted for all this, then cannot get through to the tax man, HMRC, to check if he is filling its complicated forms out correctly. Potholes plague motorists, and bankrupt councils fail to collect the rubbish.
Britain really is broken, both in little and in big things, and Labour is making it worse.
As always, there is hope. Immigration may be controlled. The EU has recently allowed a Rwandan-style scheme, which we were going to do, but the new government ditched it. Economies can grow, but this needs high-cost energy policies to be dropped and the net zero agenda abandoned. Taxes may be cut. Welfare can be reformed; Iain Duncan Smith managed to do it. The woke ideology may be dropped, and foolish judges overruled.
International affairs mean that the luxury opinions of prosperous times are simply no longer affordable. It is time to look at reality, if these problems are not fixed, Britain’s decline will inevitably continue.
Starmer has moved a little, but he will need to go much further. As Jim Callaghan and Dennis Healey discovered in the 1970s, it is only conservative solutions that really work.
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