British politics is in a state of tactical tinkering. It is sad for a British citizen to need to say this but, at the risk of inducing a rant, it must be said. How the word ‘party’ came to describe a collection of aspirational minds nitpicking their way through trivial political life remains a mystery. For a former centre of Empire to behave as though stability had no place in our troubled world is breathtaking. Britain has just been – bravely – trying to mollify the frightening extremes of current United States policy. The admonitions could become even more credible if the United Kingdom started showing the way. It used to.
Two things are causing the present turmoil. First, the pace of change is faster than the established Western version of the Democratic System can handle. If Government is too out of sync with the news it will forever be catching up with the mood of the moment. There are good reasons why it shouldn’t. Mob moods are dangerously volatile. We don’t want our life’s seas to be absurdly calm but we’d like them to avoid being a tempest whirlpool all the time.
Second, the concept of popular government is doomed to make the lives of many people unfairly rocky. Our present educational and mind management systems dictate a priority for the short-term even when we realise the longer-term is critical for ourselves, our children, future generations and the survival of the planet. So ‘today’s dollar’ not only wins over ‘tomorrow’s peace’, it destroys it. The result of these dysfunctions is tactics over strategy.
Listening to the King’s Speech, which is, of course, the Prime Minister’s speech, to the British Parliament was like hearing a plan for the future of the world delivered as a series of adjustments to the fare rates on a tram route. From magnificent all-embracing moral aspirations to fiddling with who grabs what, it lacked a coherent achievable objective.
Government of sixty-five million people cannot be conducted as a series of life support or death inducing events. Hence the laudable but outdated 5-year term often associated with democracy. We must avoid rule by referendum (cf Brexit) but we need better signs of voter intentions than opinion polls. As the wheels of government grind along the path of progress there is little more idiotic than a once-in-a-five-year general election result based on today’s petrol price.
Leadership, so often dissected as some formulaic routine, is not about prescription. It is a consequence of reading and understanding people and deciding what is doable progress. The leadership of Sir Keir Starmer is too uncertain for today. Britain wants neither the rough and tumble of American politics nor the sleek-lined symmetry of Singaporean. It needs a guide to a modern version of efficiently muddling through. Top of that agenda is moral discipline. Not perfection, but workable standards where everyone knows their responsibilities and does them. It also helps if voters can do their arithmetic.
The meaning of a health service has changed since the 1950s. So has the need for voters to understand the implications of debt. So has how we will produce energy. On top of that we now need to think about what we really want.
That is why the need for education has changed even more than the rest.
And will continue to do so.
Good morning
John Bittleston
Please tell us your views at [email protected]. We need them.
17 May 2026
