“You don’t think the country is fundamentally broken. You don’t think the model of the country is broken. You just think it’s been let down by a series of bad prime ministers who have effectively managed the situation badly,” a frustrated Tom McTague, political editor of the New Statesman asked British Prime Minister (PM) Keir Starmer in 2025. The journalist had been shadowing Starmer for months to understand his vision and felt he was getting nowhere. The response he received confirmed McTague’s suspicions: “Yeah, you’re right,” Starmer said. The Labour leader, who, in 2024, led the party to its third-largest parliamentary majority in history, failed to fully grasp his country.
The UK stands a good chance at getting its seventh PM in a decade; and its eighth in the next general elections that may occur any time before or in 2029. Such sustained political tumult cannot be understood simply as a by-product of Brexit, the shock of wars, or a series of poor decision-making by several PMs. The UK is experiencing acute social, economic, and strategic churn. This is best witnessed in the emergence of a five-party system with the far-Right Reform UK led by Nigel Farage and the far-Left Green Party led by Zack Polanksy dominating the scene.
Former Cambridge economist Joan Robinson’s mid-20th century quip for India holds truer for the UK today: Whatever you can rightly say about Britain, the opposite is also true.
Starmer is both right and wrong. He’s right that British society is not fundamentally broken. For all social media-powered narratives about rising crime and uncontrolled immigration, the facts speak a different story. Homicides and other serious crimes, including knife-crime and burglaries, have gone down. Illegal migration was never as high as political rhetoric suggested: About 193,000 illegal entrants were detected during 2018-25. Even if one contends that the “true” figure is higher, it is likely a pittance in comparison to the 3.5-4 million migrants who arrived legally during this period. In fact, in the last 12 months, 693,000 people left the UK, and the country is now experiencing at-scale emigration, not immigration.
Starmer failed to understand that the country still feels broken. Such lack of emotional intelligence and public connect from a PM who never stops extolling his virtue as a family man cost Starmer dearly. Like McTague, most Britons feel they are getting nowhere with Starmer.
Herein lies the story of a simple yet powerful breach between rhetoric and reality. The British police, for example, despite its successes, does not have the capacity to control petty crime such as phone-snatching, street-theft, and cybercrime. For a society, whose average screen-time is four-and-a-half hours per day, this is important. Starmer struggles to grasp such mundane realities, and in doing so allowed Farage, who helped trigger Brexit in the first place, to fill the gap.
Starmer’s don’t-fix-what’s-not-broken assessment of Britain’s economic model is also grounded in a similar paradox. Prima facie, the UK economy is slow and resilient. It grew by 0.6% in the first quarter of 2026 and is likely to touch 1% this fiscal. Inflation is down from double digits to about 3%, even if it is struggling to touch the Bank of England’s 2% target. But people’s quality of life has taken a hit, and unemployment has reached a record 16%. Interest rates remain high, and the sense that “however hard one works, it is never enough to make ends meet” is a feature of urban British life. In small town and countryside Britain, in the Midlands and further north, the situation is worse.
The current reality strikes harder when one looks at the country’s debt-to-GDP portfolio. In 2007-08, the UK’s national debt was about 35% of its GDP. Today, it stands at 93.8% — a staggering £2.91 trillion. As a point of comparison, India’s economy is valued at £3.10 trillion in terms of nominal GDP. The UK could soon have a debt the size of India’s economy. No wonder the treasury spends £111 billion every year, or 3.7% of the GDP, on debt servicing. This is more than its allocation towards education and defence.
The only sector the government spends more on is health and social care (£204 billion), and the far-Right wants to spend less on welfare whereas the far-Left promises to spend more. In short, Britain is approaching bankruptcy even as its economy grows, and its politicians are unsure how tosalvage the situation. Some are suggesting unsustainable taxes on the rich, andothers are advocating to wreck the poor even more.
This is where the contradiction of prime ministerial decision-making, good or bad, is being felt most acutely. Other than appointing Peter Mandelson, a compromised individual who failed his security clearance as UK’s ambassador to the US, and not spending enough on defence, Starmer’s government has made 16 policy U-turns, on issues ranging from national insurance thresholds to mandatory digital ID. By doing so, it has failed to gain credit for its decisions that have arrested the UK’s downward spiral. It is regulating migration better, rewiring national policing, reducing its debt servicing expenditure, re-strengthening ties with Europe, and refusing to join the US and Israel’s war against Iran. Labour has also helped build bridges between communities at a moment of polarisation and resurgence of Islamophobia and anti-Semitism.
In normal times, Starmer would have lasted an entire term and delivered a premiership that helped fix Britain. But as it happens, he could be ousted by his own comrades who believe that the prime ministerial disconnect with the electorate is so total that Starmer is indeed getting the party somewhere: Headed towards ruin. The situation is so desperate that former PM Tony Blair, a Labour grandee, is calling the party delusional.
But the circumstances of British politics are such that in trying to save the party, Starmer’s detractors risk expediting the route to ruin. Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, who is trying to claw his way into Number 10, Downing Street, if he wins the Makerfield by-elections, may make for a better communicator than Starmer and try to take the party in a Left-ish direction. But he is underestimating the force of the singular message the British electorate has been sending: It desires stability. Barring the 2017 elections when the Conservative Party lost its majority, the voters have consistently voted one party to power.
Constant prime ministerial changes despite such electoral clarity creates trauma for a public struggling to pay its bills. The Tories and the Labour will have no one else to blame if the electorate gives a massive mandate to the far-Right in the next elections, whenever they occur.
Avinash Paliwal teaches at SOAS University of London and is a Nonresident Scholar in the Carnegie South Asia Program, Washington D.C. The views expressed are personal
