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DOOM LOOP by @AndrewMarr9 Why no politician can get Britain out of this mess The postwar British political establishment is collapsing. The Conservatives threw themselves into a death spiral last year, though it had been a long time in the making. Now in government, Labour is heading in the same direction. The nation’s patience has snapped. The likelihood is that at the next election, almost whatever happens, we will be stuck with a government we didn’t expect. What follows may be bleak. After Keir Starmer’s victory, I succumbed to that hard-to-forgive journalistic sin: the faint prickle of optimism. With a big majority, it seemed that, perhaps at last, the “grown-ups” were in charge. Starmer promised “to restore service and respect to politics, end the era of noisy performance, tread more lightly on your lives, and unite our country”. But shocks kept coming. Above all, the Labour establishment had underestimated the deeper difficulties of so much it was facing. The intractable problem of ballooning welfare spending and worklessness; the sheer incompetence of much of the state; the pressures on housing and public services caused by the post-Brexit immigration wave. It did not feel as if a new government meant a new start, not in daily life. For now – perhaps for the rest of our lifetimes – the two-party system lies in ruins. From once-Labour Wales to inner-city London, people who a few years ago would not have given Reform the time of day are privately reassessing, due to impatience and despair. Unless something substantial changes, we are heading for a Reform government. The Conservatives, underpinned by business, hereditary wealth, the military and the poor old Church of England, are being scattered to the winds. The party of organised labour has gone the same way as, well, organised labour. Yet the old arguments about economic vitality, fairness and cohesion will also be the new arguments. My greatest fear is that we come to feel, before too long, that these past wildly turbulent years were relatively calm and kindly ones.