Stop the boats, wreck the state

Another week, and it’s another two institutions on the brink – prisons and the asylum system.

His idea of serious government was an AI summit and a five-point plan that never had a hope of working. Pic: Flickr/Simon Dawson/No 10 Downing Street

There are no consequences for failure in modern British politics, just speaking gigs, board seats, and new wallpaper in Downing Street. The country, however, is not so lucky. When ministers depart, having left Britain in worse condition than they found it, it’s the public left to deal with the blowback.

Another week, and it’s another two institutions on the brink. This time, it’s prisons and our asylum system.

According to a damning new review, Britain came within days of running out of prison cells on three separate occasions under Rishi Sunak. In other news, the government is desperately trying to get a grip on irregular immigration, as small boat arrivals pass 25,000 this year – the earliest this figure has been reached so far.

Add them to the long, sprawling list. Like the NHS, schools, the courts and local government, the prison estate and asylum system are buckling under the weight of chronic underfunding and political indifference.

In Lancashire, the consequences are playing out in real time. Overcrowded jails, overstretched staff, and dangerous conditions. In many ways, the prison system is the perfect metaphor for governance in modern Britain: a collapsing frontline, institutional vandalism, and a political class that shrugs because crises like this never touch their lives. They don’t use the services they let rot, and they don’t know the people who do.

At the centre of this decay are two men: Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak. Better described as careerists than politicians, they treated the role of prime minister as a title to be collected, not a job to be done.

Johnson bulldozed Britain into a hard Brexit he had no interest in managing, let alone making work. He lit the match of the small boats crisis by pulling the UK out of the EU returns agreement without a viable replacement and funnelled cash into gimmicks like “levelling up” while stripping asylum support, hollowing out councils, and ignoring the death rattle of public services.

Sunak was no better. He entered No.10 promising “integrity” and “competence” after the chaos of his predecessors, only to turn his back on every crisis staring him in the face. Local councils from Birmingham to Woking effectively declared bankruptcy. Prisons ran out of space. The family courts ground to a halt. Inequality became so rampant, and the welfare system so broken, that child poverty surged and we saw the return of Victorian illnesses. His idea of serious government was an AI summit and a five-point plan that never had a hope of working. He even looked visibly irritated when journalists dared to ask why it wasn’t. This was a man who had been told his whole life he could do anything, so of course he could “stop the boats”. How hard could it be?

What links these crises is the same underlying rot: a government that legislated for headlines and saw the privilege of running the country as a means of feathering their own nest. Time and again, they refused to invest in long-term solutions. They wouldn’t borrow, wouldn’t raise taxes, wouldn’t fund essential services. They wouldn’t negotiate a realistic immigration agreement with European neighbours. They used the job as an opportunity to sell themselves to hedge funds, pressure groups and tech firms. Failure didn't matter – there would always be another job waiting for them at the end.

All of this was avoidable. The small boats crisis isn’t the result of some unstoppable force of nature, but the direct consequence of political choices: leaving the EU without a returns agreement, gutting the Home Office’s capacity to process claims, and turning a blind eye to the exploitation of cheap labour by business. Instead of pursuing serious, workable solutions, the Tories reached for stunts: Rwanda, barges, threats of military intervention. None of it worked, but none of it was supposed to. It was little more than performance politics.

Now, in the smoking void that has been left, the populist right is surging. Reform UK thrives on the chaos the Conservatives created but refuse to own. And Labour, terrified of being seen as soft, talks tough on migration while austerity’s real costs go unspoken.

The country is more unequal, more fragmented, more cynical than ever, and at the heart of it is a politics that no longer takes the act of governing seriously. The next government has a choice: repeat the cycle of neglect, or rebuild trust by doing the hard, grown-up work of repair.■

About the author: Zoë Grünewald is Westminster Editor at The Lead and a freelance political journalist and broadcaster. Zoë then worked as a policy and politics reporter at the New Statesman, before joining the Independent as a political correspondent. When not writing about politics and policy, she is a regular commentator on TV and radio and a panellist on the Oh God What Now podcast.