There are, it is fair to say, a lot of challenges facing the UK. Given the number of prime ministers that the country has had in the last few years, it also seems that the British public believes no recent government has been up to the task of solving them.

But if none of Britain’s supposedly most adept political minds (and Liz Truss) can fix the country, we need to at least ask the question of whether the state is even capable of solving these problems and, if not, do we need to stop asking it to?

Since Margret Thatcher came into power, the British state has shrunk drastically. We gave up control of, in whole or in part, water, electricity, gas, telecommunications, rail, buses, steel, housing, postage, among other industries and state functions, mostly to the private sector.

In general, we have also lost control over huge swaths of British existence as it modernised into an international service-based one. Our defence capabilities (including the nuclear deterrent) rely on US systems and US weapon manufacturers, we import nearly all our consumer goods from China and elsewhere, and lots of our media and communications infrastructure is mostly American such as Social media companies and software giants.

This all leads to the uncomfortable truth that the state has very little control over the issues and concerns that people care about.

Want to make housing affordable? Sorry, the state doesn’t own any houses anymore, Thatcher sold them all. Best we can do is to strongly encourage other people to build them. Also, good luck getting a mortgage.

Want to go to university and help improve the economy by becoming one of those desperately needed “skilled workers”? Sorry, we don’t really have any of those, best we can do is help you pay a quasi-private institution for the privilege, if you pay us back of course.

Want to introduce a pause on AI infrastructure and development? Sorry, we never really had any in the first place, go try your luck with Washington.

Combined with the aftermath of Liz Truss’ mini budget, which even 5 years on makes bond markets recoil at any suggestion of UK government borrowing, and the fact that the public has been unwilling to accept tax rises of almost any kind, we have a set of enormous and expensive systemic problems, and no way for the government to raise any money to fix them.

Unfortunately, it is difficult to ask a general population who have just experienced over a decade of austerity to sacrifice more than they already feel they have, even if that extra sacrifice is genuinely required to fix the country.

For a public that has been told that hard times are ahead broadly since the financial crisis, new claims of ‘But this time we’ll actually fix it, promise’ are not going to hold water.

The rise of populism is not helping matters either. Populists on both sides of the political spectrum are loudly proclaiming that the solutions are easy, either by saying that the state is inefficient and that getting rid of ‘benefit scroungers’ and/or immigrants can raise the cash or just claiming that government debt “isn’t debt in any real sense”, as Zack Polanski genuinely said on an interview with Laura Kuenssberg a few days before last year’s autumn budget.

Sir Keir Starmer found out the hard way that there is no reasonable competition against this kind of promise. Labour’s manifesto going into the Starmer government was all about threading the needle between taxation and expenditure such that they could minimise pressure on the public purse whilst maximising the impact of state services. In other words, they acknowledged the dilemma of a country with big problems and little wiggle room in the way of tax rises or welfare cuts.

As it turned out, this was a big mistake. Even minor cuts to welfare, such as the adjustments to winter fuel payments, and minor tax rises, such as the farmer’s inheritance tax changes, became politically unworkable immediately.

If Starmer’s fairly feeble efforts to fix the state are enough to get him removed from office, what on earth is the government to do? It seems that are three options.

Image credit: UnSpalsh