The Hidden Politics Of Collapse: When Everything Continues To Break

THE SYSTEM THAT HELD AND THE MOMENT IT FELL APART

I was on Jeremy Vine on 5 recently. If you saw my exchange with Yasmin Alibhai Brown , you’ll know why I didn’t bother tiptoeing around Shabana Mahmood’s asylum reforms. They won’t happen. Not because the ideas are unworkable, but because the party pushing them is barely coherent. Labour now resembles a family Christmas after someone has flipped the Monopoly board and everyone’s pretending to be cheerful while mentally calculating escape routes.

Politics in Britain is breaking faster than anyone wants to admit, and the parties meant to fix it are the ones pulling it apart.

It isn’t just Labour. It never is. The Conservatives are still wandering through the post-Brexit wreckage. Reform UK has convinced itself that energy counts as competence. Every major party is dragging the country down with them. Prisons under HM Prison Service are bursting, immigration policy has turned into performance art inside the Home Office, and the idea of economic growth is treated like a bedtime story because the real numbers would send everyone to sleep for the wrong reasons.

Policy never dies in public. That would require honesty. It dies behind closed doors at No.10 Downing Street and inside the Cabinet Office, carved apart by rival factions whose main ambition is humiliating each other.

For years Westminster survived on the myth that the big parties were sturdy bits of national infrastructure, the kind of foundations that could absorb chaos. They weren’t. They simply hid it well enough to stop the roof falling in.

Those days are over.

Once the internal beams cracked, the whole structure folded. People convinced themselves weakening the two-party system would revitalise democracy. Instead it revealed exactly why British politics is collapsing: the duopoly was the only thing keeping the circus tent upright.

Today Westminster feels like a row of petty Italian city states forced to share the same broken copier. Every faction claims authority. None has it. The Prime Minister sits in the middle like a ceremonial bystander wheeled out whenever someone needs an “image of stability” for eight seconds. I’ve sat in enough lobbies and whip offices to know that when everyone looks calm, it’s because the knives are hidden, not gone.

FRACTURED PARTIES, FRACTURED STATE

To understand how we got here, you need to go back to Theresa May’s premiership — a period Westminster now recalls in the same tone people use when describing a kitchen fire. Brexit didn’t create the fractures. It illuminated them. Parliament couldn’t agree on Brexit because Parliament couldn’t agree on anything, a reality that explains why the UK political system is breaking down across every major institution.

May’s battles with her own MPs weren’t a policy failure; they were a public diagnosis of a deeper problem. A governing party had lost the ability to control itself. Westminster convinced itself this was uniquely Conservative dysfunction. It wasn’t. It was a preview of what was coming for everyone else.

Labour is now replaying the collapse with different branding. Calling Labour a single party requires a level of optimism that borders on denial. What exists now feels more like a federation of semi-independent borough councils than a national political movement. Angela Rayner lining up allies. Wes Streeting auditioning for a job he swears he doesn’t want. Andy Burnham operating as if Manchester is a city-state and Westminster an irritating admin office.

This isn’t just ambition. It’s what happens when the internal wiring burns out. The welfare bill fiasco. The instant revolt over Mahmood’s immigration plans. The constant background hum of Labour Party internal divisions. None of this is a blip. It is a long, slow structural failure.

And all of this is unfolding while Labour is supposed to be running the country. Immigration is stuck in a perpetual loop. Prisons are dangerously full. Crime numbers twitch depending on who’s leaking what. Growth has practically clocked off early. And Labour, faced with all of that, has chosen this moment to pull itself apart.

Then comes Reform UK, strolling into the smoke with a swagger built on never having been asked to run anything complicated. They keep being described as the fresh new force in British politics. Let’s be realistic. Reform UK’s instability shows through the moment anyone asks for detail. The party operates like someone set off fireworks indoors and insisted the sparks were “momentum.”

Their confidence survives because they have never had to produce specifics. Ask for detail and you get the same look MPs give when the Whips ask who actually read the briefing pack.

Under the surface it’s chaos. Rupert Lowe’s implosion. The lingering Tommy Robinson shadow. Zia Yusef shuffled around the party like a misplaced paperweight. The steady stream of ex-Tories arriving with rainy-day car boot sale energy. And the infamous Insomnia performance by someone who had previously accused the party of breaking the law. It doesn’t look like a movement; it looks like an endurance test.

Reform doesn’t survive because it’s steady. It survives on one line: at least we aren’t them. But the moment they commit to policy, their own base ruptures. The moment they compromise, the movement fractures. Their future isn’t a bold new era. It’s the epilogue of a political system already buckling.

If you want a preview, look at the MAGA movement. Same film, different cast.

THE FOUNDATIONS HAVE BROKEN AND NOTHING WORKS

Here’s what Westminster still refuses to admit: the so-called culture wars weren’t distractions. They were the fault lines under the floorboards. And when the foundations cracked, it wasn’t budgets or foreign policy that collapsed first. It was the cultural questions Westminster spent a decade mocking.

Nicola Sturgeon discovered this when her stance on transgender prisoners detonated her political project. Senior Labour figures are still tripping over the question no focus group can sanitise: what is a woman. Westminster treated these arguments as toxic sideshows. Yet they’ve done more damage to party unity and electoral coalitions than any fiscal policy ever has.

The country cannot fix its crises because the parties cannot hold themselves together long enough to support solutions. Immigration falters not because the Home Secretary lacks courage but because no one can survive the internal backlash. Prisons deteriorate because long-term commitment inside HM Prison Service lasts about as long as a WhatsApp status. Crime spirals because every policy gets ripped apart halfway through implementation. Foreign policy lurches because every statement is filtered through domestic tribal tests before reaching the public.

These failures aren’t isolated. They come from one collapse: the two-party architecture that once stabilised British politics no longer exists, leaving the UK political system without a functioning centre.

People thought breaking the duopoly would liberate the system. Instead it exposed that the duopoly was the last part still working. This can be rebuilt, but not by the parties currently tearing each other apart.

We are not entering a new era. There is no renewal waiting around the corner. Westminster keeps pretending the system works; the rest of us can see the wires hanging out of the walls.