We are living through a moment when people are looking for leadership – and finding performance instead.
But in our moment – a moment of economic fragility, social fracture, and institutional decay – the adults never arrived.
What we have instead is a political class that knows how to look like it is governing, but increasingly struggles to govern with courage, honesty, or purpose.
“People do not need perfect leaders. They need leaders who are real.”
Yet what we see today is not real leadership.
It is the performance of its absence.
1. Politics Is No Longer About Governing
Modern politics is no longer a vocation.
It is a career path, a branding exercise, and a survival game.
That does not mean every politician lacks integrity. Many enter public life for decent reasons. But they enter a machine whose incentives steadily pull them away from service and toward survival.
The incentives are brutally simple:
• Win the selection
• Win the seat
• Keep the seat
• Protect the party
• Protect the narrative
• Protect yourself
Everything else – policy, principle, public service – is secondary.
This is why scandal‑mining, character assassination, and narrative warfare dominate the political landscape.
They are not aberrations.
They are the natural output of a system where optics matter more than outcomes.
“If you are more focused on how politics looks than what politics does, you are already part of the problem.”
Today, that problem is the system itself.
2. This Did Not Happen Overnight
The dysfunction we see today did not appear suddenly.
It is the result of decades of structural drift – and it needs to be understood honestly.
By “the system”, I do not simply mean Parliament, parties, elections, advisers, donors, media cycles, and polling operations. Those are the visible mechanics of politics. They matter, but they are only one layer.
The political system is itself a system within a wider system: a money-centric, extractive order that has captured almost every institution it touches. It is a philosophy of life that places money before people, extraction before care, growth before wellbeing, and measurable value before human value.
That wider system now shapes how politics behaves, how the media frames truth, how public services are funded, how work is organised, how communities are treated, and how success itself is defined.
Nothing functions effectively for long when it is built on a broken philosophy.
Politics has not escaped this logic. It has absorbed it.
Politics became:
• Market‑constrained
• Donor‑dependent
• Media‑shaped
• Poll‑driven
• Risk‑averse
• Narrative‑obsessed
Parties became machines for winning, not governing.
Policy became a branding exercise.
Leadership became a performance.
And morality – the quiet compass that once guided public life – was replaced by legality.
“Real leadership begins where self‑interest ends.”
But in modern politics, self‑interest is the only safe place to stand.
Real leadership would look less like message discipline and more like truth-telling – even when it costs.
5. Scandal Politics Fills the Vacuum Left by the Absence of Real Leadership
When a political system cannot solve real problems, it shifts to the only arena where it can act: narrative warfare.
This is why we see:
• Personal attacks
• Dredging up old stories
• Targeting families
• Manufactured outrage
• Culture‑war distractions
These behaviours are not moral failings.
They are structural inevitabilities.
When the system cannot deliver solutions, it delivers stories.
When it cannot offer leadership, it offers theatre.
When it cannot inspire trust, it manufactures fear.
Scandal becomes the currency of a system that has run out of truth.
When public services strain, housing becomes unaffordable, or communities are left to carry the cost of decisions made elsewhere, the political response is too often not structural reform. It is a change of story, a new slogan, a symbolic fight, or another managed outrage.
6. The Public Sees the Performance – and Withdraws
People are not disengaged.
They are disillusioned.
They see:
• The avoidance of real issues
• The obsession with optics
• The lack of courage
• The absence of vision
• The endless recycling of political theatre
This is why trust collapses.
This is why turnout falls.
This is why populism rises.
This is why “None of the Above” becomes a meaningful political identity.
“People are not rejecting democracy. They are rejecting the people who have hijacked it.”
The public is not apathetic.
They are waiting for adults who never arrive.
7. We Are Watching a Structural Tragedy
Politics today is not a comedy of errors.
It is a tragedy of constraints.
The actors are not villains.
They are trapped.
The system is not malfunctioning.
It is functioning as the wider extractive order requires it to function: to preserve itself, protect its interests, and keep people arguing about symptoms while the underlying philosophy remains untouched.
And until the system changes, the behaviour cannot.
Closing: The Curtain Will Fall – The Question Is What Comes After
Every political system reaches a moment when the performance can no longer continue.
When the gap between what politics pretends to be and what politics is becomes too wide to ignore.
When the public stops applauding and starts demanding something real.
We are living in that moment now.
The tragedy is not that our leaders are inadequate.
It is that the system has made adequacy impossible.
But systems are not permanent.
They are choices repeated until they feel inevitable.
“The moment we stop accepting the world as it is, we begin to create the world as it should be.”
The curtain will fall on this performance.
The only question is whether we will demand real leadership – and a system built around people rather than money – or continue rewarding the performance in its place.
British politics is full of noise, but nowhere is the confusion deeper today than on the political right.
The Conservative Party, Reform UK and Restore are fighting to be recognised as the true voice of the right. Each claims it alone can “save” the country. Each accuses the others of betrayal, weakness or irrelevance. And yet all three are reaching for something that now sits beyond their grasp.
To many voters, this looks like chaos.
To those inside the parties, it feels like a fight for survival.
But the deeper truth is far more important:
All three parties are trying to reclaim the same thing: a form of conservatism that the modern political system no longer allows to exist.
That is the real “race to the bottom”: not a competition to be the most populist or extreme, but a desperate scramble to rediscover a purpose that has slipped out of reach.
In simple terms, this article argues that Britain’s right-wing parties are not merely competing over policies, personalities or slogans. They are fighting over a deeper question: What is the right actually for, when the social, economic and political conditions that once sustained conservatism have been steadily dismantled?
The Right’s Original Purpose: The One Thing They All Should Still Share
Before we can understand the crisis on the right, we need to understand what the right is supposed to be for.
Traditional conservatism was built on six simple but powerful ideas:
Locality – decisions made close to the people affected by them.
Community – strong social bonds, shared responsibility and mutual obligation.
Stewardship – care for land, heritage, institutions and the inheritance passed between generations.
Continuity – change that is evolutionary and rooted, rather than sudden and destructive.
Identity – belonging grounded in place, memory and shared experience.
Self-governance – power held by the governed, not by distant authorities beyond meaningful democratic control.
This is what conservatism is at its root.
This is what the right once existed to conserve.
And this is the foundation that should, in theory, unite the Conservatives, Reform UK and Restore.
But it does not, because the political landscape in which these parties operate no longer supports these principles in any meaningful way.
How the Right Lost Its Purpose – A Story of Drift and Disconnection
To understand today’s fragmentation, we need to understand how the right became detached from its own foundations.
This did not happen all at once. It happened through drift, compromise and disconnection.
1. The 1970s: The Ground Shifts Under the Right’s Feet
From the 1970s onwards, Britain’s move towards more centralised and supranational forms of governance began to erode several of the things on which traditional conservatism depends. Centralisation means decision-making moving upwards, away from towns, counties and communities. Supranational governance means important decisions being shaped beyond the nation state, through institutions and arrangements that sit above national democratic control.
local autonomy
national decision-making
community-rooted politics
Traditional conservatism depends on those things because it is rooted in the belief that people, places and inherited institutions matter.
But much of the right did not see the danger clearly, because it assumed the world it knew would continue unchanged.
2. The 1980s–2000s: Neoliberalism Replaces Conservatism
The decisive break came when neoliberalism began to replace conservatism.
Neoliberalism, in this context, means a market-led, globalised economic outlook that prioritises (corporate) deregulation, competition, finance, corporate scale and consumer choice.
The right increasingly embraced:
deregulation
financialisation
global markets
corporate power
consumerism
managerial politics
These are not conservative values in the traditional sense.
They are economic ideologies and operating assumptions.
Over time, they hollowed out the right’s philosophical core.
Conservatism, rooted in community, identity and stewardship, became a ghost inside a political movement that no longer fully understood itself.
3. The 2000s–2010s: The Hollowing Out Becomes Visible
By the 2000s and 2010s, that hollowing out had become visible.
Without a clear purpose, the right became:
reactive
fragmented
populist in tone
technocratic in practice
dependent on media cycles
unable to articulate what it stands for
This was the moment when the right often appeared to stop conserving people, places and institutions, and instead began conserving the system itself.
That loss of purpose did not remain abstract. It surfaced most clearly in the anti-EU movement.
The Deep Irony: The Anti‑EU Movement was Conservatism’s Last Instinctive Rebellion
Here is the irony that explains much of today’s political confusion:
The anti-EU movement was traditional conservatism trying to save itself, without fully realising that the philosophical ground beneath it had already been removed.
The instincts behind the movement were deeply conservative:
local control
national self‑determination
suspicion of distant authority
protection of community identity
desire for continuity and rootedness
But the right that led and shaped the movement had already embraced many of the forces – globalisation, centralisation and corporatism – that had made traditional conservatism so difficult to sustain.
So the movement fought the symptoms of the drift, rather than the drift itself.
It tried to reverse a trend that the right had already helped create.
For example, a politics that speaks about local control cannot easily thrive in a country where planning, infrastructure, public services and economic life are increasingly shaped by distant institutions, large corporations, national targets and global pressures.
That is why the argument goes deeper than Europe alone.
The Modern Split: Conservatives, Reform UK and Restore Are Fighting Over the Same Lost Purpose
This is the part we all need to understand.
The Conservative Party, Reform UK and Restore are not divided as they are because they stand for completely different philosophies.
They are divided because they all want to reclaim the same thing – traditional conservatism – but none of them can reach it within the current system.
The Conservatives
The Conservatives are trying to defend a system that no longer reflects conservative values. They carry the name, history and institutional memory of the right, but they have become too closely associated with the very political and economic structures that displaced traditional conservatism.
Reform UK
Reform UK is trying to break the system, or at least disrupt it, without always making clear what durable conservative order should replace it. It channels anger at drift, centralisation and betrayal, but protest is not the same as reconstruction.
Restore
Restore is trying to revive traditional conservatism in a landscape where the conditions that once supported it have been weakened to the point they no longer function the way they once did. Its instinct is to return to first principles, but those principles now have to operate in a system built against them.
The three visible parts of the right are fighting each other because:
they feel the same loss
they sense the same drift
they are chasing the same instincts
they are trying to conserve something the system itself has dismantled
Their conflict is therefore not simply ideological.
It is existential.
They are competing to represent a philosophy that the political operating system no longer allows to function.
Why the Left Appears More Unified
This contrast matters.
The left achieved much of its historic mission decades ago:
suffrage
workers’ rights
the NHS
the welfare state
These were extraordinary achievements.
Once achieved, the left’s original foundational purpose was essentially complete.
So the left adapted.
It became:
flexible
narrative‑driven
culturally aligned
institutionally embedded
comfortable with centralisation
comfortable with supranationalism
The left arguably appears unified today not because it has a clear purpose, but because it has no foundational mission left to betray.
It can adapt to remain relevant.
The right struggles to adapt cohesively and together because it has forgotten, or lost the conditions for, what it is supposed to conserve.
The Real Problem: Conservatism Cannot Meaningfully Exist in the Current System
This is the truth the right often refuses to face:
Conservatism cannot meaningfully exist within the current system.
Conservatism requires:
local decision‑making
community autonomy
stewardship
identity
continuity
self‑governance
But the current system is built around:
centralisation
corporatism
globalisation
managerialism
technocracy
distant authority
These two worldviews sit in deep tension.
That is why the right is in a race to the bottom.
It is trying to rediscover a purpose that the system itself has made effectively impossible to practise.
In practical terms, this can be seen when local communities feel they have little control over development, when national economies depend on global supply chains, when public institutions are managed through targets rather than relationships, or when identity is treated as a branding exercise rather than a lived bond between people and place.
So What Is the Right Really For?
If the right rediscovered its purpose, it would stand for:
Local power
Community‑rooted economies
Stewardship of land and environment
Identity grounded in place and shared experience
Governance by the governed
Institutions that serve people, not systems
This is not nostalgia.
This is not ideology for its own sake.
This is not populism.
This is real conservatism: the kind that protects people, places, institutions and the bonds between them.
But until the right recognises that the system itself prevents these values from flourishing, it will continue its race to the bottom, mistaking noise for purpose, populism for philosophy, and survival for renewal.
The Message That Needs to Be Heard
Britain’s right-wing parties are not simply enemies.
They are fragments of the same broken whole.
They are all trying to reclaim a conservatism that the modern political system has made effectively impossible to practise.
Until they recognise this, they will keep fighting each other and keep losing sight of the very thing they should exist to protect:
People.
Places.
Communities.
And the continuity that binds them together.
Until the right redefines its purpose for the system as it is, not the one it remembers, it will keep fighting itself instead of shaping the country.
Modern society has made a quiet but devastating mistake:
We have begun to treat what is legal as if it is moral.
That confusion now shapes the entire way we provide for ourselves. It determines how we build homes, how we manage land, how we regulate technology, how we grow food, and how we define progress.
It is the organising principle of a system that increasingly works against the people it claims to serve.
Housing, flooding, food, seeds, bread, technology – these are not separate issues. They are symptoms of the same structural error.
That does not mean every failure is deliberate, or that every official, developer, regulator or business leader is acting in bad faith.
The problem is deeper and more dangerous than conspiracy. It is the result of incentives: systems reward what they measure, protect what they value, and ignore what they do not count.
When profit, throughput, asset inflation and legal compliance become the dominant measures of success, human need is pushed to the margins.
The law may permit the outcome. The spreadsheet may justify it. The market may reward it. But that does not make it right.
Housing: A Crisis Manufactured by Design
Britain is repeatedly told it has a housing shortage. But the numbers tell a different story.
The figures are contested and depend on definition, but they all point to the same uncomfortable truth. England alone had 25.6 million dwellings in 2024, alongside hundreds of thousands of vacant homes and long-term empty properties.
Across the wider UK, the issue is not simply the absolute number of buildings, but the way existing homes are distributed, priced, occupied and withheld from genuine need.
The crisis is therefore not best understood as a simple shortage of bricks and roofs. It is a crisis of access, affordability, allocation and incentives.
New developments do not automatically make homes affordable because housing is not treated primarily as shelter. It is treated as an asset class. Supply is released into a market designed to preserve values, secure lending, generate land uplift and sustain confidence.
Developers have incentives to pace supply so that local prices are not undermined. Banks depend on rising values to protect mortgage books. Councils depend on development, valuation and growth. Governments count construction as economic activity, even when the deeper social problem is insecurity rather than physical absence.
The entire structure rewards scarcity, even when scarcity is manufactured.
The “shortage” is not physical. It is structural – and it is maintained because the system benefits from it.
This matters because it changes the question. If the problem is only shortage, the answer is always more building. If the problem is structure, the answer must also include empty homes, under-occupation, affordability, land value, planning incentives, tenure security and the treatment of housing as wealth rather than shelter.
Flooding: When the Law Overrules the Landscape
My experience as a councillor during the 2007 Gloucestershire floods revealed the same distortion in a different form.
I watched floodplain being reclassified as “safe” for development simply because the land had been raised or ‘built up’ to match or exceed Ordnance Datum Newlyn.
The hydrology of the area had not changed. The water still behaved as water does:
Pluvial flooding from extreme rainfall still sought the lowest point; fluvial flooding from swollen rivers still spilled into the landscape.
Raising land by a metre does nothing to change:
how water flows
where water accumulates
how water is displaced
how water is redirected into existing homes
But because the land met the legal test, development could be treated as acceptable.
The law said the site had been made safe, so the system behaved as if the water would agree.
This is legality replacing reality. And because legality has been allowed to stand in for morality, the public is told that these outcomes are not only acceptable but necessary.
GDP: The Incentive That Distorts Everything
Governments favour new building partly because construction boosts GDP. That does not mean homes are never needed, or that building is always wrong. It means the measure itself rewards activity more than sufficiency.
GDP rewards:
activity
churn
extraction
expansion
GDP does not reward:
sufficiency
reuse
stability
resilience
So:
building new homes increases GDP
using existing homes does not
This is one reason the system keeps expanding supply even where the deeper need is security, affordability and better use of what already exists.
GDP was designed to measure economic activity. It was never designed to measure whether people are housed, nourished, secure, healthy or free from avoidable harm.
Yet it has become the scoreboard by which governments claim success.
We have mistaken throughput for progress.
The Free‑Market Myth: The Story That Makes It All Possible
People imagine a free market as a place of open competition, fair rules and level playing fields.
But the market we actually have is one shaped by whoever has the power to write – or remove – the rules.
Over four decades and more, those with the most influence have systematically dismantled the safeguards that once protected people, small businesses, communities and the environment.
These protections weren’t removed because they failed. They were removed because they worked – and because they limited how much big business could take, accumulate and control.
Deregulation is sold as liberation. But it functions as consolidation. It clears the path for large corporations to expand without friction, without accountability, and without the public interest getting in the way.
This is not a free market. It is a captured market, engineered through legislation, lobbying and the slow erosion of public protections.
Seeds: The Quiet Capture of the Food System
Seed markets are now highly concentrated, with a small number of multinational firms holding substantial power over commercial seed, breeding technologies and associated agrochemical systems.
Through patents, licensing agreements, technology-use contracts and market consolidation, corporate actors increasingly shape:
what can be grown
how it can be grown
who can grow it
what farmers are allowed to do with their own harvests
Practices that sustained humanity for ten thousand years – saving seeds, exchanging varieties, breeding hybrids adapted to local conditions – are now restricted or prohibited.
There are documented concerns about farmers’ dependence on proprietary seed lines, restrictions on replanting, and the narrowing of genetic diversity. The precise legal position varies by crop, country and contract, but the direction of travel is clear: control is moving away from growers and communities and towards corporate ownership.
This is not a free market. It is corporate enclosure of the food system. And because it is legal, it is treated as moral.
Bread: When Corporate Morality Enters the Human Body
The Chorleywood Bread Process, developed in 1961, is one of the clearest examples of industrial efficiency being allowed to redefine food quality.
It was introduced to:
speed up production
reduce fermentation time
use lower‑quality wheat
increase shelf life
maximise output
To achieve this, the process relies on high-speed mechanical mixing, added processing aids, shorter fermentation and tightly controlled industrial production. The result is the soft, uniform, sliced loaf that dominates supermarket shelves: visually consistent, cheap to produce and easy to distribute at scale.
The concern is not that every industrial loaf is poison, or that every digestive problem has one cause. The stronger point is that the system selected for speed, volume, shelf life and margin, while giving far less weight to fermentation, digestibility, flavour, biodiversity and long-term health.
Research comparing bread-making processes suggests that longer fermentation, particularly sourdough fermentation, may affect gut microbiota and digestibility differently from no-time industrial processes. That does not prove a single national health story, but it does show why the moral question matters: what do we optimise food for?
And the tragedy is this: we can grow and bake better bread. Traditional methods, longer fermentation and more diverse grains can produce food that is nutritious, digestible and full of flavour. They simply fit less neatly into a model built around scale, uniformity and speed.
If we were organising our food system around needs rather than wants, we would be eating better bread, grown locally, with healthier outcomes. But we aren’t – because legality has been shaped to favour corporate efficiency over human wellbeing.
Technology: The New Frontier of Unregulated Power
Technology is the newest frontier of the same old pattern. Governments often legislate slowly, partly because technologies are complex and partly because the companies developing them move faster, possess more technical knowledge and are able to frame regulation as a threat to innovation.
Politicians, terrified of “stifling innovation”, defer to corporate timelines. Regulation arrives years after the harm. Public protections lag far behind corporate capability.
Once again, legality is used to justify outcomes that would be unacceptable in any other context.
The Systemic Error
Across these domains – housing, land use, food, technology – the pattern is not identical in every detail, but it is recognisable. Rules and incentives are shaped around growth, extraction, scale and legal compliance. Safeguards are weakened or delayed. Public interest becomes negotiable. Corporate morality replaces human morality. And because the resulting system is lawful, we are encouraged to treat it as legitimate.
But legality is not morality. It never has been. And until we stop confusing the two, we will continue to build a society that works beautifully for the system and terribly for the people living in it.
The truth is simple, and it sits beneath every example:
We have mistaken corporate freedom for human progress.
What We Lost When We Replaced Morality with Legality
The most dangerous consequence of this shift is not the individual failures – the flooded homes, the hollow bread, the unaffordable housing, the captured seed supply, the unregulated technologies.
It is the loss of a shared moral compass.
For most of human history, societies understood that certain things were wrong even if they were technically permissible. Communities had norms, expectations, and boundaries that existed outside the written law. You didn’t poison the river because the law allowed it; you didn’t do it because it harmed your neighbours. You didn’t strip the land bare because the regulations hadn’t caught up; you didn’t do it because you knew the land had to sustain your children.
But when corporate morality – a morality built entirely around extraction, accumulation and growth – becomes the dominant organising principle, those unwritten boundaries collapse.
The only question that matters becomes: is it allowed? And if it is allowed, it is pursued, no matter the cost.
This is how we end up with food optimised for shelf life before nourishment, seeds governed by ownership before resilience, homes built where water will still go, housing markets that preserve scarcity, and technologies that reshape society before society has chosen the rules.
When legality becomes the only measure of rightness, harm becomes invisible until it is too late.
The Cost of Confusing Wants with Needs
There is another layer to this story – one that sits beneath the economics and the legislation. It is the cultural shift that has blurred the line between needs and wants.
The Chorleywood Bread Process is a perfect example. We did not need bread that stayed soft for a week, or loaves that looked identical from Cornwall to Carlisle. We wanted convenience, uniformity, and the illusion of abundance. And because the system is built to satisfy wants rather than needs – because wants are more profitable – we ended up with a national diet shaped by industrial efficiency rather than human health.
The same is true of housing. We do not need endless new estates on greenfield land. We need secure, affordable homes. But the system is built to satisfy the wants of capital – asset appreciation, land value uplift, mortgage expansion – rather than the needs of people.
The same is true of seeds. We do not need globalised monocultures. We need resilient, diverse, locally adapted crops. But the system is built to satisfy the wants of corporations – patentable genetics, predictable supply chains, consolidated markets – rather than the needs of farmers or ecosystems.
When wants drive the system, needs become collateral damage.
A Society Built on Extraction Cannot Sustain Itself
The deeper problem is that extraction is not a stable organising principle. It works brilliantly in the short term – for those who benefit from it. But it erodes the foundations of long‑term wellbeing.
You can see this erosion everywhere:
in the rising tide of gluten intolerance
in the loss of agricultural biodiversity
in the hollowing out of local economies
in the strain on infrastructure
in the unaffordability of basic needs
in the environmental fragility exposed by extreme weather
in the political paralysis around regulating new technologies
These are not isolated failures. They are predictable outcomes of a system that rewards extraction, calls it growth, protects it through law and then mistakes legality for legitimacy.
The Way Back Is Not Nostalgia – It Is Rebalancing
This is not an argument for going backwards. It is not a call to abandon technology, or markets, or innovation.
It is a call to rebalance.
To recognise that:
markets need boundaries
innovation needs guardrails
land needs stewardship
food needs diversity
housing needs sufficiency
technology needs accountability
communities need protection
and progress needs a moral compass
We cannot legislate our way out of every problem. But we can stop pretending that legality is enough. We can stop allowing corporate morality to define the limits of what is possible. We can stop mistaking extraction for progress.
And we can start rebuilding a system that works for people, not just for profit.
The Real Question
The question facing us is not whether the system is broken. It isn’t. It is working exactly as designed.
The real question is: who is it designed to serve?
If the answer continues to be “those who benefit from extraction,” then the future will look like the present – only more so.
But if we can reclaim the idea that morality sits above legality – that what is right matters more than what is permitted – then we can begin to build a society that is not just efficient, but humane.
A society that provides for needs before wants. A society that values resilience over throughput. A society that treats people as citizens, not consumers. A society that remembers that progress is not the same as profit.
Because until we make that shift, we will continue to mistake corporate freedom for human progress – and we will continue to pay the price.
Further Reading
The essays and policy papers below develop the practical architecture behind this argument. They are best read as a progression: first the economic model, then the living standard it is meant to secure, then the democratic and community structures needed to make it real.
The Local Economy Governance System – Online Text. Sets out the full model for rebuilding economic life around local resilience, democratic accountability and practical provision rather than distant extraction.
The Local Economy Governance System – Policy Summary. A shorter policy-facing version of the local economy model, useful for readers who want the operational implications and reform priorities in a more concise form.
The Basic Living Standard – Explained. Introduces the idea that society should organise itself around guaranteed access to the essentials of a decent life, placing human need above market permission.
The Basic Living Standard – Full Text. Provides the fuller moral, economic and social case for a needs-based foundation beneath politics, markets and public policy.
A Community Route – Full Text. Develops the community-level pathway for practical renewal, showing how local action can reconnect governance, economy and everyday life.
Manifesto for a Good Dictator. A provocative thought experiment about authority, responsibility and public good, best read as a challenge to weak governance rather than a literal political prescription.
When Parliament returns once again to the question of assisted dying, the same objections surface almost immediately.
“It’s a waste of time.”
“There are more important issues.”
“We shouldn’t be opening this door.”
These refrains are familiar. Some are sincere. Some reflect legitimate anxieties about coercion, disability rights, clinical safeguards and the pressure already placed on health and social care.
Those concerns deserve to be heard carefully, not brushed aside. But they cannot be allowed to become a permanent excuse for paralysis.
Assisted dying is not an abstract moral puzzle. It is not merely a symbolic battlefield for competing ideologies. It is a practical question about whether terminally ill, mentally competent adults should have a safeguarded choice at the end of life when suffering has become intolerable and death is already close.
The current law does not prevent suffering. It exports it, hides it, criminalises compassion around it, and leaves only the wealthiest or most physically able people with any practical route to control.
That is not a neutral settlement. It is a failure of policy.
This piece builds on my previous writing about the distinction between assisted dying and suicide, the reality of safeguards, and the uncomfortable truth that our present law can be crueller to human beings than the compassion we routinely extend to animals at the end of life.
The political detachment problem
The uncomfortable truth is that many of the people most relaxed about delay are not the people living with its consequences.
For those untouched by this reality, assisted dying can look like a philosophical dilemma. For those living it, it is a crisis.
They have not watched a parent suffocate slowly from terminal lung disease.
They have not held the hand of a partner who begs for relief that the law forbids.
They have not sat through the long, degrading decline of someone they love, knowing that the only legal option is to endure every moment of it.
There are families who know that palliative care can be extraordinary but also know that it cannot relieve every form of suffering.
There are patients whose fear is not only pain, but the loss of autonomy, communication, control, dignity and the ability to say goodbye on their own terms.
Delay is not cost-free. It is paid for by dying people and by the families left to carry the memory of how they died.
That is why Parliament cannot continue to treat this issue as a discretionary moral seminar.
It is a question of representation: whether legislators are prepared to confront suffering that may be distant from their own lives but immediate, intimate and devastating for others.
Conscience must not become a hiding place
Assisted dying is routinely framed as a matter of conscience. That framing matters, because it sounds noble. At its best, conscience protects MPs from party pressure and allows them to weigh evidence, ethics and public duty seriously.
But conscience cannot be allowed to become a hiding place. A representative democracy asks MPs to legislate for people whose lives, beliefs and suffering may look nothing like their own.
Personal discomfort is not, by itself, a sufficient reason to deny others a safeguarded choice at the end of life.
No MP is elected only to protect the moral comfort of people who already agree with them.
They are elected to legislate for everyone, including people whose final weeks may be defined by suffering that the law currently forces them to endure.
Safeguards are a design challenge, not a veto
The strongest objection to assisted dying is not that suffering does not exist. It is that any new law must protect vulnerable people from coercion, pressure, poor care or a sense that they are a burden. That concern is serious and should shape the law.
But a safeguard problem is not a reason to refuse reform indefinitely.
It is a reason to legislate carefully.
The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill has been framed around a narrow model: terminally ill adults, expected to die within six months, with mental capacity, assessed through multiple layers of medical and independent oversight.
Whether that model is sufficient can and should be scrutinised, but scrutiny is not the same as obstruction.
My earlier piece on safeguards argued that the real task is not to pretend risk can be eliminated, but to design a system that reduces risk more effectively than the present law does.
The status quo has no formal eligibility test, no independent approval process, no transparent data, and no compassionate route at home for those already determined to end their suffering.
That is the comparison legislators must make: not between a proposed law and a fantasy of perfect safety, but between a regulated framework and the unregulated cruelty of what happens now.
The expertise exists.
The comparative models exist.
The public mandate exists.
What doesn’t exist is political will.
Public opinion has remained consistently supportive of reform. Parliamentary material has cited polling showing around three quarters of respondents supporting a change in the law in principle, including when safeguards are explained.
That does not mean MPs should simply follow polling. It does mean they cannot pretend the demand for change is marginal, reckless or uninformed.
The fear of pressure is real – and must be answered honestly
There is an undercurrent of fear, particularly among older people, disabled people and those who feel abandoned by the state, that assisted dying could become another way for society to make the vulnerable feel disposable.
In a political climate shaped by long NHS waits, stretched social care, austerity, loneliness and declining trust, that fear is not irrational. It is one of the most important issues Parliament must confront.
But the answer to that fear cannot be to deny every terminally ill adult choice. The answer is to build law around consent, capacity, independent scrutiny, access to palliative care, training, data, oversight and the right of clinicians not to participate.
People do not only fear assisted dying. They fear being failed by the systems around it.
They fear a system that has already:
rationed care;
closed or overstretched services;
left people waiting months for treatment;
allowed social care to reach breaking point; and
too often treated dignity as an aspiration rather than a guarantee.
Those are not reasons to abandon reform. They are reasons to insist that reform is accompanied by better end-of-life care, stronger protection against abuse, and a political commitment that no one should ever choose death because life has been made unbearable by neglect.
Hypothetical risks must be weighed against present suffering
Opponents are right to ask what might go wrong. Any serious lawmaker should ask that question. But a responsible Parliament must also ask what is already going wrong.
The present suffering is not hypothetical.
People are dying in agony.
Families are traumatised.
Doctors are forced into impossible ethical corners.
Those who can afford it may travel abroad to die, often at enormous emotional and financial cost.
Those who cannot afford it are left with fewer, harsher and more frightening options.
Recent figures reported by campaign groups show dozens of Britons continuing to travel to Dignitas each year, with UK membership of the Swiss organisation rising significantly since 2020.
That reality exposes the inequality at the heart of the current law: choice exists, but only for those with money, mobility, time and the physical strength to leave the country.
A law that drives dying people overseas is not protecting dignity. It is outsourcing the hardest part of compassion.
The moral question is not whether risk exists. It does. The question is whether legislators have the courage to reduce risk while also reducing suffering.
Assisted dying is not suicide – and the distinction matters
One of the most damaging distortions in this debate is the casual equivalence between assisted dying and suicide. I have written about this before because the distinction is not semantic; it shapes how the public, the media and legislators understand the issue.
Suicide is usually an act arising from despair, crisis or treatable distress.
Assisted dying, in the context proposed for England and Wales, concerns terminally ill adults who are already dying and seek control over the manner and timing of an inevitable death.
Suicide prevention rightly aims to help people live.
Assisted dying asks whether a dying person should be forced to endure suffering they find unbearable when death is no longer preventable.
Conflating the two may be politically convenient, but it blocks honest debate. It allows opponents to talk as though compassion for dying people somehow weakens suicide prevention, when in fact the two require different legal, clinical and ethical responses.
What responsible legislation should do
A responsible assisted dying law should not be rushed, careless or ideological. It should be careful, limited, transparent and enforceable.
define eligibility tightly;
require mental capacity and a clear, settled, voluntary request;
involve independent medical assessment;
include legal or multidisciplinary oversight;
protect people from coercion and abuse;
protect clinicians who conscientiously object;
collect and publish transparent data;
strengthen, not weaken, palliative and end-of-life care; and
ensure Parliament reviews the law once evidence accumulates.
listens to lived experience
confronts uncomfortable truths
designs safeguards
protects the vulnerable
trusts the public
acts with urgency when suffering is preventable
That is not beyond the capability of Parliament. It is exactly the kind of complex moral and practical issue Parliament exists to resolve.
The return of assisted dying legislation, and the possibility of renewed votes after previous parliamentary delay, should focus minds. The elected chamber has already shown that this issue cannot simply be dismissed. The public continues to expect a serious answer. Dying people and their families cannot wait for political comfort to arrive.
Legislators now need to step outside familiar evasions: beyond personal discomfort, beyond procedural delay, beyond slogans about safeguards, and beyond the illusion that doing nothing is morally neutral.
The task is not to choose between compassion and protection. The task is to deliver both.
One person dying without dignity is one too many. Britain has already allowed too many.
How fear, fragmentation, and a broken social system are failing our children – and why banning the symptom will not fix the cause
A proposal to ban or heavily restrict social media use for under‑16s is expected to come before Parliament. Predictably, it has triggered the familiar storm of headlines, moral outrage, and political theatre.
Once again, the smartphone is being cast as the villain of modern childhood – the corrupting force supposedly destroying attention spans, mental health, confidence, resilience, and society itself.
There are real reasons to worry about the digital world. Children can be exposed to bullying, harmful content, addictive design, commercial pressure, distorted body image, and material no young person should ever have to encounter.
Families are right to be concerned, and platforms should be held to a far higher standard.
But if we stop the argument there, we miss the deeper crisis entirely.
This debate is not really about smartphones.
It is not even only about children.
It is about a society that has quietly dismantled the foundations young people once relied on – safe public space, trusted adults, local belonging, meaningful activity, family time, affordable places to gather – and now wants to blame the consequences on a device.
This is not protection.
This is avoidance.
1. Childhood hasn’t collapsed everywhere – but the conditions that support childhood have
It’s easy to point to a new playground, a refurbished park, or a well‑funded youth centre and say, “Look – things aren’t that bad.”
But this misses the point entirely.
The real story isn’t about whether a park exists.
It’s about whether children can use it freely, safely, and socially – and whether the wider conditions of life make that possible.
Across the UK, the underlying ecosystem that once supported childhood has been eroded, even in places where the physical amenities remain.
The decline is structural, not cosmetic.
The evidence is stark. Local authority spending on youth services in England has fallen by around three‑quarters in real terms since 2010, with reports showing cuts of more than £1 billion and hundreds of youth centres lost or hollowed out.
Wales has seen substantial reductions too. These are not marginal changes. They represent the removal of an entire layer of social support that once gave young people somewhere to go, something to do, and adults who were not parents or teachers but still mattered.
But the deeper loss is not the buildings. It’s the conditions that made them matter.
Parents work longer hours and carry more pressure.
Neighbourhood trust has weakened.
Fear dominates public life.
Children’s independent mobility has collapsed over generations.
Public transport is patchy, expensive, or simply not good enough.
Activities that were once free now often carry a cost.
Spaces that once belonged to everyone are increasingly commercialised, regulated, or designed around cars rather than children.
A park is only a park if children can get to it, feel safe in it, and have others to play with when they arrive. A youth centre is only a youth centre if it has people in it. A community is only a community if people trust each other enough to participate.
Even where facilities exist, the conditions that make them meaningful have been stripped away.
And when the offline world becomes harder to access, more expensive to participate in, and more frightening to navigate, children retreat to the only environment that is always available, always open, and always populated: the digital one.
Smartphones didn’t replace childhood. They replaced the conditions that once made childhood possible.
That does not mean technology is harmless. It means technology has become powerful partly because the offline alternatives have been weakened.
The phone did not arrive in a vacuum. It arrived in a society that had already made childhood smaller.
2. Fear hasn’t risen because danger has – fear has risen because community has collapsed
We live in a society where many people genuinely believe danger lurks behind every parked car, every stranger, every unstructured moment.
Some dangers are real. Knife crime, exploitation, online abuse, road danger, and serious violence cannot be dismissed. But the wider picture is more complicated than the emotional climate suggests.
Long‑term crime data in England and Wales shows many traditional forms of crime have fallen over time, even as public anxiety and the visibility of disorder have intensified.
What has risen is the volume of fear‑based messaging.
Fear keeps people watching.
Fear keeps people clicking.
Fear keeps people compliant.
But fear also does something else:
It destroys the social fabric that once kept people safe.
When people fear each other, they withdraw.
When they withdraw, community weakens.
When community weakens, crime finds space to grow.
Crime does not thrive in strong, connected, people‑centred environments. It thrives in the gaps left behind when those environments disappear.
This is the part of the story almost no one tells:
The crime we fear today is often intertwined with the same systemic breakdown that fear itself accelerates.
When youth services vanish, young people lose structure.
When public spaces decline, informal supervision disappears.
When families are stretched thin, support networks collapse.
When communities fragment, accountability evaporates.
When everything becomes transactional, belonging dissolves.
Crime is not simply a moral failing. It is often a social signal – a warning light from a system that no longer supports the people within it.
Fear didn’t rise because danger rose.
Fear rose because community fell.
3. The pub crisis: one case study in how systems fail people – and then blame them
If you want to understand why children spend so much time online, look at what has happened to the places where adults once gathered.
Pubs were once one of the beating hearts of local life – intergenerational, affordable, communal, and human. They were not perfect, and they were never the only form of community infrastructure. Libraries, youth clubs, churches, sports clubs, community centres, parks, working men’s clubs, cafés, and local shops have all played similar roles. But the pub remains a vivid example because it shows what is lost when informal social life is treated as disposable.
But over time, the pub stopped being a community institution and became a financial asset. Corporate ownership, property speculation, debt‑driven business models, and homogenisation hollowed out the soul of the industry.
Many pubs didn’t close because people stopped wanting them; they closed because the system stopped valuing what they were for.
And when pubs disappear, something else disappears with them:
The informal social supervision that keeps communities safe.
The landlord who knew everyone.
The regulars who kept an eye on the street.
The intergenerational mix that built trust.
The shared space where problems were noticed early.
The sense of belonging that kept people anchored.
When these things vanish, crime does not simply “rise” in a neat straight line. Communities are more complicated than that. But risk changes. Isolation deepens. Problems go unnoticed for longer. The informal checks and relationships that once helped people feel seen, known, and accountable start to disappear.
The collapse of the pub is not just an economic story. It is a story about the disappearance of the social immune system.
The same is true for the spaces children use. Close a youth club, price out a sports activity, make buses unreliable, let parks feel unsafe, and then children do not simply stop needing connection. They look for it somewhere else.
4. The political appeal of banning the symptom, not the cause
A social media ban for under‑16s is politically irresistible because it is:
simple
visible
cheap
emotionally charged
It allows politicians to say, “We are protecting children,” without having to confront the harder truth:
We dismantled the social fabric that once supported them.
A ban avoids the real questions:
Why do children have so few offline opportunities?
Why are parents so stretched and unsupported?
Why is community life collapsing?
Why is everything that used to be free now commercialised?
Why is fear the dominant emotion in public life?
These are systemic failures. And systemic failures require systemic solutions.
A ban may reduce some exposure to harm. It may give some parents cover. It may even be part of a wider package if implemented carefully.
But on its own, it is not a solution.
It is a distraction if it allows us to avoid the harder work.
That does not mean we should do nothing online. Quite the opposite. Harmful design, weak age assurance, algorithmic amplification, cyberbullying, predatory behaviour, and exposure to dangerous content all require serious regulation.
Platforms must be made safer. The Online Safety Act must be enforced. Children need digital literacy, parents need support, and companies must not be allowed to profit from avoidable harm.
But a blanket ban risks becoming a political shortcut: a visible act of concern that leaves the underlying conditions untouched.
Worse, if handled badly, it may push some children into less visible and less regulated spaces while doing nothing to rebuild the real‑world places they actually need.
5. The deeper truth: fear is what failing systems use when they cannot offer renewal
When a system is struggling to explain its own failures, it reaches for fear.
Fear divides.
Fear isolates.
Fear distracts.
Fear keeps people looking in the wrong direction.
And right now, fear is being used to:
pit parents against technology
pit generations against each other
pit communities against imagined threats
pit society against its own children
The more the system fails, the more it needs fear to justify itself.
6. The real crisis is not only digital – it is social, economic, and moral
If we banned every smartphone tomorrow, would children’s lives improve?
Only if we rebuilt the conditions that make childhood possible:
properly funded youth services, open often enough to matter
safe, welcoming public spaces that are not designed only for consumption
local transport that lets young people move independently
affordable sport, arts, music, and social activities
libraries, clubs, community centres, and informal “third places” where people can gather
support for parents who are stretched by work, housing, childcare, and cost‑of‑living pressure
trusted adults beyond the family home and school gate
digital literacy taught as a life skill, not a panic response
platform accountability, not just parental blame
trust, opportunity, belonging, and hope
Without that, removing smartphones would simply expose how little we’ve given children to replace them.
The crisis is not technological.
The crisis is environmental.
The crisis is structural.
The crisis is systemic.
And the crime we fear is not a separate problem. It is a symptom of the same collapse.
Treating social media as the sole cause allows us to avoid asking why so many children are lonely, anxious, bored, supervised but unsupported, connected but not held, visible online but invisible in their own neighbourhoods.
7. Where real hope lives
Hope does not live in bans, restrictions, or fear‑driven policies.
Hope lives in rebuilding communities.
Hope lives in restoring public spaces.
Hope lives in supporting families.
Hope lives in creating opportunities.
Hope lives in teaching digital literacy.
Hope lives in regulating platforms properly.
Hope lives in making offline life rich enough that the online world is no longer the only place children reliably find connection.
Hope lives in reconnecting society with itself.
Hope lives in the recognition that children are not the problem.
Hope lives in the courage to admit that the system is.
Hope lives in the willingness to build something better – not just remove something convenient to blame.
That means moving beyond symbolic politics and asking harder questions: What would it take for a thirteen‑year‑old to walk safely to a park, meet friends there, stay for a few hours, and come home without fear? What would it take for parents to trust their community again? What would it take for young people to be known by adults who are not paid to manage, test, punish, or sell to them?
8. The choice ahead
We can continue down the path of fear, division, and superficial fixes. We can keep treating children as problems to be managed, parents as failures to be blamed, and technology as a monster that appeared from nowhere.
Or we can confront the truth: children have not abandoned the real world. Too often, the real world has withdrawn from them.
Children do not need bans as a substitute for society.
They need protection online, yes – but they also need freedom, belonging, trusted adults, safe places, real opportunities, and a world worth growing up in.
If we want children to spend less of their lives on screens, we must give them more life beyond them.
Adam Tugwell 