Britain is on the verge of a debt crisis, burdened by stagnant growth and strained by mass migration, while facing domestic unrest and potential external threats.
But politicians are powerless to fundamentally change the country due to an overinflated, officious civil service and bureaucracy.
So says the man that was running Whitehall behind the scenes until six months ago.
Former Cabinet Secretary Sir Simon Case spent decades at the heart of the Establishment; in No10, Buckingham Palace and the spy world.
Navigating the country through political upheaval, wars, royal challenges, and a pandemic, few individuals possess a deeper understanding of Britain’s inner workings.
So the ex-mandarin’s chilling warnings should make us all sit up and listen…
Acknowledging “there is a real sense that politics and political conversation and how we govern our country hasn’t been working for ordinary working people for quite a long time,” Sir Simon cautions that politicians are presently failing to satisfy the public’s desire for change.
There is a real sense that politics and political conversation and how we govern our country hasn’t been working for ordinary working people for quite a long time
Simon Case
Rachel Reeves will tomorrow unveil government spending plans for the next few years, yet Sir Simon fears Labour have hit the same challenges faced by previous governments in an “all must have their say” culture that leaves the public picking up the tab.
He says incoming governments of all stripes have found their promises to voters are left in tatters as they realise they only have the power to tinker at the edges of what needs to be done.
And he warns the overbearing state strangles growth and reform while radical solutions to our border crisis languish in Whitehall and the courts – leaving the voters angrier and angrier, and trust in the system frayed to breaking point.
He told The Sun: “This is the call to arms now… it doesn’t matter who’s in power, we need to fix these things.”
But if we do not, Sir Simon warns the he music might stop soon, saying: “What I worry about most is actually having a properly functioning democracy… if you vote for change, you’ve got to get change. And if people keep voting and they don’t get change, they start to wonder, why on earth am I spending my time… Why am I engaging? Why am I paying my taxes?”
And he says politicians in all parties must now get real and wake up to the failings of the state or the consequences of not doing so will see the country slip down a dark path.
“There are moments in our history where we’ve had political violence”, he said, “but that isn’t who we’ve become as a modern nation… And when you start to see people expressing their frustration in that way, we should all stop and listen and think, what is happening? You know, what is going on here?”
“Something is happening that we should all pay attention to”, he added.
Asked if we were yet at breaking point Sir Simon warned: “For me, look, you should always plan for the worst” but insisted there was a still a small window to turn things around despite the growing threat of China and Russia abroad.
But in the short term he warns the Chancellor is caught between unsustainable debt mountain, political nervousness in Parliament from her own side as well as diminished power for any ministers to actually make change.
Though he insisted he hates the “dehumanising” phrase The Blob, the former boss of the civil service says critics have a point about a system that stifles reform.
He said: “I do understand that there is this kind of faceless sort of set of organisations that seems to be holding power, and no matter what you want to do, there’s a million reasons…
“Fundamentally, we have a system of government that’s developed largely over the last 200 years into what I think of as lowest common denominator political thinking.
“Everybody has an equal say. You come up with an idea and it gets sandpapered away by all of these… And then you’re just kind of left with this thing… and you think, that doesn’t really look a lot like what I originally said.”
But he warns politicians only have themselves to blame for years of political game playing on both sides that as seen power given away to ever increasingly powerful bureaucrats.
“He hit out: “I think a lot of politicians think they’re going to be elected or on a platform of change. That’s exactly what this government did… And then you come into power and you realise that over the last, actually probably now about 40 years, it’s amazing how much power elected politicians have given away in all sorts of different ways.”
He added: “We’ve got to that point that, you know, people are fighting hard to get to the top of the tree, to become prime ministers, to become cabinet ministers, and they come round and they’re saying, oh, we’ve given it all away… And you realise everything is a really long, slow, painful negotiation.”
Appearing on the Sun’s Never Mind the Ballots show in a stunning broadside against the machine he previous ran, Sir Simon blasts the formation of the Office of Budget Responsibility as a typical example that binds in politicians from the radical and sweeping changes that need to be done.
He says there were people in power now that “spotted really quickly that the way we govern ourselves isn’t right… The OBR was a really interesting one.”
Blaming both Labour and Tories, he said: “Over and over, over and over again, politicians are reacting often to some issue or some scandal and saying, politicians can’t be trusted, we should take more power away from politicians, so you can trust us because we’re not going to wield power in the same way as the last lot. And that is a fundamental problem.”
Asked if he pushed for the abolition of the controversial quango on when in government, Sir Simon added: ”I’m not going to go into what I said on the inside, but I’ll tell you what I think. And you can draw your own conclusions.
“You can’t have elections where no matter who you vote for, you just keep getting the same answer.”
