Blain’s Morning Porridge May 14^th, 2026 – Don’t Blame Starmer, Britain was Broken years ago…

“And was Jerusalem builded here, among these dark satanic mills…”

The imminent departure of Sir Keir Starmer (it is a matter of when, not if) is bread and circuses. His defenestration will distract and amuse the chattering political classes and infuriate voters as yet more evidence of Broken Britain. But we need to be honest – it’s not any single “leader’s” fault. 60 years of bad decisions piled on poor policies have landed the UK in the mire of the present. It can be fixed – but it will need a reset.

Link to Podcast

Yesterday was a tough day – a classic Broken Britain Odessey…

My early train up to London was only 20 mins late, but then the underground was a mare. Because the tubes were dicey, I tried to grab a bus to the next meeting, but the driver opened the door to tell me the Bus Stop was non-operational therefore he could not let me on (!!) I walked in the hail and rain to the next bus-stop, overtaking the same bus – smiling my most sarcastic grin at the same driver as I got on.

Lunch with clients to discuss a rather excellent gold deal (give me a shout if interested) gave us a superb view of the Household Cavalry returning to Barracks after the State Opening of Parliament. Magnificent, and it well impressed our potential investors. But after an excellent feast, the tube was broken (again), necessitating a taxi to Waterloo in grid-locked traffic, missing 2 trains to catch a later one that was stopped dead in Basingrad because of something broken somewhere South. Fortunately, She-Who-is-Mrs-Blain (who was in Winchester) was able to pick me up, so we could crawl through the botched rebuild of a roundabout on the M3 together. And then it was the broken sewers on the lane back to the village, meaning I was hours later than I expected.

Pretty much a normal day in Broken Britain.

Yesterday was a day of high political drama in the UK. Politicians scoring points off each other – but otherwise doing FA. The electorate bored and frustrated by it all – hating any and all government because it doesn’t seem to be delivering anything. Sir Keir Starmer and Chancellor Rachel Reeves are seen as weak ditherers. Kemi Badenough, leader of the notional opposition, wielded the classic: “in office, but not in power” comment well – but would she be any better than Starmer? It seems inevitable he will be packing his tea-chests and exiting Downing Street before too long… another disappointing prime minister in a succession of disappointing prime ministers.

The question, however, we should be asking is not why is Starmer so bad, but why is Britain so Broken? Our politics have become a reflection of bust – offering nothing to raise us higher.

Regular readers will know that as a Scotsman I genetically lean towards the left – but I’ve always prided myself on being practical about my politics. Yesterday I was soundly berated by my chum Simon about Starmer and Reeves taxation mistakes reducing the tax-base while destroying business confidence triggering a cascading run of failure in the bedrock of the economy – small businesses.

I could have defended Labour. I could have talked about how spending has been constrained. I could have tried to excuse Labour’s left demanding welfare as the only priority – but I can’t. I could have referenced the Blitzkrieg campaign of negative press ever since Labour won the 2024 election by a landslide. But what would have been the point?

We need to be honest about Broken Britain. It’s not, entirely, Sir Keir Starmer’s fault.

All political decisions are ultimately compromises – Britain today is the product of the last 60 years plus of political compromises. The consequences of bad decisions decades ago have led the UK to this point. To fix it we have to acknowledge there are no quick fixes. We have to be brutally honest about why the UK economy is broken and why it doesn’t work. Once we accept the truths – then we can start to think about how to fix it.

In my new book, The Battle For Hamble, I write about how the grand ambitions of politicians in Westminster to create strong, robust, resilient communities and a growth economy are buried and lost in the actual execution of policy – often because the people tasked to deliver are under-resourced and subject to such over-regulation and bureaucracy that they simply can’t deliver. They become box-tickers rather than enablers. The book then adds the dimension of wealthy, lawyered-up, greedy developers who arbitrage the broken system by mobilising expensive lawyers and consultants to push through bad policy to their benefit.

I illustrate failure in the planning process by showing how the approval of the wholly unnecessary Hamble Gravel Quarry will cost 6000 local jobs and devastate the local economy – allowing a foreign company to ultimately reap windfall profits by turning a prosperous village into a waste-landfill site.

Grown up economics? It is not.

There are a number of critical starting blocks in sorting broken Britain:

• Identify what is broken – and what is achievable to fix it?
• Effective delivery of policy is critical, better and less bureaucracy?
• What should be the priorities of state – what does the state have to provide, and what can the private sector and markets provide?
• Growth, Growth and Growth.

Let’s start off with Wes Streeting, present health minister -and wanta-be premier. What does he plan to resolve the complete and utter FUBAR that is the NHS? For decades the NHS has been an untouchable “national treasure” – allowing it to become a festering ineffective disgrace, threatening to consume the whole economy. What could be done to make it work? As an organisation with millions of users, it’s data rich and the plans to turn it over to Palantir to run through AI do make curious sense. But how will Government ensure that we don’t make the problem worse by allowing Palantir to monetize the UK population, seeking to charge us “rent” to use our own health system?

Or how about housing? Another issue I deal with in The Battle For Hamble is the landowner, Persimmon Homes, which has been repeatedly denied permission to build homes on the site (because of bad roads and a lack of infrastructure.) The myth is the UK needs 1.5 mm homes now – yet “landbank” firms like Persimmon are currently sitting on planning permission for 1.3mm homes, but aren’t building, creating scarcity so home prices will rise, which will allow them to sell their rabbit hutches more expensively!

I would say the real issue in housing is not executive rabbit hutches, but the need for 2 bed rental and affordable apartments in Cities to give young people security to work and start family formation. How about local councils are given the right to seize land from “Landbanks” that have planning permission but haven’t built and build social housing instead. Oh… that would hurt?

And let’s be brutally honest about the other aspects of Britain that are broken and why. Our rivers polluted and dying because private equity firms bought and levered up the water companies to award themselves huge bonuses and save nothing towards infrastructure. Same issue with railways. If we are going to farm out the services and infrastructure of state to the private sector – then it needs strong and aggressive regulation, which means firms won’t do it, meaning it becomes a government responsibility in financially tough times.

Or maybe we acknowledge the bulk of welfare spending is unsustainable – yes there are deserving cases, but we can’t pay whole generations of non-working families, or the costs of subsidising non-productive immigration. When we spend more on welfare than on defence, we have a serious problem.

And don’t tell me Nigel Farage is the solution. He is defined by the foolish populism of Brexit…

I could continue in this vein all morning… but I have work to do.

The key issue is to figure out how to make the economy work – holistically – to ensure workers have security and the incentive to work, that companies are encouraged to invest, entrepreneurs to entrep, that infrastructure works and is effective, and that we have a growth economy that continues to attract the finance and investment to back it all up with.

The point is… there is little point shouting at Starmer today (although I am more than prepared to accept he has proved a particular disappointment), because we will only be shouting at someone else tomorrow… who knows who? Kemi? Farage? Ed Davis (who he – ed) Unless we fix the fundamentals.. the UK will remain broken.

Out of time and back to the day job… Gold and Spitfire…

Bill Blain

Author of the Morning Porridge
CEO Windshift Capital
Advisor – Spitfire Strategic Capital

The Battle For Hamble is a proper grown-up examination of how bureaucracy has failed: a tale of Greedy Corporates, Bad Planning and Economic Illiteracy. It explains how a wholly unnecessary Gravel Quarry will be dug in middle of a prosperous village – putting 6000 jobs at risk. The truth is no one wants gravel, and the quarry company understands it’s not what you dig out, but what you stuff back into a hole in the ground that matters. Gravel sells for £30 a tonne – Landfill earns £150 a tonne to bury. Go figure.