Broken Britain: what went wrong?

Did Gillian Keegan need to apologise? The Education Secretary thought her ITV interview had ended and she could speak frankly. She insisted the schools’ concrete crisis was down to ‘everyone else’ who had ‘sat on their arse’.

It was a fair point, inelegantly expressed. It’s been almost 25 years since the order first went out from Whitehall to inspect schools and hospitals for crumbling reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (Raac). When a roof eventually collapsed at the Singlewell Primary school in Kent in 2018, the government sent out surveys to inquire about building material – but that was largely it. Like lazy homeowners, or dodgy landlords, successive administrations assumed the problem would be dealt with by somebody else at a later date.

Then, days before the new term started this week, parents of pupils at more than 150 schools were told it wasn’t safe for their kids to return. Memories of ‘stay at home’ messaging came back in a flash.

The blame can be spread. The SNP in Scotland and the Labour party in Wales have only just started the Raac discovery process. But Rishi Sunak’s government is going to take the brunt of the anger. After 13 years in power, the Tories must accept that voters aren’t interested in root causes. Every primary school student sent home this week was born under a Conservative-led government.

The school-roofs issue could be regarded as urgent yet manageable. But to a lot of the public, it seems as if the country is falling apart. The NHS is shambolic: its waiting list now includes 13 per cent of England’s adult population. The sewage system is inadequate, with rivers and coastlines full of effluents. Trains are expensive and overcrowded. Airports descend into chaos at the slightest glitch in air traffic control software.