Just when you think it can’t get worse, it can, and does. On top of the ongoing wave of strikes across much of UK public sector, the energy shambles and a cost-of-living crisis, in one recent week we learned that: 1000 Met police officers were under investigation for violence or domestic abuse, with ‘two or three’ court cases a week expected as a result; 235 vulnerable migrant children had unaccountably ‘disappeared’ from Home Office designated hotels; the UK had tumbled to 18 on Transparency International’s corruption perception index, its lowest position ever; alone among developed countries, the UK economy would shrink in 2023; the British army no longer qualified as a top-level fighting force; and the chair of the Conservative Party, a former chancellor, became the third cabinet minister to be sacked for breaching the ministerial code in the first 100 days of Rishi Sunak’s premiership.

Even when people are nominally working, the UK isn’t. Everything is out of kilter. It’s as if the country and all its institutions are falling apart. Not only the centre cannot hold – none of the component parts fits, works with the others or is in the right place. It’s synergy in reverse. 

How do we make sense of this extraordinary collapse? 

One way to look at it is through the lens of culture. Culture – roughly speaking, the shared values and norms that shape how organisations behave – is a slippery beast. It can be strong or weak, loose or tight, positive or the reverse. One organisation can contain a multitude of cultures, subcultures and even microcultures – boardroom, shopfloor, middle managers, teams – and the management culture is something different again. On my bookshelf is a book called The Seven Cultures of Capitalism; C.P. Snow famously wrote about the ‘two cultures’ of the arts and science. A schools culture is different from a business culture, a team sport from an individual one. 

Intangible as it is, however, culture is a thing – sort of organisational dark matter – and one to be reckoned with. Culture management, says one respected management academic, ‘lies at the heart of contemporary analyses of managing’. The cost of misjudging it is disastrous. It’s hard not to conclude that it was the Downing Street culture, largely of his making and reflected in Partygate, ethical lapses and attempts to bypass parliament, that brought Boris Johnson down as prime minister (as it had done before). Its lingering taint, not helped by Truss’s detachment from everyday reality, may have fatally wounded Sunak’s administration from the outset. Or Cressida Dick: the culture of violent misogyny and racism haunting the Met wasn’t of her making, but revelations of its extent and her failure to root it out were enough to cause her downfall. A similar scandal, fortunately so far without the murders, is brewing in the fire and rescue service. And there are plenty more: The Home Office, Yorkshire cricket, Welsh football: the list is long.

The stakes are high in business, too. Researchers at MIT SMR/Glassdoor Culture 500, a research unit, note that companies with a ‘healthy’ corporate culture consistently outperform comparable firms financially. On the other hand, the human and financial costs of a ‘toxic’ culture (disrespectful, non-inclusive, unethical, cutthroat, and abusive) are ‘staggering’. I’ve quoted before Jeff Pfeffer’s excoriation of the toxicity of US workplaces and its extraordinary cost in terms of health and excess mortality.  A toxic culture is by far the strongest predictor of attrition in the Great Resignation. According to one estimate, job-hopping caused by toxic corporate culture was costing US companies $50bn a year even before the post-Covid rush for the exits. 

How does this relate to the UK meltdown? 

I’m not the first to suggest that a central operating principle of English, perhaps British, culture, in evidence at every level, is ‘muddling through’. You could also call it expediency, the line of least resistance or aversion to prioritising. Johnson’s smirking ‘cakeism’ is the quintessential illustration. We avoid big long-term decisions wherever possible. Since the second world war, only EU entry and possibly Thatcher’s privatisations match the Beveridge reforms in political importance – and look how those turned out. As for infrastructure, hello Channel tunnel, and not much else. Do we shy off big projects because the execution record is so bad, or the latter is the result of our reluctance to commit to large projects? Whatever, the consequence is the same: things are patched up until no one really understands how they work, witness the NHS. Seventy-five years after France, we haven’t even finished electrifying the railways, whose absurd prices and unreliability, like the sewage washing our shores, are a national disgrace. We treated the North Sea oil bonanza like an tipsy lottery winner and splurged rather than invested the windfall. You get the picture.

Muddling through sort of worked – not well, but such that people grumbled rather than rioted – until it was tested to destruction by the crash of 2008, Brexit, and Covid. The 2008 crash was followed by a decade of austerity, which with hindsight is not a policy, just another way of not making decisions. Fifteen years later, we are therefore in the same position only worse, with the chickens of cuts and long-term underinvestment in public services cackling home to roost. Brexit was the summation of cakeism, a ‘grand projet’ undertaken with nonchalant disregard for the consequences and the reality on the ground, as with the Northern Ireland protocol. Covid then struck as the equivalent of the Turkish earthquake, shaking to bits the cobbled-together public-service infrastructure and, even more dismaying, uncovering the hidden decay of the basic values of decency and probity that had traditionally underpinned UK public life and the country’s soft power abroad.

Sociologists say there are three modes of exercising power: coercion, calculation and culture. Calculation is in effect the market, with its impersonal and seemingly unappealable rules; and in the absence of cultural guide rails, it is to the markets that successive governments delegated most of their decision-making. But while the markets, as Charles Handy notes, tells us what things cost, it doesn’t tell us what we should do. And unfortunately – Truss and Kwarteng proved it yet again – the fiercest devotees of the market’s speed and power are the least qualified to deploy them. Rishi Sunak, currently at the wheel of the Tory party limousine, is a less reckless driver than they were; but as some of his appointments testify, he is only too aware of the gaggle of far-right Mr Toads behind him on the back seat shouting ‘faster! faster!’

That leaves coercion. Sure enough, through the dizzying policy zigzags, departmental rebrandings and ministerial musical chairs of the last few years there runs a consistent and threatening thread of authoritarianism and compulsion: the unprecedented curbs on protest brought in by last year’s Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act and the current public order bill, and the new proposals for tightening restrictions on strikes, for example. Assaults on the judiciary and the proroguing of parliament are out of the same playbook, as is the ‘hostile environment’ for migrants, indeed all foreigners, institutionalised at the Home Office, and reflected in the Windrush scandal and Suella Braverman’s fevered dreams of watching 747-loads of cross-Channel migrants taking off for a barren new life in Rwanda. Charges of bullying, demeaning staff and creating a climate of fear at work against individual ministers such as Gavin Williamson, Priti Patel and Dominic Raab just reproduce the same values at individual level.

Disrespectful and abusive behaviour – or coercion – is, of course, a significant element in the toxic culture identified in the MIT/Glassdoor study that so undermines organisational performance. It’s a vicious circle that only leads to more of the same. Sunak’s threat to leave the European Convention on Human Rights to allow ever harsher crackdowns on migration, if it happens, will be one more step on the same slippery slope.

On 26 January a Ukrainian economist posted a thread on Twitter on the culture of corruption and how to combat it. Here is is, edited for length:

Tymofiy Mylovanov

Follow @Mylovanov

We’re not as bad as that. But procurement, oligarchs, lobbying, political finance should surely remind us of something. And we also suffer from a different corruption. Muddling through can easily become a shrug of ‘don’t care’, dissembling and – a speciality of recent governments – downright lying. In a recent poll, 65 per cent of voters said they believed that the Conservative party was institutionally corrupt. Whatever else, we need a cultural reset, and that takes above all the will to look the facts in the face and act on them. Values, as someone said, ‘are what you are willing to enforce’. We need to start doing so – now.