This is what it feels like to live through a change of the world order. Empty shelves and soaring prices in the shops, rage at work and mounting mortgage worries at one end of the scale; uncontrollable interest rates and skittish markets, extreme nature and vicious domestic and foreign politics at the other, all given a vigorous stir by conspiracy theories and fake news fanned by social and other media. There are words a-plenty, but from small boats to hospital waiting lists to war in Europe and a burning planet, seemingly no levers to pull on. Everything once taken for granted is now a source of friction, aggro and deep unease. 

Some of today’s crises are shared. The downsides of globalisation and financialisation were too long brushed aside, and the financial crisis and the faux boom of the following era of cheap money rubbed the noses of the casualties in it even more insultingly. It took Brexit, Trump and the fractures of the pandemic and subsequent Great Resignation, still playing out, to bring to the surface the depth of the disenchantment. At the same time the Russian invasion of Ukraine revealed the dangers of overdependence and the frightening fragility of many international supply chains. 

To which of course the UK has added its own grotesque missteps and failings. Brexit, obviously, is a unique case of wilful self-harm, a major economic and political fracture in its own right. But the current sense of hopelessness – the ‘impossibility of everyday life’, in the phrase of one commentator – has been much longer in the making. Cameron and Osborne’s brutal austerity is part of the story. Looming out of an even more distant past, Thatcher’s chickens are now coming to roost: the deliberate deindustrialisation that sucked the heart out of many industrial communities; the sell-off of social housing, never replaced, that is a big factor in today’s housing crisis; the privatisations whose failings have left these islands surrounded by sewage visible from space, a train service (some of it in companies nationalised by a Conservative government) that is an international joke and a supremely dysfunctional energy market; and crucially the hollowing out of the state, recently detailed by Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington in The Big Con, with the thinking as well as operational capabilities outsourced to a small group of major consultancies incentivised to sell ministers precisely what they want to hear.

This process has left a vacuum where the heart of a government should beat, while politics, further destabilised by the antics of Johnson et al, has been reduced to a contest of broad narratives (growth, anti-woke, culture wars, small boats on one side, NHS, cost of living, levelling up on the other), neither of which, detached from reality as they are, can be delivered. Just when green technologies, overstretched supply chains and, less positively, military conflict, have launched a new industrial arms race with the potential to bring much needed investment, productivity and jobs to some of the UK’s most flattened areas – there is no strategic state to react creatively to the unlooked-for economic reset. As Diane Coyle recently remarked in the FT, the one player not bothering to play the industrial policy game is bound to lose. 

Nor, meanwhile, is there the organisational capacity to deliver, well, almost anything. Never mind the waffle about a ‘scientific superpower’: a more telling symbol of the state of the UK economy is the becalmed HS2, where eight years work has failed to produce a definitive plan for the Euston terminus or even what it is supposed to achieve, and to which trains from the north won’t now run until the 2040s; while the condition of our political democracy can be resumed in the endless indecision over what to do about the crumbling Houses of Parliament, estimates for the fixing of which are now up to £13bn and counting.

All this constitutes a mighty and daunting challenge for the next government. Yet to employ the habitual cliche (sorry) it also represents a huge opportunity, both to craft a new way of communicating with an alienated electorate and to begin to rebuild the capacity to actually do things. Think of it as a ‘modern supply side’ approach – taking in not just the public sector but also the machinery of government and (the elephant in the room) the private sector too. One of the biggest disappointments of the New Labour Blair-Brown regime was the timid capitulation to the City over the initial intention to reform company law to allott a bigger place to social purpose and the common good. Twenty-five years and multiple financial scandals and crises later, all caused by out-of-control financial greed, Will Hutton cautiously relaunched the idea in an important recent piece on the water companies in The Observer. 

Hutton’s broad point is that the task of UK infrastructure reconstruction is so colossal that it can’t be envisaged without the engagement of a vigorous and committed private sector. Water isn’t the only sector in dire need of investment: decarbonisation, levelling up and bringing schools, hospitals, transport and local services up to scratch will cost at least £2.5tr over the next decades. I’d put it the other way round: while Hutton isn’t wrong, the necessary outcomes can’t be achieved with a private sector that too often is actually at war with the common good. Think of water and care homes owned by private equity whose business model is to pile on debt and bleed every last penny from their acquisitions before selling on their hollowed-out shells, hedge firms that create no net value for society and have an interest in promoting the market volatility that they alone profit from, and more generally CEOs who cynically use the shareholder value credo to feed their own greed.

But the world really has changed. As these examples suggest, the externalities of our enslavement to shareholder value are now so obvious and extreme that the planet can no longer afford them. Change won’t be less contested than in 1997, and in some ways, given the dense ecosystem of vested interest that has accrued around it and the disturbing hard right rhetoric in the US equating ESG with communism or Nazis, may be even more so. But it’s now difficult to believe that the world can survive much longer when society’s interests and economic incentives are so wildly misaligned. It seems likely that the next UK government will be Labour. Whatever else, it should take up the meta-management challenge it flunked the last time and redeem itself by showing the world the way forward.