President-elect Donald Trump (Image: Getty)
Exactly 30 years ago this month, I embarked on a new career as a writer, having previously been immersed in Labour politics as both a Parliamentary aide at Westminster and as a councillor in the London Borough of Islington, then a byword for ideological and financial extravagance.
In my municipal role, I saw how weak management and trade union power undermined operational efficiency.
One extraordinary case epitomised the culture of indulgence towards the council’s workforce.
In early 1993, a caretaker called Ron Warne took an extended spell of sick leave, much to the exasperation of the local tenants who complained about the neglect of basic maintenance on their housing estate.
But their indignation turned to astonishment when Mr Warne appeared in a television news report from the Balkans civil war, wearing a khaki uniform and carrying a Kalashnikov.
It turned out that Mr Warne was fighting fit and had joined a unit of Bosnian mercenaries to take on the Serbs.
On his return to England, Mr Warne was dismissed; if only he had shown the same enthusiasm for sweeping stairwells and changing lightbulbs as he had for lethal combat in the former Yugoslavia.
But the tale reinforced my deep concerns about the dysfunctional nature of the town hall. On any given day, a quarter of the staff in the children’s centres were off sick. Even the smallest change in working practices involved protracted negotiations.
I lost my council seat in 1994, having failed to inject some dynamism into the organisation. What disturbs me, three decades later, is that this self-serving, querulous spirit still prevails in parts of the public sector.
Islington in the 1990s might be an extreme example, but the same negative attitudes can be found today, denying the public the quality of services for which they pay. The transport unions, for instance, are notorious for their militant protection of vested interests, with the result that our network is in desperate need of modernisation.
On Boxing Day, the Office of Road and Rail Data revealed that in 2024, a record 370,000 trains had been fully or partly cancelled. Similarly, the Home Office has long been branded “unfit for purpose”, a label reflected in the huge backlog of almost 100,000 asylum applications.
While productivity in the private sector has gone up in recent years, it has actually fallen among state employees by 8.5% since the pandemic, a trend that is likely to worsen as the practice of remote working becomes more widespread.
At HM Revenue and Customs, over 90% of staff have the right to work from home for at least some of the week, which may explain why 10 million calls to the department go unanswered every year.
Some staff are not even based in this country, never mind their offices. This week an investigation by the Taxpayers’ Alliance showed that, since the advent of , local authorities have approved more than 2,000 requests to work abroad at locations ranging from Bali to Brazil.
Remote working can be an ally of enterprise in a flexible, productive environment, but those qualities are absent in much of the lumbering state machine, as shown in the continuing high rates of absenteeism.
The average public sector worker took a whopping 10.6 days off sick last year, double the rate of the private sector, while only last week a report from the Office of National Statistics indicated that state employees are three times more likely to be off work with mental health problems than their private sector counterparts.
That’s because of indiscipline rather than the unique pressures of being on the state payroll.
Britain is in a financial hole and the way out is not by putting up taxes, but by raising output. In the US the incoming President has set up a Department of Government efficiency to galvanise the state. We could do with the same here.
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Sir Keir Starmer (Image: Getty)
Sir came to power promising to “smash the gangs” of people traffickers who operate across the English Channel. But it looks like the gangs are smashing his credibility. In just four days from December 25, 1,485 illegal migrants made it to our shores, easily a record for the festive period. Altogether, from the Prime Minister’s first day in office to the end of the year, no fewer than 23,242 migrants reached Britain in small boats, an increase of 29% on the same period in 2023.
So shrill in his condemnation of the for their mishandling of the Channel crisis, Starmer now presides over an even bigger mess. He scrapped the previous government’s scheme for using Rwanda as a base to process asylum claims and accommodate deportees from Britain, but he put no alternative deterrent in its place. Instead, he just tinkered with bureaucracy through the creation of a new Border Security Command, a step that has done nothing to reverse the tide.
Official immigration policy has long been a gigantic exercise in delusion and deceit. Pledges are continually broken, crackdowns never materialise. But the worst culprit has been Tony Blair, who liked to pose as a moderate but in reality was the architect of the social revolution that has transformed our country. His 1997 manifesto promised “firm control” of our borders, but did the exact opposite. As demonstrated by the release of official papers this week, he overruled Cabinet colleagues to open the floodgates – and our fractured nation has been paying the price ever since.
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The scandal of predatory Asian gangs ruthlessly exploiting vulnerable white working-class girls in towns like Rotherham and Rochdale brought shame on our nation. What made this saga particularly outrageous was that the abuse was covered up for years by the authorities because they wanted to maintain the illusion that Britain’s experiment in multi-culturalism had been an unalloyed success.
In effect, girls were sacrificed on the altar of a warped anti-racist ideology. Tragically the rape culture still exists, while the full truth about the extent of cover-up has never come out. But all that could change in 2025, as more trials of the child rapists get underway, heroic investigative journalists dig deeper, and global celebrities like J K Rowling and push for justice for the rape victims. A bomb is ticking at the heart of the establishment and the fall-out could be devastating.
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Sir Alex Ferguson was not much of a player. His fellow Scot Tommy Docherty once jokingly told me: “Alex trapped the ball further than I could pass it.” Yet Ferguson became the finest club manager of them all. Alternatively, dazzling talent on the field is no guarantee of success, as proved by the experience of Wayne Rooney, one of Ferguson’s biggest stars at . This week Rooney was sacked by Plymouth Argyle, his fourth successive managerial failure. We are told that a stint as house-husband now beckons, not a position Sir Alex would have relished.
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had an impressive year in 2024. But 2025 may well be even better as disillusionment with the two main parties mounts. Which is why Farage sounded so confident in the broadcast of his New Year message from Blenheim Palace, Winston Churchill’s birthplace. There were a few complaints about the grandeur of this backdrop, given Farage’s image as “the man of the people”. But I think the location was entirely appropriate. After all, Farage has been the greatest warrior for British freedom since Churchill.