All the old certainties of the post-war era I was born into are gone.
Our political chaos is a symptom of an age entering its death rattle

For a time traveler in the post-war era, Britain is a fundamentally different place than it is today. All the old certainties have disappeared.

Few people expect to hold a job for life, a third of marriages end in divorce within 20 years, almost a fifth of the population was born abroad and Christianity is fast becoming an anachronism.

We shouldn’t be too surprised that our political system, designed for a completely different nation, stopped working. And last week it happened in spectacular fashion.

Following Labour’s disastrous local election results, a devastating war broke out at the highest levels, shocking even Whitehall veterans with their levels of personal revenge.

In a speech on Saturday, Wes Streeting called for a ‘proper contest’ to replace the Prime Minister, making his first public appearance since resigning as Health Minister.

With Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham announcing he will stand in a by-election to represent the Labor leadership and former deputy chancellor Angela Rayner waiting on the sidelines, we now face the dire prospect of a long, drawn-out battle for a new leader.

And this revolving political merry-go-round has become actively dangerous to the general public.

Last week, as Labor’s top brass pursued their own personal ambitions, gilt yields soared – City cites a rise in the cost of government borrowing – and the pound plummeted.

Meanwhile, oil prices remain above $100 per barrel due to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, energy prices and the high cost of living.

At a time of rising international tension, a country in crisis needs a coup from a strong government. Instead our politicians fight like ferrets in a sack.

If Starmer falls and looks like he has no chance of long-term survival, the UK will see its seventh prime minister in less than a decade.

Given the political life expectancy of the average modern Prime Minister, No 10’s famous black front door might as well be replaced by a revolving door.

Since David Cameron’s departure in June 2016, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak have been in and out again. The only constant throughout their tenure has been Larry the Cat, who has been in office for 15 years since his arrival in 2011.

The epic reigns of Margaret Thatcher (11 years) and Tony Blair (10) are unlikely to be repeated. In 2018, former Labor Prime Minister Gordon Brown predicted that the maximum “shelf life” of politicians in the future would be six years.

‘People get bored of personalities very quickly,’ he said. ‘They’re sick and tired of you, they’ve seen it all before due to the 24-hour nature of the news.’

He is, of course, right that the modern media environment makes life much more difficult for today’s politicians than it was for their ancestors.

First, the advent of 24-hour TV news channels has created an ever-increasing demand for ‘content’, with politicians under pressure to respond instantly to even the most trivial developments.

Meanwhile, the rapid rise of social media has given even the most underrated candidates a platform from which to promote their favorite candidates, take down their opponents, or spark controversy.

Few people can withstand such relentless scrutiny for long. Indeed, Gordon Brown’s prediction now looks unusually optimistic. The lesson from last week’s results is that we face a multi-party future at the national level as well, come the next general election.

This means we can look forward to a new political era marked by horse-trading, coalition infighting and snap elections called by fed-up prime ministers.

Our fractured future is a reflection of the country with which Britain is increasingly out of sync.

Mass immigration radically changed national demographics. Whether our leaders admit it or not, deep-rooted concern for millions of people from other countries underpins much of our current political discourse and was arguably the most important factor in the Brexit referendum.

But the failure of governments to deport significant numbers of immigrants as voters supposedly ‘take back control’ demonstrates another truth about modern governance: that it is constrained by external forces. International laws and conventions, particularly the European Convention on Human Rights and the UN Refugee Convention, mean that it is almost impossible to turn the threat of deportation into a meaningful deterrent.

The UK’s tax burden is now at its highest level in 70 years; Interest on our £2.9 trillion debt mountain is costing us £110 billion a year

This usurpation of ministerial power means that the government is weaker than ever; Executive powers have been devolved not only to the judiciary but also to the civil service, regulatory bodies and quangos such as the Office for Budget Responsibility.

It doesn’t help that the quality of our political class has never been this bad. This would be less of a problem if we were experiencing a period of unprecedented peace and stability. Instead, we live in a time when living standards have barely improved in the last 20 years (the longest period in British history) and conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East are having a significant impact on the global economy.

The pace of change has never been more dizzying, as the phenomenon of ‘working from home’ becomes more widespread, leaps in digital technologies empty our offices and the daily commute ends.

And Artificial Intelligence is poised to change the way we do business in almost every field imaginable.

But unlike the economic revolutions of the past, our current revolution has not brought us prosperity.

The UK’s tax burden is now at its highest level in 70 years; Interest on our £2.9 trillion mountain of debt is costing us £110 billion a year, and inflation is running at 3.3 per cent, well above the Bank of England’s 2 per cent target, and is expected to rise further.

Labor appears committed to a redistributive socialist agenda that will compound these problems. And the burden of paying for it falls disproportionately on young people. The ratio of retirees to the population has doubled since 1951. More than 13 million people now receive a state pension, compared to 4.8 million 75 years ago.

Thanks to social media, more people than ever are aware of politics, but their knowledge is shallow, variable, and often lacking in real experience. They want change and they want it now.

New worlds emerge from groundbreaking changes. Following the end of the Napoleonic Wars, Victorian Britain created an empire on which the sun never sets.

This situation ended with the Second World War, which ushered in a new era that saw the emergence of the great state and the growth of supranational institutions. This settlement into which I was born is now experiencing its death throes, and our current political chaos is a symptom of its death.

It seems clear that a new order will emerge over time. Whether it is a golden age or something else entirely, only time will tell.

Professor Robert Tombs is the author of The English and Their History, published by Penguin.