A VOICE FROM THE STREET

2nd September 2026
 
Extra, extra, read all about it!

I WENT AWAY FOR SIX WEEKS. WHAT ON EARTH HAPPENED TO BRITAIN?


By David Selves


3,500 miles through France, Spain and Portugal in a campervan, another 200 on a bike — and a rather different country waiting when I got back

On 19 July we set off travelling around Europe in our campervan.

By the time we returned to something approaching normal life at the end of August, we had driven some 3,500 miles through France, Spain and Portugal and covered another 200 miles by (electric!) bike. 

There is something rather useful about travelling by campervan and bike.

You don't see countries from an airport lounge, a motorway service station or the back seat of a ministerial car. You see villages, small towns, farms, factories, roads, cafés and ordinary people getting on with their lives. On a bike you see them even more slowly.

And you notice the small things.

One of the most striking was our overnight stopping places.
There are increasingly sophisticated holiday camps designed for campervans, with facilities, entertainment, designated pitches and all the paraphernalia somebody has decided the modern campervan traveller requires.

Yet time after time the places we preferred were the simplest farm campsites.
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A field. Somewhere safe to park. Basic facilities. Perhaps some local produce. A farmer getting on with farming rather than attempting to manufacture an "experience".
They were frequently better.

Not better because they provided more.

Better because they provided what was actually needed.

There might be a lesson for government in that.

Meanwhile Britain carried on without me.

Rather too enthusiastically, as it turned out.

In barely six weeks we had changed Prime Minister, watched Andy Burnham attempt to change the direction of Labour, seen Nigel Farage resign his Clacton seat and fight to win it back, watched Reform encounter the awkward transition from protest movement to prospective government, continued arguing about asylum seekers and hotels, worried about inflation, borrowing, welfare and defence — and somehow managed to give nearly ten thousand votes to a man wearing a dustbin on his head.
Perhaps I should go away more often.

Or perhaps not.

Because beneath the entertainment lies something considerably more serious.
What happened between 19 July and 31 August raises a question I have returned to repeatedly in recent years:

Does anybody in British politics actually have a strategic objective any more?

BATTLES AND WARS

Military people understand the distinction between winning battles and winning wars.
A battle has an immediate objective.

A war has a strategic one.

Politicians increasingly seem obsessed with the first and rather hazy about the second.
Nigel Farage was different because, for most of his political life, he had an extraordinarily clear strategic objective.

Brexit.

You may regard Brexit as Britain's liberation, Britain's greatest post-war act of self-harm or something between the two. That is not the point.

Farage knew what he wanted.

Everything — UKIP, European elections, resignations, television appearances, pints, cigarettes, arguments with Brussels, battles with the Conservative Party — served the strategic objective.
And eventually he achieved it.

But what is Farage's strategic objective now?

To become Prime Minister?

To destroy the Conservative Party?

To replace it?

To reduce immigration?

To shrink the State?

To disrupt politics?

Or simply to continue being Nigel Farage?

Those are not necessarily the same thing.

THE £5 MILLION QUESTION

During the summer Reform also found itself dealing with precisely the sort of scrutiny that insurgent movements eventually encounter when people begin taking seriously the possibility that they might govern.
The £5 million donation associated with Christopher Harborne was not merely another Westminster funding story.

It raised the larger question that always arises when anti-establishment parties become established enough to attract very large sums of money.

Who funds the insurgents once the insurgents become part of the establishment?
Farage has spent much of his career portraying himself as the man outside the system.
But you cannot simultaneously be the outsider throwing stones through the establishment's windows and the leader of a serious prospective government indefinitely.
At some point somebody asks who paid for the stones.

AND GORGEOUS GEORGE?

Then there is George Cottrell.

The so-called "Gorgeous George" has been around the Farage world for years, and questions about influence, access and the people surrounding political leaders matter rather more when those leaders begin talking seriously about Downing Street.

Again, this is not uniquely a Farage problem.

Every political leader accumulates advisers, donors, friends and fixers.

Blair had his circle.

Brown had his.

Cameron had his.

Johnson certainly had his.

Starmer had his.

The question is whether the people around a leader help him understand the country — or gradually insulate him from it.

And if Reform really does aspire to government, scrutiny of Farage's associates is not persecution.
It is the entrance examination.

FARAGE'S GREAT GAMBLE

Then came Clacton.

Faced with mounting pressure, Farage resigned his parliamentary seat and triggered a by-election.

That was an extraordinary gamble.

It was also quintessential Farage.

David Davis did something similar in 2008 when he resigned his seat to force a by-election over civil liberties and the proposed 42-day detention of terrorism suspects.

There was a difference.

Davis was making a point about an issue.

Farage was making a point about Farage.

He won.
Of course he did.

He received 22,239 votes.

But Count Binface came second with 9,455.

That deserves more thought than the inevitable jokes.

Nearly ten thousand voters in a parliamentary election decided that the appropriate response to British politics was a comedy candidate with a dustbin on his head.

Politicians may laugh.

They should perhaps worry.

A joke vote is still a vote.

And sometimes the joke is directed not at the candidate but at the system.

HAS REFORM REACHED THE DIFFICULT BIT?

Reform's great attraction has been its simplicity.
Britain is broken.
Immigration is too high.
Taxes are too high.
Government is too large.
Public services don't work.
The establishment has failed.
There is quite a lot in that diagnosis with which millions of people agree.
The difficulty begins with the prescription.
Cut taxes.

Spend more on defence.
Control immigration.
Improve the NHS.
Reduce waiting lists.
Police the streets.
Help pensioners.
Protect farmers.
Support business.

And, presumably, continue servicing a national debt measured in trillions.
That is where protest politics meets arithmetic.

Eventually somebody has to add up the numbers.

The same applies to welfare.

Successive governments have discovered that reducing welfare expenditure is enormously popular in theory and extraordinarily difficult in practice.
Every saving has a human being attached to it.
Every reform produces a television interview with someone adversely affected.

Governments then retreat.

The result is that expenditure ratchets upwards while politicians continue telling us that the system is unsustainable.
Both things cannot continue indefinitely.

STARMER: A HUGE MAJORITY WITHOUT A MISSION

Starmer's departure on 20 July was extraordinary precisely because of the scale of the majority he had won only two years earlier.

How does a Prime Minister move from electoral landslide to Downing Street departure so quickly?
Perhaps because the landslide disguised the weakness underneath.

Labour won a huge number of seats in 2024 without winning the enthusiastic support of anything approaching a majority of the electorate.

Starmer's great achievement was tactical.

He made Labour electable again.

But what was the strategic objective?

Blair had one.

Whatever one thinks of New Labour, Blair and Mandelson understood that Labour had to change the product before asking the customer to buy it.

Thatcher had one.

Attlee certainly had one.

Even Harold Wilson, the supreme political tactician, understood the direction in which he wanted to take the country.

Starmer too often seemed to offer competent management.

But competent management of what?

Towards where?

A government cannot spend five years saying, "We're not the previous lot."

Eventually it becomes the previous lot.

ENTER ANDY BURNHAM

Burnham appears to understand that.
His arrival in Downing Street was accompanied by the language of a "circuit breaker".
He cancelled Digital ID and redirected the money towards removing VAT from domestic electricity.

He talked about council housing.
Public ownership.
Devolution.
Youth unemployment.
Consumer protection.
Social care.
The cost of living.

Whatever one thinks of the individual policies, there is at least the outline of a strategic argument:

Government should once again make ordinary people's lives demonstrably better.

That sounds almost absurdly obvious.
Yet it is remarkable how far British politics has drifted from it.
Perhaps there is something of the farm campsite in that idea.

People do not necessarily want government to provide an elaborate political holiday camp, complete with initiatives, strategies, consultations, quangos, regulators, targets, mission statements and somebody in Whitehall measuring whether we have enjoyed ourselves.

Sometimes we just want the field to be level, the gate to work and the lavatory to be clean.
The political equivalent is not difficult to identify.

Empty the bins.
Fill the potholes.
Answer the telephone.
Police the streets.
Educate the children.
Treat the sick.
Defend the country.
Control the borders.

Then, if there is money and administrative capacity left, perhaps government can start designing the entertainment programme.

Burnham, however, faces exactly the same obstacle as Farage.

Arithmetic.

WHO PAYS?

Britain wants Scandinavian public services with American tax levels.

We want world-class defence, a world-class NHS, generous pensions, better social care, more police, better schools, cheaper energy, more housing and lower taxes.

We also want Net Zero.

And therein lies another question which Westminster seems remarkably reluctant to address honestly.
What is the strategic priority?

If defence really is the first duty of government — and I believe it is — then where does it rank against the enormous sums required to transform Britain's energy system?

Where does welfare rank?
Where does social care rank?
Where does debt interest rank?
Dwight Eisenhower famously warned about the military-industrial complex.

But government today consists of dozens of competing complexes, each absolutely convinced that its expenditure is indispensable.
The environmental complex.
The welfare complex.
The health complex.
The defence complex.
The administrative complex.
And they all send the bill to the same taxpayer.
At some point government has to choose.
That is what governing means.

IMMIGRATION: NUMBERS VERSUS BELIEF

The summer's immigration figures provided an interesting lesson.
Asylum applications were falling.
Small-boat arrivals were down.
The number of people housed in asylum hotels had fallen substantially.
The cost of the asylum system had fallen.
Yet immigration remained one of the most politically potent issues in Britain.

Why?

Because there is a difference between a statistic and an experience.
If the Home Office tells somebody that asylum-hotel use has fallen nationally while a hotel in his own town is being used for asylum seekers, which fact determines his political view?

The spreadsheet or the hotel?

That does not excuse racism, violence or intimidation.
But neither does shouting "racist" at everybody who questions immigration constitute a policy.
The public is capable of holding two thoughts simultaneously.
We can be compassionate towards genuine refugees.
And we can expect the Government to control who enters the country.
Those propositions are not contradictory.
Indeed, unless government restores confidence in the second, public support for the first will continue to erode.

VIEWED FROM A CAMPERVAN — AND A BIKE

Perhaps travelling 3,500 miles through France, Spain and Portugal gave me a slightly different perspective.
None of those countries is Utopia.

France has its political tensions and a State that can hardly be accused of excessive modesty.
Spain has its regional divisions, political arguments and economic problems.

Portugal has its own pressures.

Immigration is contentious across Europe. Governments everywhere struggle with ageing populations, housing, public spending, energy and the balance between what voters demand and what taxpayers can afford. On the return journey across the Pyrenees back into France we were stopped by French border police high in the mountains on a narrow twisting road looking for people smugglers! 
So this is not the familiar British habit of returning from abroad and declaring that Johnny Foreigner has discovered the secret of civilisation.

He hasn't.

But France, Spain and Portugal do make you look again at some of our assumptions.
You see communities which have retained a sense of place.

You see small businesses.

You see agriculture not as an abstract environmental issue but as somebody's livelihood.
You see towns that have grown organically rather than because somebody produced a 400-page regeneration strategy.

And from a bike you see things that disappear at 70 miles an hour.
You notice whether a place feels cared for.
You notice whether a village still has a centre.
You notice whether people use public spaces.
You notice the condition of roads, buildings and fields.
Most of all, you are reminded that ordinary life is mostly local.
Westminster thinks nationally because that is its job.
People live locally because that is their life.
Which brings me back to those farm campsites.
Some of the best places we stayed offered almost nothing.
And that was precisely their attraction.
They did the basics properly.

The sophisticated campervan holiday camps offered far more and sometimes somehow delivered less.
There is a philosophy of government hidden in there somewhere.
More provision does not automatically mean better provision.
More spending does not automatically mean better government.
More regulation does not automatically mean greater security.
More administrators do not automatically mean better administration.
More initiatives do not necessarily mean more achievement.

Sometimes the simplest question is the best one:

Did it work?

WHAT ABOUT THE CONSERVATIVES?

Perhaps the most extraordinary feature of my six weeks away was how little the Conservative Party appeared to matter.

Think about that.

The party which governed Britain for fourteen years watched a Labour Prime Minister fall, another Labour Prime Minister arrive, Reform encounter serious difficulties and Farage gamble his parliamentary career.
This should have been an enormous political opportunity.

Yet where was the Conservative strategic objective?
What is the modern Conservative Party for?
Lower taxes?
They increased them.
Smaller government?
Government grew.
Controlled immigration?
Immigration rose.
Fiscal responsibility?
National debt rose.
Home ownership?

Increasingly beyond younger people's reach.

One does not rebuild trust by rediscovering the vocabulary of conservatism.

One has to rediscover the substance.

The danger for the Conservatives is no longer simply that people dislike them.

It is that people cease to regard them as relevant.

Hatred can be politically useful.

Indifference is fatal.

THE RETURN OF GOVERNMENT

Burnham's early programme also raises a fascinating wider question.
Have we reached the end of the political settlement which began in 1979?
For decades the assumption was that private enterprise should do things and government should regulate them.

Now water, energy, rail, buses, housing and social care are increasingly being discussed as things in which government should play a much more direct role.

There is a danger of romanticising nationalisation.

I am old enough to remember when nationalised industries were not universally regarded as models of efficiency.

Try telling somebody who waited months for the GPO to install a telephone that public ownership automatically produces magnificent customer service.

But the reverse argument also deserves scrutiny.

Privatisation was supposed to introduce competition.

Where it did, it frequently worked.

But what happens when a private monopoly simply replaces a public monopoly?

The customer may reasonably wonder what exactly was achieved.

Perhaps the next political settlement should be neither Thatcherite nor socialist.

Perhaps it should borrow something from a French, Spanish or Portuguese farm campsite.

Provide what is necessary.

Provide it properly.

Don't charge people for unnecessary frills.

Don't employ an army of people to tell them how wonderful the facilities are.

And ask the customer whether it actually works.

That would be a surprisingly revolutionary manifesto.

THE VIEW ON RETURNING HOME

So after 3,500 miles through France, Spain and Portugal in the campervan and another 200 by bike, what did Britain look like?

Different.

But not necessarily changed.
Starmer had gone and as I write announces that he is leaving Parliament, despite saying that he would stay as an MP, causing what will be an unwanted and possibly difficult By-election for Labour where the Greens will fancy their chances.

Burnham had arrived.

Farage had survived.

Reform had discovered that scrutiny becomes rather less enjoyable when people think you might actually win.

The Conservatives remained in search of a reason for voters to listen.
Immigration was falling by some measures while remaining politically explosive.
Inflation remained troublesome.

Government borrowing continued to demonstrate its contempt for political promises.
And everybody still wanted government to spend more money on their particular priority while spending less money overall.

Perhaps the most important thing I brought back from those miles was not a political conclusion at all.
It was a reminder of scale — and simplicity.

On a bike, even an electric one, 200 miles is quite a long way.

In a campervan, 3,500 miles is a very long way.

Yet sometimes the most memorable place at the end of the day was not the expensive site with the longest list of facilities.

It was a field on a farm where somebody had understood exactly what was required and provided it.

No mission statement.
No strategic delivery unit.
No consultation exercise.
No minister cutting a ribbon.
It just worked.
Britain does not lack politicians capable of winning battles.
Starmer won an election.
Farage won Brexit.
Burnham won the Labour leadership and Downing Street.
The Conservatives won four successive general elections before spectacularly losing one.
But what is the war?
What Britain desperately needs is not another collection of clever announcements, focus-grouped slogans or tactical victories.
It needs somebody to answer some brutally simple questions.
What sort of country are we trying to create?
What must government provide?
What can we actually afford?
What must we stop doing?
How much tax are we prepared to pay?
How much debt are we prepared to leave?
How do we defend ourselves?
How do we control our borders while remaining a decent country?
How do we make work, enterprise and investment worthwhile?
And, above all, where are we trying to get to?

I spent six weeks travelling 3,500 miles through France, Spain and Portugal and cycling another 200.
I travelled on motorways and country lanes, through towns and villages, past farms and businesses, staying sometimes in sophisticated campervan sites and sometimes in little more than a field.

Britain spent those same six weeks travelling at extraordinary political speed.

Perhaps the lesson from the journey is simpler than all the political theories.

You don't always improve something by adding more to it. Sometimes you improve it by deciding what actually matters and doing that properly.

The best farm campsites seemed to understand that.

I knew where I was going.

I'm still not entirely convinced Westminster does.
 

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