Britain’s Interregnum: From the Blairite Revolution to the National Populist Age
What we learned in 2025, where we are heading in 2026
Matt Goodwin’s newsletter goes to 91,200 subscribers from 183 countries. Paid subscribers access all posts, the archive, events, comments, and help us grow. You can also join us on YouTube, Insta, TikTok, X and Facebook
What did we learn about British politics in 2025? And what awaits us in 2026?
If the past year taught us anything, it is that Britain is in an interregnum — a period in which the old political regime in Westminster is losing legitimacy and collapsing, while a new regime is beginning to emerge.
Antonio Gramsci described an interregnum as a moment in which “the old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born”, a time when “a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”.
That description now fits Britain with unsettling precision.
In 2025, it became obvious to everybody that the country is now governed by a regime that no longer commands consent, trust, or moral authority. The people can no longer ignore the symptoms of decay. And a new mood is unmistakably rising.
Future historians will see this period as the dividing line between two distinct phases of modern British history. On one side lies the Blairite revolution — a thirty-year settlement defined by elite commitment to social, economic, and cultural liberalism.
On the other lies what I call the National Populist Age, which is emerging today.
This new era will be defined by a reassertion of popular sovereignty over elite rule, national preference over universalism, cultural conservatism over social liberalism, and democratic control over technocratic authority.
The Blairite revolution began in 1997 but did not end with New Labour’s defeat in 2010. Between 2010 and 2024 it was absorbed, normalised, and consolidated by a series of Tory governments that rendered meaningful political competition obsolete.
For nearly three decades, Labour and the One-Nation Tories formed a single governing consensus — a Uniparty — committed to mass immigration, hyper-globalisation, porous borders, technocratic governance, and the insulation of major policy areas from democratic pressure.
But today, as we approach the end of 2025 and the start of 2026, it is now clear to everybody that the contradictions of that settlement are unravelling at speed.
The collapse of support for Keir Starmer’s government — now polling as low as 14% in some polls— is not merely a rejection of one leader, one party, one government.
It is a rejection of the entire political order that has governed Britain for a generation.
Nor has Labour’s collapse been matched by a Conservative recovery. Both architects of the failed regime of the last thirty years are failing simultaneously.
The 2024 general election produced the lowest combined vote share for Labour and the Conservatives since the modern two-party system emerged in 1918. The 2025 local elections went further still: for the first time in modern politics, neither party topped the projected vote share.
Between 2010 and today, the combined vote for the Uniparty has been slashed from over 65 per cent to barely a third. This represents not a cyclical swing but a public repudiation of the two parties that designed and presided over the previous regime — a settlement that served an elite minority while neglecting the surrounding majority.
The rise of Reform is not the cause of this breakdown, but its clearest symptom. There are others —mass public protests, the raising of the flags, a more febrile and combative political culture. What they all signal is not an ephemeral protest but the early contours of the National Populist Age.
The Assumptions of the Blairite Regime
The Blairite revolution rested on a set of core assumptions that still dominate elite thinking today, even if they alienate a large majority of voters.
Mass immigration was treated as permanent and desirable. Borders were downgraded. Hyper-globalisation was embraced. Power was concentrated in technocratic elites rather than citizens. Supranational governance, enforced through treaties and lawfare, was prioritised over national democracy. Popular sovereignty was subordinated to managerial rule. Progressive universalism was elevated above national loyalty. Democratic decision-making was insulated from the people.
For a time, the settlement appeared to work. Rising asset prices masked collapsing productivity. Financial deregulation fuelled London while left-behind Britain declined. Cheap credit concealed stagnant wages. Mass immigration boosted consumption while obscuring structural weakness. Identity politics distracted attention from falling trust, rising anger, and social fragmentation.
By 2024, however, public consent for the status-quo had collapsed. Labour won a landslide in seats but on the lowest vote share for any governing party since records began in 1830. Starmer’s regime was backed by barely one in five eligible voters.
Labour doubled its seats with just a 1.6 per cent increase in vote share. There was no public enthusiasm for a continuation of the Uniparty — merely the absence of a viable alternative. This explains why the Starmer regime collapsed so suddenly.
Economic Failure: Managed Decline
By 2025, the consequences of that settlement and its downstream effects became impossible to ignore. Growth slowed to a crawl, leaving Britain among the weakest performers in the developed world. GDP per capita continued to fall, confirming what millions already felt: Britain is getting poorer, living standards are declining.
Unemployment rose above 4.5 per cent, hitting young people especially hard. Economic inactivity and welfarism became firmly entrenched, with over nine million working-age adults outside the labour force and more than a million young people not in education, employment, or training. Roughly one million people have been moved onto welfare since the 2024 election alone.
Productivity — the engine of prosperity — remained below its pre-2008 level. After two decades, Britain produces no more per hour worked than it did before the global financial crisis. The productivity gap with America and much of Europe has widened further, locking British workers into low wages and declining living standards for years, if not decades, to come.
Public finances deteriorated sharply. National debt moved beyond 100 per cent of GDP. Debt interest alone now exceeds £100 billion a year — more than the budgets of major government departments — forcing the people to service the regime’s past policy failures, from disastrous lockdowns to disastrous foreign wars.
And while the state aggressively expanded itself, it became less efficient. In 2025, it became undeniable that Britain is governed by a larger, more expensive, and more intrusive state than at any point in peacetime history and yet, at the same time, this state is demonstrably less capable of performing its most basic functions.
The state employs more people than ever before, roughly one million more than during the Blair years, yet delivers less. Total public spending as a share of GDP has surged to 47%, the highest sustained level in peacetime, and yet the state remains woefully incompetent, unable to give its own people a functioning health service, affordable housing, safe streets, and controlled borders.
Taxes have also surged to their highest sustained level in modern history, rising above 37 per cent of GDP. This was achieved not through consent but stealth —frozen thresholds, fiscal drag, and rising national insurance on employers, all of which will now further stifle growth, productivity, and prosperity.
Britain, in short, has been transformed into a high-tax, low-performance economy. Scandinavian tax rates with dismal public services. For the first time in decades, this year net emigration of the British people became a visible feature of our national life.
At the same time, Net Zero and mass immigration have battered working people, putting the needs and wants of a narcissistic elite class ahead of those of the nation.
Net Zero policies drove industrial energy prices to among the highest in the Western world, accelerating de-industrialisation outside London. Mass low-skill, low-wage immigration —turbo-charged by the post-2021 Boriswave—has continued to hollow out the economy while eroding social and cultural cohesion.
Over the last year, in short, the verdict became clear. Gripped by the failing policies of the previous regime, Britain has now fully drifted into a big-state, big-tax, big-debt, big immigration economy without growth, resilience, or national unity.
Living standards are falling. Public services are deteriorating. The promise that each generation would be better off than the last has collapsed. This is not a cyclical downturn. It is a deep-rooted structural failure within the system. These are the economic foundations of the interregnum.
Social, Demographic, and Cultural Breakdown
Socially, the dying regime also shattered …
The rest of this essay is exclusive content for our paid supporters who make our work possible. Upgrade to remove all paywalls and join us for an enormous year ahead.
