Andy Beckett: Britain’s public wants change but Westminster keeps calling it too risky

Andy Beckett’s essay starts with a blunt diagnosis: Britain’s most reliable political weapon is not a policy programme but the word “risk”. In his account in the Guardian, reforms across the spectrum are routinely killed off once opponents succeed in making them sound reckless, impractical, too vague, or simply “too expensive”. The result is a country that can list its problems—cost of living, public services, housing, productivity, inequality, the electoral system, climate—while treating any serious attempt to address them as a kind of extremism.

Beckett argues that this reflex is not evenly applied. He points to the way talk of war with Russia is increasingly used to dominate debates about defence spending, and to a related claim circulating in British politics: that higher defence budgets should be paid for by cutting benefits. In that framing, the immediate, measurable harm to the poor and jobless is treated as tolerable, while the speculative harm of being unprepared for conflict is treated as overriding. Beckett describes an arms industry and a military-media ecosystem that can demand money with a confidence unavailable to constituencies that do not buy advertising, fund thinktanks, or supply prestigious post-politics jobs.

The broader pattern he sketches is a political economy in which the status quo is presented as the only “responsible” option even when it is visibly failing. Beckett notes that over the past decade a series of would-be “rescue” projects—Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell’s plans for a more equal economy, Theresa May’s 2017 attempt to reform social care funding, Boris Johnson’s “levelling up”, Liz Truss’s tax-cut growth pledge, Ed Miliband’s clean-energy jobs pitch—were each met by a similar wall of hostility from much of the media, big business and Westminster. Some proposals were more coherent than others, he concedes; what stands out is how quickly the political class and its amplifiers converged on the message that change was unaffordable.

That convergence has downstream effects. Beckett writes that the last five prime ministers, starting with May, became derided and often hated figures, and that many voters now swing between demanding action and turning on whoever tries to deliver it. He cites the Institute for Fiscal Studies’ 2024 finding that UK living standards have languished, particularly compared with other wealthy countries—an underlying reality that makes patience with incrementalism harder to sustain. In his telling, anger curdles into nihilism: voters reject proposals, demand different governments, then withdraw consent again within months.

Beckett ends by naming Andy Burnham as the next likely figure to run into this dynamic: the public appetite for change colliding with a system trained to label change as danger.

In British politics, “too risky” has become a veto that costs nothing to issue. The bills arrive anyway, spread across poorer households and another year of stagnating living standards.