I don’t trust the British state

Do you trust the British state? How about the NHS? Politicians? The press? The police? An increasing proportion of Britons don’t, and I, despite being a middle class university graduate who works in Westminster, am one of them. 

In the past few days stories that reflect a deep wrongness in British society have flooded my social media feed. Chief amongst them has been the scandal of Henry Nowak’s murder in Southampton. Nowak was walking home when he spotted 23 year old Vickrum Digwa wearing a blade. He asked, lightheartedly, Digwa was a “bad man”. Digwa said he was, and proceeded to stab Nowak to death. 

Bad men do bad things. But what happened next was a horror story of what 21st century Britain has become. Vickrum’s family arrived on the scene. They did not call an ambulance, or try to save Henry’s life. Instead, Vickrum’s brother called the police to tell them that a racist attack had taken place — perpetrated against Vickrum. His mother then disposed of Vickrum’s knife, concealing it at the family home. The family stood watching as Henry bled to death on the ground in front of them.

The police arrived. They find the family standing around a prone, half conscious Henry Nowak. Vickrum, pointing to his clearly uninjured face, claims his turban has been knocked off and his eye is bruised. Officers ask if he is hurt. They drag Henry out into the open ground. He tells them “I’ve been stabbed, I can’t breathe, call an ambulance”. He is told “I don’t think you have, mate”, and is handcuffed. Shortly thereafter, he dies. 

An entire society was there in miniature. A killer, the killer’s family (his “community” if you will) and the police, representatives of the state. Everyone involved was indifferent to Henry, and in that moment, chose to help the killer rather than the victim. The ethnic and family loyalties of the family, and the anti-racist training of the cops, inverted justice and reality. We are all left to wonder how — how in a million years — a cop could arrive to find a killer standing over his victim, and proceed to handcuff a dying man. Even if, as has been reported, Nowak was beyond saving, he was denied dignity in his last moments. In those final minutes on earth he might have had the simple satisfaction of seeing his attacker arrested — instead, he spent them being disbelieved and betrayed by the people whose job it was to protect him.

He wasn’t the only one. News also recently broke of the circumstances of Libby Instone’s death. A 20 year barrister, she arrived in hospital vomiting and in extreme pain. She was sent home twice, only to vomit “black liquid” in the hospital carpark. The family then waited 9 hours outside the emergency room for her to be seen. When she was finally admitted to a ward, nurses were too busy watching the Women’s World Cup to take care of her. She was sent home yet again. Shortly thereafter, she collapsed and died. A simple scan would have revealed her blocked intestine, and surgery would likely have saved her life. After her death, a member of staff at the hospital told her parents that they had thought Libby was a “time-waster”.

There is a consistent pattern: public servants in once trusted roles showing cruelty and indifference to the needs of the people they’re supposed to serve

Nor was this a unique item of news. As the tragic case of Libby Instone was being heard by an inquest, a story was breaking about Nottingham’s maternity unit, where nurses had written FOH — “fuck off home” — on the charts of pregnant women. One nurse was told in relation to a mother worried she was going into labour, “don’t be too kind, she’ll keep coming back”. A pregnant woman in labour was told she didn’t need to come into hospital, and when she finally did “her baby was dead. The mother’s perineum and vaginal wall collapsed because she’d been left to labour for so long. She now has a stoma bag.”

There is a consistent pattern: public servants in once trusted roles showing cruelty and indifference to the needs of the people they’re supposed to serve. And there is a persistent villain. As I have written about before, both nursing and policing are formerly highly respected vocations ruined by managerialism and a loss of purpose and ethos. Central imperatives — make the sick well, investigating and preventing crime — are increasingly diluted by HR, progressive ideology, and endless centrally mandated initiatives. The old guild-like hierarchies of seniority, in which accumulated first-hand experience and guiding principles are passed down the generations, have given way to professional managers who come out of university and spend little time on the ward or on the beat. It is a pattern replicated across the public sector, and the result is a class of people who see themselves as servants of procedure first, and the public a distant second. 

This essential relationship of service, trust and gratitude between state and citizen, public servant and private individual, has been subject to rapid degradation. Polling reflects this shattering of trust. Satisfaction with the NHS, from an historic high of 70 per cent in 2010, had fallen to 21 per cent by 2024. In the same year, the British Social Attitudes survey revealed that only 14 per cent of people trusted the government to put the national interest first, the lowest level recorded since the survey began in 1986. 

I don’t trust the NHS, I don’t trust the police and I don’t trust the government. I’m not alone. Friends recount endless horror stories of neglect, life-changing mistakes, and delays in British hospitals. My family now regularly go private to receive basic care and check ups. I’ve never once bothered to call the police to report a crime or anti-social behaviour, still less been foolish enough to confront the perpetrators. Not when teenagers were taking drugs and blaring music in the middle of the night beneath my window, not when I saw a mentally ill man wandering into the middle of the road and screaming at passing cars, not when another mentally ill man shoved me in a tube station. What would the point be? As Henry Nowak found out, a stray comment can see you murdered. Drugs and yobbish behaviour are effectively legal in London. Weed is smoked openly everywhere. I could smell it queuing up outside of Parliament the other day. If the armed policemen swaggering around Westminster aren’t bothered by law-breaking in front of their faces, why should anyone else care? 

One thing that was striking about these recent police and nursing scandals is that they involved not the most deprived; those least able to advocate for themselves; but members of the middle classes. Henry Nowak and Libby Instone were young, presentable and well-educated. Henry was an accountancy and finance student, Libby a barrister. Whilst the victims, horrifically, of professional neglect are all too often people easily dismissed because of their class, their accent or because they don’t understand the system, that wasn’t the case here. People of my background are no longer comfortably insulated from the failure of British institutions, or from abuse and neglect by the state. If Libby and Henry could die surrounded by official indifference, so too could my friends, family and colleagues, no matter how switched on or well-prepared.

If people like me — with the advantages of education, economic security, family support and working in the nation’s capital — no longer trust basic shared institutions, I can only imagine how helpless and angry people who lack the means to seek private healthcare, who have to live next door to habitual criminals, who can’t avoid danger, must feel. 

It’s a rough sort of solidarity, as we get to experience society as the least well off long have — untrusting of the state and its emissaries, and not always without reason. It’s a dangerous situation, and things could develop quickly. Middle class people will increasingly seek ways to opt out of failing schools, hospitals and dangerous neighborhoods. Some will simply leave the country. But for those who don’t have a choice, rage and frustration will build. Already, this week saw rioting on the streets of Southampton. Protesters hurled bins and screamed abuse at the police, and multiple officers were injured. Nigel Farage spoke of his “cold rage”. I can’t disagree. Watching the body-cam footage of Novak’s arrest, seeing his limp, injured body manhandled by the police, I’m overwhelmed by helpless anger. 

The structures of British society feel terribly thin. In Westminster, I have the same conversation, over and over again. The topics change: health, welfare spending, immigration, housing, the economy. But it always comes down to the same thing: things can’t go on like this, it isn’t sustainable, I have no idea what will happen next. One finds oneself caught between hoping things hold together, and hoping they fall apart. 

It’s worth remembering at such times that society is more than the sum of its scandals or its institutions. Most people want to do the right thing, and some do so to an heroic extent. There are policemen like Seff Serroukh, who whilst off-duty saw a woman and child who had been stabbed fleeing their family home. He spotted they were in trouble and acted swiftly and with unbelievable courage. Unarmed and out of uniform, Serroukh rushed inside to confront the knifeman, tackling him to the ground and detaining him till other police officers could arrive. 

And in what was nearly another terrible case of NHS failure, one Julie Silverman had spent years complaining of coughs and shortness of breaths, only to be dismissed by doctors. It took a determined nurse, Alison, to force doctors to look at her airway and discover a rare condition: her trachea was 75 per cent obstructed by scar tissue, and Julie could easily have died if it hadn’t been spotted in time. 

Good people are out there trying to make a difference. Lives are saved, often without fanfare, thanks to the efforts of quick thinking, conscientious public servants. Virtue and vocation still exist in our public institutions, but all too often they exist in spite of, rather than thanks to, governing structures and procedures. 

At the heart of the crisis of trust is a democratic and political failure

Nowhere is trust and purpose more attenuated than in politics and the media, which are just about the least trusted groups in the country, with the publicly rightly intuiting that the failures of public service begin at the top, in the world of Westminster, Whitehall and Fleet Street. The shameful response of the British establishment to Nowak case has seen disingenuous denials of two-tier policing, even as police chiefs have been forced to order a review into flaws in the “Police Anti-Racism Commitment”. Public anger and demands for change have been demonised, with the same people who tweeted their rage about George Floyd in 2020, now condemning those outraged by the death of Henry Nowak.

At the heart of the crisis of trust is a democratic and political failure. Two basic expectations of our system — that the law treat people equally, and that politicians enact the consistently expressed will of the people — have been breached in the age of state-sanctioned mass migration, two-tier policing and “positive” discrimination. This attitude of meritocratic progressive paternalism and condescension towards ordinary people, begun under Blair, has morphed into an anti-democratic, disempowering ideology that now pervades the public sector. 

Unless and until this dangerous, anti-democratic mindset is banished from the halls of power and the hearts of the political class, there is no end in sight to the anger and division they bemoan. Something, somewhere, has to give.