Times columnist Matthew Syed last week bemoaned what he described as the ‘hysteria’ surrounding calls to replace UK prime minister Keir Starmer. According to Syed, Britain has entered an era of permanent leadership speculation in which no prime minister, whether Labour, Conservative or Reform, will ever be secure for long. He concluded with the dire warning that ‘Britain is becoming ungovernable’.

Syed is far from alone in this diagnosis. A growing number of centrist commentators now argue that Britain has entered an age of chronic political instability in which governments can no longer sustain authority or maintain public trust. They have portrayed Britain – and Western democracies more broadly – as increasingly fragmented, volatile and difficult to govern.

Starmer’s trajectory in government has hardly helped this mood of elite despair. He entered Downing Street with a huge majority and the promise that, after years of Tory psychodrama, the ‘adults’ were back in charge. Barely two years later, his popularity has collapsed, and the knives are out in the Labour Party. As of this week, more than 90 of 402 Labour MPs have called on Starmer to resign. A leadership contest appears to be imminent.

Among centrist commentators and their social-media fellow travellers alike, one increasingly hears nostalgia for the supposedly steadier age in which Britain expected two or three prime ministers a decade, not six (and counting). To the centrists, this proves Britain has become impossible to govern – a nation of capricious ingrates forever turning on whoever occupies No10.

But perhaps voters are not so irrational. Perhaps they simply do not wish to be governed in the way that Starmer and his Tory predecessors have been governing. Yet when the public complains about policy and implementation, centrists conclude not that the government has failed, but that the public itself is the problem.

Governing with a reasonable level of public consent need not be this tricky. Governments do not operate in total darkness. Polls, elections and public reactions provide fairly clear signals about what voters want.

A government genuinely interested in democratic legitimacy might try listening. Yet modern governments increasingly campaign on what they think the public wants to hear, only to govern as though the electorate had voted for something else entirely. They then react with bafflement when support collapses.

Immigration is the clearest example. For years, voters have consistently said they want lower levels of immigration. For years, politicians have promised to deliver exactly that. David Cameron promised to bring net migration down. Theresa May promised it, too. Boris Johnson rode to power presenting himself as the man to deliver Brexit and who finally understood the electorate’s desire for border control.

Yet, once in office, all three presided over soaring numbers of legal and illegal immigration. Johnson was the most spectacular case. Having styled himself as the tribune of popular frustration with mass immigration, he went on to oversee an influx of foreigners so unprecedented they now bear his name – the ‘Boriswave’.

Starmer’s own pledge to ‘smash the gangs’ has followed the same pattern. There have been headline-grabbing raids, press conferences and operational announcements, yet the broader picture remains one of record crossings and continued public frustration. All of this has unfolded amid a steady stream of reports about serious sexual crimes committed by illegal migrants, deepening the sense that the government is failing to protect the public.

On this issue and many others, voters are not issuing incomprehensible demands. They want lower immigration, affordable energy, safer streets, functioning services and economic stability. These are hardly exotic requests. Yet successive governments have dismissed demands for them as mere ‘populism’.

The very people complaining that Britain has become ‘ungovernable’ are the same people who have spent decades refusing to govern in accordance with the public’s clearly expressed wishes. Presenting themselves as sober managerial technocrats, they increasingly come across as a caste of haughty administrators unwilling to alter course, no matter how loudly voters object.

Any serious disagreement is treated as evidence that the public has been misled, radicalised or insufficiently educated. Politics ceases to be representative and becomes a series of attempts to impose the correct attitudes on hoi polloi.

The complaint that Britain has become ‘ungovernable’ recalls Bertolt Brecht’s famous satirical line that, rather than changing the government, it might be easier to dissolve the people and elect another. Democracy requires our leaders to adapt themselves to public priorities, not the other way around.

Centrists work from the opposite assumption. The policy framework is treated as settled and largely beyond democratic challenge, while the public is expected to regulate itself accordingly. When voters refuse to comply, their demands are treated not as legitimate democratic claims, but as evidence that democracy itself is malfunctioning.

Britain is not ungovernable. Britons are perfectly willing to support governments they believe are acting in their interests and responding to their concerns. ‘Ungovernable’ is shorthand for the death of the old centrist assumption that politicians can indefinitely ignore public priorities.

When voters reject this arrangement, centrist commentators diagnose a crisis of democracy. In fact, democracy is the one thing the public is still trying to assert.

James Martin Charlton is an English playwright and director. Follow him on X @jmc_fire.

We warned them. Zia Yusuf warned them. Anyone with a functioning understanding of how corporate compliance works in the face of punitive state regulation warned them. And now here we are.

TikTok has removed a video posted by Reform UK’s home-affairs spokesman, Zia Yusuf, in which he set out the party’s new immigration policy. It is an entirely legal, mainstream argument about the consequences of mass migration and the failure of successive governments to control it. The platform’s justification for blocking the video was ‘hate speech’ and ‘hateful behaviour’. The removal was triggered by a report made under the Online Safety Act.

Let that settle for a moment. A senior British politician, who is effectively shadow home secretary of the unofficial opposition, has had his political speech – policy announcement, not abuse or incitement – deleted from a major platform under legislation this government told us was about protecting children from pornography. Yusuf was also warned that further violations could result in his removal from TikTok altogether.

To be clear, this was not TikTok acting on its own instincts. Failing to comply with the Online Safety Act’s requirements can incur fines of up to £18million or 10 per cent of a firm’s global annual turnover, whichever is greater. When the penalty for inaction is that large, corporations do not sit and deliberate the merits of each complaint. They reach for delete. They err, always, on the side of caution – which is to say, on the side of whoever filed the report. GB News presenter Tom Harwood put it simply and correctly: regulation of this kind has a deadening effect on liberties, not because it commands censorship directly, but because it creates an incentive for corporations to censor first and think later. Companies do not need to knock on the door when it has already made the cost of opening it prohibitive.

Yusuf had predicted precisely this. Speaking last year, he pointed to section 179 of the Online Safety Act, which makes it illegal to say something false that causes ‘non-trivial psychological harm’, and warned that this would force social-media companies to ‘proactively censor’ speech. ‘It’s going to create an incentive structure for social-media companies to over-censor’, he said, ‘because that’s the rational thing to do’. He was right. He is now the living proof.

There is a rich and nauseating irony here that should be stated plainly. Yusuf noted that TikTok, which has just removed his immigration-policy video on the grounds that it is hate speech, happily hosts videos calling for the assassination of Nigel Farage. Fayaz Khan, an illegal immigrant from Afghanistan who threatened Farage’s life, stood before a camera in October 2024 and announced his murderous intentions on TikTok. While that video remained up (although Khan was jailed for five years in October for the threat), a video on Reform’s migration policy was taken down. You could not construct a clearer demonstration of where the algorithm’s political sympathies lie – or rather, where its risk calculations land.

Then there is the parallel case of Katie Lam. Last year, shortly after the Online Safety Act came into force, the Tory MP gave a speech in the House of Commons criticising Labour’s response to the grooming-gang crisis. While not removed altogether, the speech was age-restricted on X under the same legislation. Words spoken under the protection of parliamentary privilege, in the mother of all parliaments, were deemed unsuitable for general viewing. We have arrived somewhere genuinely dystopian.

Yusuf told me: ‘This is exactly what we said would happen as the law targets social-media companies in a punitive fashion.’ He is right. And the political class that passed this legislation in 2023 – with cross-party support, let it be remembered, the Conservatives as guilty as Labour – knew or should have known what its results would be. Section 44 allows the culture secretary to unilaterally force Ofcom to change the rules about what social-media companies must censor without an act of parliament, without a vote. A single minister, in private, can redraw the boundaries of acceptable political speech. That is not about ‘safety’ online. That is power without accountability, dressed in the language of child protection.

This is the precautionary principle in its most corrosive form, our worst European inheritance, transplanted into British law and handed to Whitehall to enforce. In medicine, in environmental regulation, in financial compliance, we have watched this principle devour common sense for 30 years. When in doubt, prohibit. When the cost of action is lower than the cost of inaction, act. The corporations have done their maths. They will keep doing it.

The Online Safety Act must be repealed. Not reformed, not adjusted at the margins, not reviewed after a suitable period. Repealed. What was sold as a shield for children has become a sword in the hands of whoever holds office. That was always the risk. It has now become the reality.

We said so. Now you have seen it.

Gawain Towler is a commentator and an elected board member of Reform UK.