Matthew Bowles

The British public struggles to distinguish between large numbers and large margins. On Wednesday, amid swirling debates about the government’s nudging of supermarkets to implement price caps, I made the apparently controversial observation on X that supermarkets tend to operate on very small margins, and so should not be vilified. Tesco, for instance, makes somewhere in the region of about 4 per cent. In most sectors, this would not exactly qualify as gangster capitalism.  The response was telling.  Those that disagreed did not really dispute the margins themselves. Instead, the objections were to the fact that I had mentioned them at all rather than the actual numbers.

In May’s local elections, most of the attention will fall on the larger contests: the devolved elections in Scotland and Wales and the major local authorities. Less noticed, however, will be the smallest units of local government, parish councils, whose elections rarely attract much scrutiny, and their decisions even less. They generally operate outside of urban areas, with about 40 per cent of the population of England living within their domains – a substantial minority of the country. Parish councils are funded by their own tax, a precept, which is collected alongside regular council tax by the larger council of the area. It is here, in these quieter corners of the system, that some of the more curious examples of public spending can be found.

Walk through central London with your phone out, and it might not be yours for much longer. Theft in the capital has surged in recent years. So has shoplifting, with almost 90,000 incidents recorded in London last year, up roughly 54 per cent from the previous period. Meanwhile, fare dodging on London’s transport network has soared. The joke is on law-abiding Londoners who bother to buy a ticket. Over 2,200 TfL employees earn more than £100,000 The sums of money lost to crime in London are far from trivial: the £190 million cost of fare dodging would pay the annual salaries of 3,000 frontline police officers. But it’s not just phone snatchers and those who refuse to buy a train ticket that are costing Londoners a packet: City Hall is doing so too.

London is often held up as the jewel in Britain’s crown. Yet beneath the city’s gleaming skyline lies a less celebrated reality: ‘temporary housing’ that is anything but. Across the capital, families in need are housed by local councils in hotels, hostels and B&Bs at extraordinary expense. What is meant to be a short-term emergency fix has calcified into a way of life for tens of thousands, sometimes for years. It is expensive, unsuitable and corrosive, to both family life and the public purse. Councils across England spent £2.29 billion on temporary housing last year, up nearly 30 per cent in only twelve months.

History doesn’t repeat itself. But it does echo. The United States of the 1970s and Britain of the mid-2020s share more in common than we might first admit: economic drift, institutional distrust, foreign policy muddles, and a political class that’s treading water. The question now is whether the UK, like America in 1980, is approaching a political inflexion point, one that could shape the next decade. In 1968, Richard Nixon won the presidency by forging a coalition of traditional Republicans and culturally conservative working-class voters, the so-called 'silent majority'. He spoke to those unsettled by the cultural turbulence of the 1960s, offering a firm alternative. His presidency ended in scandal, but the political realignment he triggered proved enduring.