Three quarters of Britons agree the country is “broken”, a key Reform UK talking point, including the voters of every major political party, age group, and region.
“Britain today is broken” is a statement that enjoys widespread support in the country, pollster JL Partners found in research for the i paper. The revelation of apparently strongly held public sentiment comes as politicians and media figures butt heads on whether things are actually going well in the UK or not, with clashing views on crime, migration, integration aired daily.
A resounding 74 per cent of Britons, the polling states, when told they “must choose” an answer agree with the statement. When broken down by what political party the respondents backed at the last national elections in 2024, backers of outsider parties were more inclined to agree with the notion, but crushingly for the government even those who support establishment parties think Britain is broken.
Of those who voted Labour in the 2024 election, 59 per cent said they think the country is broken. Even those steadfast defenders of the status quo the Liberal Democrats and the Conservative Party saw its voters agree, with 66 and 76 per cent saying broken Britain respectively.
Perhaps inevitably, the UK voters most likely to diagnose serious problems in the country are those that back the parties that promote the most radical change. A massive 91 per cent of those who voted for Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party think Britain is broken. On the other end of the scale the big-state radical leftists in the Green party also agree with the statement — although presumably for very different reasons — at 87 per cent.
As noted by the report, even the most optimistic age group, young people, still majority-backed the Britain is broken line, at 56 per cent.
The survey underlines the ‘Britain is Broken, Reform Will Fix It’ slogan of Nigel Farage’s political faction and follows another such survey from April which then found that 68 per cent of Britons agreed with the statement “Britain is broken”. That poll looked at issues as well as the headline statement and found immigration was the policy area respondents said most needed radical change.
The results call seriously into question the strategy pursued by Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer at his Labour party conference last week where he attacked those who feared the country to be broken as dangerous extremists who, rather than recognising problems, actually wanted further damage to occur for cynical political reasons.
Starmer said of those who acknowledge that Britain has problems that need addressing:
…decline is good for their business. I mean, think about it. When was the last time that you heard Nigel Farage say anything positive about Britain’s future? He can’t. He doesn’t like Britain, doesn’t believe in Britain, wants you to doubt it just as much as he does. So he resorts to grievance.
They all do. They want to turn this country, this proud, self-reliant country, into a competition of victims. Saying to you, to working people, don’t trust in each other, we can’t fix this, this is not a great country
The JL Partners research also comes hot on the heels of a UK news cycle surrounding defacto Conservative Party leader Robert Jenrick, who came under attack from segments of the legacy media for decrying the failure of a Birmingham neighbourhood he’d visited where he reported not having seen a single “white face”. This showed poor integration and communities living “parallel lives”, he said.
Notably, this Birmingham neighbourhood Jenrick cited lies within the English West Midlands region, which today’s polling identified as having the highest proportion of voters who think Britain is broken, at 87 per cent.
Read the full article here