Haywire: A Political History of Britain since 2000 by Andrew Hindmoor (published by Penguin Books)
“The country looks a lot like a person who has, whilst trying to cross the road, got hit by an on-rushing car, only to get up, dazed, and stumble backwards, to then be hit by a lorry.”
Andrew Hindmoor, Haywire
By the time Haywire begins, I had already spent the best part of a decade watching British politics swerve from crisis to crisis, each one more grotesque than the last. I became politically aware in the early 1990s—during the Major years, that damp post-Thatcher limbo of sleaze, recession and half-hearted technocracy. It was not a golden age. But it was the crucible in which many of us came to understand the brittleness of the post-Cold War consensus: that capitalism would roll forward under the banner of competence, and that social democracy, if it had any place at all, would be a well-behaved junior partner. It is that very consensus that Andrew Hindmoor’s Haywire charts in its slow, unravelling collapse.
The book covers the years from 2000 to 2023, but it opens, with deliberate irony, at the Millennium Dome, a structure so devoid of meaning it becomes, in Hindmoor’s telling, a near-perfect metaphor for New Labour itself: vacuous, overlit, privately sponsored, and puffed up with its own rhetoric about renewal. Hindmoor likens the Dome to Coldplay—professional, inoffensive, and dull—but that’s a little generous. For those of us whose political formation came in the aftermath of Thatcher, the Dome felt like something worse: a glossy cenotaph for a Labour Party that had abandoned struggle, class politics, and any notion of structural transformation.
“If the Dome was Coldplay—shiny, inoffensive, faintly embarrassing—then New Labour was the political equivalent of Britpop after 1997: derivative, self-congratulatory, and already out of date.”
Haywire is structured in seven parts—Millennium, Boom, War, Crash, Union, Splintering, and Quartered, each corresponding to a phase in the cascading crises that have defined twenty-first-century Britain. Hindmoor’s argument is simple but compelling: the crises are not isolated events, but link together in a sequence of cause and consequence. The financial crash enables austerity; austerity fuels Brexit; Brexit weakens the Union; Covid exposes the rot. The structure isn’t perfect, there’s some chronological slippage, but the cumulative effect is one of deepening dysfunction.
What emerges, especially for those of us who witnessed the 1990s from the Left, is a grim vindication. We were told that politics had been professionalised, that ideology was dead, and that Blair’s ‘radical centre’ would inoculate Britain from extremism. Instead, as Hindmoor documents, the very institutional features that were supposed to guarantee stability, centralised party rule, the whipping system, the media class, the cult of managerialism, have helped produce a country where trust is exhausted, government is performative, and power is hoarded by a caste too hollowed-out to wield it.
Hindmoor is not, by temperament, a polemicist. His style is even-handed, almost too much so at times, and his reluctance to moralise can feel like a dodge. But his critique of “centralised partyocracy” is quietly devastating: a political system designed to concentrate power in Whitehall while excluding serious debate from both the public and the opposition. Ministers come and go, Blair, Brown, Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak, but the pattern remains: rash decisions made in haste, policy driven by factional calculation, accountability reduced to comms strategy.
“The great claim made on behalf of the British political system was that it generated strong and stable government. Even that now feels a tad too buoyant.”
There are moments in the book that might seem modest in their framing but hit like gut punches if you were there. The casual mention of Labour’s decision to keep to Tory spending limits in 1997. The abandonment of the “stakeholder economy” the moment the tabloids sniffed socialism. The deference to the City, long before the crash. Hindmoor doesn’t overstate the point, but the implication is clear: Blairism didn’t simply fail to stop the rot, it helped institutionalise it. Those of us who watched Clause IV be ceremonially buried in 1995 already knew the direction of travel. What Haywire does is show how far the journey has gone.
To Hindmoor’s credit, Haywire doesn’t indulge in sentimentalism about the past. There’s no longing for a better Britain, only a clear-eyed recognition that the long crisis is systemic, not accidental. The problem isn’t that we’ve had a bad run of leaders, but that the architecture of the British state, centralised, opaque, exclusionary, is designed to frustrate reform and reward spectacle. It’s a system that can tolerate corruption, cruelty, and incompetence, so long as it’s cloaked in the language of pragmatism.
The final chapters, dealing with Brexit, Covid, and the rise and fall of Truss, are bleak but almost anticlimactic. By the time we reach the pandemic, the reader is numb to dysfunction. If the Iraq War was the point at which many on the Left definitively broke with New Labour, and the crash the moment its economic narrative collapsed, Covid simply exposed what had long been known: that the British state is no longer capable of managing crisis without amplifying it.
“By the time we reach Covid, the reader is numb to dysfunction. The British state is not weathering crisis—it is producing it.”
Still, Haywire is not a hopeless book. Its power lies not in any proposed solution, Hindmoor ends with a nod to mild constitutional reform, the least convincing part of the book, but in its insistence on historical continuity. The crises of the 2020s are rooted in decisions made long before. Those of us who remember Major’s resignation crisis, Black Wednesday, or even the long twilight of Thatcherism will recognise the contours. The decay didn’t begin with Brexit. It began when Labour, faced with a Thatcherite settlement, chose to accept and administer it rather than resist it.
“For those of us who watched Clause IV be ceremonially buried in 1995, the direction of travel was already clear.”
For me, as someone who watched the fall of the miners, the co-option of the Labour Party, and the post-Cold War delusions of the early 1990s, Haywire reads less like a history than a vindication. We were right to be angry. We were right to doubt the hype. And if there’s one lesson to be drawn from this deeply readable, quietly damning book, it’s that no meaningful change can come from the centre. It never could.
“A focus group of disillusioned Lib Dem–turned–UKIP voters was asked to name one thing they liked about modern Britain. A man raised his hand and said: ‘Yes, I know. The past.’”
Andrew Hindmoor, Haywire
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