Across the West, governments are failing. Trump, Starmer, Macron, Merz and others are losing authority at the very moment crises demand leadership. Far-right movements are fracturing. Neoliberalism has run out of ideas.

In this video, I explore why political legitimacy is evaporating and why a politics of care – grounded in real action, community investment and democratic renewal – is now the only viable way forward.

This is the audio version:

This is the transcript:

Wherever you look, governments are collapsing under their own incompetence.

Right now, governments   are failing everywhere.

There is a political crisis emerging right across the West, and the far-right response to this is already falling apart.

This is a moment that requires political imagination. My question is,  has anyone got that imagination that is required at this moment to deliver the policies of change that we really require?

Just look across the world. Let's set the scene.

Trump is facing crises, whether they're scandals of his own making or policy failures.   Everything he's doing looks like a reaction to the Epstein files, and the consequences are inevitable. This man will not make it to the next election as president; he can't. Not only is his mental capacity failing, his political capacity is collapsing, and unfortunately, we have JD Vance standing in the wings.

In the UK, the situation is little better.  Keir Starmer is losing authority by the day. Rachel Reeves' budget is the first in history to unravel before it's even been presented.   Labour MPs know that what Starmer is trying to do on immigration is going to be profoundly unpopular, not just with them but in their constituencies, and that they will pay the price for it.  Labour has tumbled to fourth in the opinion polls in Scotland. It is a party without a future, and nothing that they can do will change this at present.   We have a government that is meant to last for another three and a half years in the UK, which is already out of road.

In France, the situation is no better. The  current government is expected to last until a week next Tuesday, because that's about the average life expectancy of a government there at present.   Macron is on his fourth or fifth this year, and there's no reason why this one will last any longer. His presidency has become an ignominious failure and a disaster for the people of France.

Whilst in Germany,  Chancellor Friedrich Merz is already losing the confidence of the German people, his party, and the Bundestag.

Just look at those four leading nations, and everyone is facing difficulty.

Canada is in much the same place. Let's be totally honest. Our former governor of the Bank of England,  Mark Carney might be Prime Minister there now, and tries to exude an air of confidence   more successfully than the other leaders I've already mentioned, but the reality is, he's been dealt such a bad hand, he has no clue what to do with it.

We have leaders unable to deal with crises, war, financial meltdown, or climate failure. And throughout all this, there's a broader pattern:  the global collapse is of political authority; systems are losing legitimacy at the very moment of crisis.

And all of those crises I've just mentioned are coming together.

We do face the risk of war.

We know that climate meltdown is getting worse.

We do know that internal crises in many countries, largely as a consequence of racism deliberately fueled by politicians, is growing.

We know that there are financial problems, and we know that they could get worse.

At the same time,  we have incompetent leaders right across the Western world who are causing and worsening the situations that we face.   Failure at the top is infecting the whole system, and the right-wing is not providing any answer to this.

Trump's own base is fracturing. The resentment of the positions he's taking in authority, plus his association with Epstein,   is collapsing the MAGA in the USA. There is no unity there, and nor is there in the UK.  Recent research has shown that the people who say they'll vote for Reform come from many incompatible factions.

Some are indeed hard-right.

Some are profoundly racist, but many aren't; let's be clear about that.   Many are just disaffected people on moderate or low wages who want an alternative to the situation they're in, where they see the wealthy getting wealthier and they're getting weaker, and that's why they look to Farage for something different.

But the fact is, he can't provide that. Nor can he reconcile their positions with that of the young men who are looking for an alternative because they feel left outside society, and reconcile either of those with the position of the hardcore racists.

Reform has no foundations, and Le Pen in France is too well known to be credible now, whilst the AfD in Germany faces a fundamental problem.  It is the party of the East. Literally, the old East Germany provides it with most of its support, but the West is not going to accept government from the East.   That's not why reunification took place, in their opinion, and so that is not a viable basis for any alternative government either. And in fact,  let's look at the Netherlands, because the far-right has already been rejected there.   The far-right offering has peaked too soon, and the reality is, as a result, that what we are seeing is an entire political order collapsing.

Neoliberalism, which in some way or other fuels the thinking of all these politicians, has run out of ideas and legitimacy. Quite clearly, it doesn't work.   The pursuit of so-called profit on behalf of the wealthy is not an answer to any known question anymore, if it ever was. The technocracy is now trying to defend its failures, but they have no solutions left to offer. We are in a situation where neoliberalism has quite literally run out of road.

People are asking for something different.  They want governments that understand crises because they know we've got them and they know they're going to get worse unless we deal with them.

They want leaders willing to use state power responsibly because they know there is no other way out of the crises we face.

They want a politics that respects people, and they're being offered a politics of hate by far too many.

And they want hope-grounded, in practical action; action that they can actually see is going to happen in the communities where they live.   And so far, none of the politicians that I'm hearing in almost any of the countries that I've referred to are offering anything like that.

We need then a politics of care, that thing that I keep on talking about.

The far-right   is offering anger and not solutions.

The state is walking away from its obligation to resolve shared crises, and there is a recognition now that austerity was always a choice, and a ruinous one.

So what we now know is that we need collective solutions requiring collective action. We have a series of events converging. The government's authority in many countries is evaporating because its policies are no longer functioning, and the narratives that have been pursued in politics for too long have lost power, and a political vacuum is opening.

So what happens next is that we will see the familiar political order fragment.  The moment of collapse has arrived, and there won't be a renewal. There is no chance of neoliberalism getting through this crisis.   It's over, finished, dead, gone, it's nailed to its perch, if you can remember the old Monty Python joke. The point is quite simple. That era is over.

Now people are looking for coherence, and they're looking for purpose, and this is the moment when a new political story can emerge. It's that which I'm working on.  We need to have new narratives; the world survives on the stories it tells itself, and what we need are new leaders who can talk about the crises we face and face them with a new model that will let them say they have answers to the questions that we know need to be addressed.

The far-right can't do that, but the politics of care can.

We can provide workable alternatives.

We can use the power of the state to create money, to use that power to deliver what people need.

We can use that power to regenerate the communities where people live.

We can do that to revive faith in democracy.

We can, as a consequence, rebuild people's lives.

We can eliminate the politics of hate.

We can increase incomes, and we can do all of that while supporting care, investment, and accountability.

We can, in other words, do so much better.

This is the moment when a politics of imagination is required, and the opportunity to deliver it is emerging.

This is the moment for a politics of care.

Do you agree? There's a poll down below. Let us know.

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