Britain’s Infrastructure Is Crumbling. Can Labour Fix It?

Asked in a recent poll to summarise Britain in a word, ‘broken’ was the people’s top choice. This brokenness is concrete stuff: crumbling bridges, sewage-filled rivers, failing computer systems, cancelled rail projects. But it’s also bundled with the collective stories we tell about what it means to be a nation, and who belongs in it.

To find out why it feels like nothing works in Britain anymore, Moya Lothian-McLean talks to Dom Davies, a lecturer in English at City, University of London and the author of The Broken Promise of Infrastructure. He explains how democratic ‘public works’ were replaced by neoliberal ‘infrastructure’, why colonial railways linger in our collective imagination, and whether Labour can get Britain running again.

Photograph by Otis VR/Wikimedia Commons