Labour’s paralysis is driving business away from Britain and paving a path to power for Nigel Farage and Reform, says Alexander Temerko

The government of Keir Starmer has internalised a culture of hesitation so completely that inaction is no longer perceived as a flaw, but as a mode of governance. Over the past year, a reluctance to act has become institutionalised, and what once might have provoked alarm now passes as procedure. Instead of directing the state toward coherent objectives, the machinery of government turns inwards, caught in an endless cycle of procedural churn and bureaucratic self-reference. The result is a managed stasis that mistakes the absence of crisis for the presence of control.

A functioning government must be judged by its capacity to bring about change in the real world. In domains essential to national strength – infrastructure, energy, defence, finance and industrial capacity – our country has utterly lost the ability to act decisively. Projects that should be manageable in scope and straightforward in process are routinely ensnared. What was once a dependable regulatory environment has devolved into a Byzantine labyrinth of lack of accountability, intrigues and speculation.

I have repeatedly witnessed this firsthand with my own project, AQUIND. A totally privately financed £2.5bn energy project of huge strategic and economic value that will reduce energy costs across the country, create jobs and lower our carbon emissions. Interconnections like this are backed by clear political consensus and AQUIND has taken substantial private investment, yet it has taken more than seven years to gain approval from government after government, despite every independent expert assessment agreeing on the project’s necessity, urgency and benefits, and not one pound of funding is required from the state. At every junction, decisions are deferred and the previous decisions reviewed. The architecture of governance, rather than supporting action, now........

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