Louise Brown: Rhetoric has replaced reality when it comes to our public services — and we’re paying for it

Louise Brown has been a parliamentary candidate, is a teacher, and Director of Educational Partnerships. She is a podcaster and broadcaster on local radio. 

I was recently listening to a podcast with David Olusoga and Sarah Churchwell about the American gun lobby and how the story of the US Second Amendment has been reshaped over the decades.

What began as a clause about a ‘well-regulated militia’ has, through repetition and political pressure, become a sacred individual right, so detached from its original meaning. Putting aside the gun debate itself, what struck me most was this: a myth, if told often enough, becomes accepted truth.

Once you start looking for it, you begin to notice the same pattern almost everywhere.

In arguments about schools, policing, the NHS, immigration and even food policy, the story people want to believe routinely overtakes the evidence sitting right in front of them. Narrative beats data. Emotion beats outcomes. Nowhere is this clearer than in education.

Listen to the national conversation, and you would assume England’s school system is in terminal decline: collapsing behaviour, illiterate children, shattered standards. Yet the international evidence tells a very different story. According to PISA, run by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, England’s mathematics performance has risen from around the OECD average in the late 2000s to well above it by 2022, putting England among the stronger-performing education systems across the Western world.

England now outperforms the United States and most European nations in maths, with reading and science also consistently above the international mean. The improvement trend remains clear even after accounting for pandemic disruption and other countries are looking to us to find out more. These gains did not happen by accident. They followed a sustained programme of reform: systematic phonics, a knowledge-rich curriculum, stronger leadership, higher expectations, better teacher training, academisation, free schools and cross-sector partnerships. These changes were often controversial, but they worked, especially when implemented well and consistently.

None of this fits today’s preferred political story of unbroken decline. So instead we are told that ‘children can’t read’, ‘standards have collapsed’ and ‘behaviour is out of control’. There has indeed been a post-pandemic knock to reading, but that is not solely a school failure. It reflects wider shifts in attention, screen use, early language exposure and family life. Myth is always simpler than reality.

This style of storytelling now dominates much of British and global politics. It is perfected by Donald Trump, for whom everything is catastrophe or triumph, villains and saviours, no middle ground allowed. Reform UK operates in much the same emotional register. Britain is ‘broken’. Schools are ‘failing’. Danger is ‘everywhere’. On education in particular, Reform offers volume without substance. There are plenty of slogans, patriotic curricula, banned topics, culture war flashpoints, but almost nothing about teaching quality, leadership, early literacy, subject expertise or the systems we know actually raise standards. A collapsing system fits their narrative. A steadily improving one does not.

Labour’s response is subtler, but in its own way just as ideological. Rather than build on the elements of Conservative reform that demonstrably raised standards and many Labour MPs privately accept that they did, the leadership is quietly freezing or sidelining them. Free schools, strong academy trusts and the cross-sector partnerships that have transformed outcomes in some of the most disadvantaged communities are being pushed to the margins because they conflict with an ideological preference at the top. This is policy driven by tribalism rather than outcomes.

The Left struggles to acknowledge that Conservative reforms improved standards. The populist Right refuses to accept that improvement is possible at all. And caught between the two is a school system that urgently needs continuity, not repeated political rewiring.

You see the same craving for symbolic narrative in Labour’s reaction to Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral primary victory in New York. Mamdani spoke to very specific local pressures, rents, affordability and cost-of-living stress in one of the world’s most expensive cities. Yet his win was immediately projected, by some, onto the British political landscape as evidence of a sweeping ideological shift. Projection, once again, triumphed over context. Mamdami has yet to achieve what he has set out to do.

Ultra-processed food is conclusively linked to obesity, Type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and some cancers. Britain has one of the highest UPF consumption rates in Europe. Yet political messaging still leans heavily on individual “resilience” rather than structural reform, because personal responsibility is a simpler story than reshaping food systems. When does it become the state’s obligation to ensure that the choices on offer to their citizens are honest ones.

Policing, too, is trapped in myth. Through a family member on the frontline, I see officers absorbing relentless demand with shrinking numbers and rising complexity. They cannot strike. They have little public voice, but we still reach instead for nostalgic clichés about how policing ‘used to be’ instead of fighting for structural reform that will incorporate the substantial change in the role of the police.

The central failure of modern British politics is this: we now trade in emotional narrative instead of empirical truth and, increasingly, we have lost the consensus of shared prosperity that once underpinned liberal democracy itself. We once believed that we were all in this together; that public services, taxation and reform existed for mutual gain.  Not anymore, as trust in our politicians has all but disappeared, myths now gain traction faster than evidence. Outrage travels further than outcomes. But public services do not respond to slogans; they respond to leadership, creative, practical decisions and investment.

Education shows what happens when we follow evidence rather than ideology: standards rise. When we build institutions rather than stories, outcomes improve. Other services could do the same, but we should stop constantly tearing them apart to serve the politics of the moment.

We will not fix Britain’s public services until we fix the stories we tell about them. And that starts with insisting on reality from those in power, not rhetoric, even when the truth is dull, complex or politically inconvenient. It is my sincere hope that those that do so, will continue to hold the line.