British Police State Disclaimer:

This article represents the personal opinions and political commentary of the author. It criticises public policy, government expenditure, and institutional behaviour. No statement herein is intended, nor should be understood, as an accusation against any identifiable individual or group defined by race, religion, or other protected characteristic.

All factual data are drawn from publicly available sources including the Department for Education, the National Audit Office, the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and the Incorporated Society of Musicians. Figures are used to illustrate public spending patterns, not to identify private persons.

This publication constitutes fair comment on matters of public interest under English law and is protected by Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights and the Human Rights Act 1998, guaranteeing the right to freedom of expression.

Readers are encouraged to verify all statistics and to engage critically with the arguments presented.

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Writing in The Daily Express on the 10^th October 2025, Michael Ashcroft sounded another note in the long requiem for English education. In his article, he describes with genuine indignation how Labour’s latest budgetary “adjustment” will destroy the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme (IBDP) in state schools.

The figures are simple enough. Until now, each state school offering the IB has received an additional £2,400 per pupil to cover the extra teaching time required by its broader syllabus. About twenty schools in England offered it; some 5,000 pupils took advantage. The Labour Government will now withdraw that small supplement. It saves perhaps £12 million—an infinitesimal fraction of the national education budget—but its effect is fatal. Most schools will drop the IB entirely.

At Ashcroft Technology Academy in Putney, founded by Mr Ashcroft in 1991, about ten per cent of the sixth form opt for the IB. Their record of admission to top universities—Cambridge, Warwick, Bristol, UCL—is remarkable for an inner-city comprehensive. The IB, as he explains, gives a broader and deeper education than A-levels, demanding six subjects, an extended essay, and a core of philosophy. It teaches thinking rather than box-ticking.

The decision, therefore, is not about savings. It is about symbolism. It is another strike against the very idea of intellectual distinction in state education. As Mr Ashcroft writes:

Are there no limits to the steps this spiteful Government is willing to take to erode the achievements of our high-achieving state schools? The savings are minimal, yet the education opportunities for thousands of students will be severely harmed.

It is an indignant lament, but incomplete. He asks why the Government would wreck its best schools to save pennies. The answer is that it does so in order to spend those pennies—indeed billions—on something else entirely: on the care and management of what is largely to be seen as the nation’s biological and moral residue.

As of March 2024, there were 83,630 “looked-after children” in England and another 7,198 in Wales—a total of 90,828. The phrase means what it conceals: children removed from their parents and kept in the custody of the State. Most are the offspring of the feckless—of drug users, petty criminals, and those who breed without means or intention to raise what they spawn. They are the human refuse of five decades of welfare dependency. I have called them “the nation’s biological and moral residue.” Marx more bluntly called them the lumpenproletariat.

The financial arithmetic is astonishing. You can check it yourself by following the links at the foot of this article. But here is my summary:

• The average weekly cost of keeping a single child in care in England is £1,610, or £83,720 per year.
• Foster care (about two-thirds of placements) costs £25,000–£40,000 per child annually.
• Residential homes (about ten per cent) cost on average £318,400 per child—over six times the median household income.
• Supported accommodation, the halfway houses of adolescence, runs £50,000–£100,000 per head.

The total annual expenditure on children’s social care in England and Wales is £15.56 billion. About three-quarters of that—over £11 billion—is direct spending on looked-after children. The remainder feeds the bureaucratic penumbra of “safeguarding,” family-support schemes, training courses, and management overheads.

This figure has increased by roughly 40 per cent in real terms over the past decade, even as the number of children in care rose by only a tenth. The cost per child, therefore, has soared.

To put it crudely: while Labour cuts £12 million from gifted children, it lavishes £15.5 billion on those who should never have been born.

The care sector is not an altruistic enterprise. It is a gold-plated racket—half bureaucratic, half corporate, wholly parasitic. Ninety per cent of children’s homes are privately run, yet their profits are guaranteed by law. Local authorities must provide placements whatever the fee. There is no competition, no price mechanism, only the taxpayer’s compulsory generosity. The National Audit Office reported in 2023 that profit margins in private-equity-owned homes averaged 23 per cent, with some reaching 30 per cent, and that fees had risen 33 per cent in real terms since 2019.

A single placement may involve:

• one supervising social worker;
• two case officers;
• a “therapeutic consultant” from a subcontracted charity;
• an education liaison officer;
• a placement-review manager;
• and a “child’s advocate” from an NGO funded by the same department.

Each is salaried, pensioned, and self-congratulating. The child himself receives little beyond food and a pretence of schooling, and then a future in crime or dependency.

The average cost—£83,720—supports this clerical ecosystem. The child is its pretext, not its purpose.

Here we come to the essence of the matter. The care system does not merely waste money; it actively corrodes the biological and moral fabric of the nation. I will not develop this point, but there is persistent anecdotal evidence that the social workers kidnap children from entirely respectable homes. They hurry the cases before gullible or bent judges, then drag their victims into lives of moral and physical degradation that would have appalled Wackford Squeers. But this is anecdotal. I will only observe that, when you build a giant sausage machine, you need to keep some meat flowing through it as well as the sawdust.

Most of the machine’s raw material, though, is less to be pitied. As said, they are the genetic and cultural end-products of the welfare state itself. Born to the feckless and criminal, reared without fathers, addicted to screens or stimulants before they can read, they are the State’s own spawn. The care industry exists to manage them, not to reform them.

A rational society would reduce their number by discouraging their reproduction—by making the bearing of children a privilege of the responsible. Ours does the opposite. It removes every restraint and subsidises the consequences. The “looked-after child” is both symptom and asset: a symptom of social rot and an asset to those who live by curing it. This is official dysgenics—a perverse inversion of Darwinian selection. The State punishes the capable and rewards the incapable. The productive classes pay to breed their replacements. The bright are taxed to feed the dull. Their own children are denied music lessons so that the progeny of addicts can enjoy “therapeutic art therapy.”

The administrators of this empire of decay are not cynical profiteers alone; they are moralists. The modern social-services bureaucracy is a secular church whose creed is Equality and whose ritual is paperwork. Each failure is proof of Original Sin—“structural racism,” “social exclusion,” “trauma”—and each demands greater expenditure.

Every “child in care” sustains a small army of believers. Every scandal justifies an expansion of staff. Success, which would reduce dependency, is heresy. The system cannot afford to cure what it feeds upon. Hence the perpetual flow of pieties: safeguarding, wellbeing, trauma-informed practice. These are the indulgences of a new moral economy. The social worker who presides over the ruin of a generation goes home assured of her virtue. She has “intervened.” She has “supported.” She has spent the budget.

Let us reduce the theology to more detailed arithmetic.

Placement Type	Children	Average Cost	Annual Spend
Foster care	56,390	£30,000	£1.7 billion
Residential homes	8,640	£318,400	£2.75 billion
Supported accommodation	6,250	£75,000	£470 million
Adoption/other	1,910	£60,000	£115 million
Administrative overhead, child-protection staff, legal costs, management, training, “other services”	—	—	£10.5 billion
Total (England + Wales)	90,828	—	£15.56 billion

During the same year, the Government spent almost nothing on help for talented children. The “Gifted and Talented” scheme was abolished in 2011 and never replaced. The Music and Dance Scheme, which provides bursaries for talented children from humble backgrounds to study at some of the best schools in the world, costs £1.9m a year. This has not kept pace with inflation, and is set to be abolished before the end of the Parliament now assembled. Thus, for every pound spent cultivating excellence through the schemes that remain, more than £7,500 are spent subsidising the unfit.

The collapse of musical education illustrates the same arithmetic. In 2008, eighty-five per cent of schools offered regular instrumental tuition. By 2022, fewer than sixty per cent did. The number of A-level Music entries fell from 10,000 to 5,500. County youth orchestras have dissolved; pianos have been sold for scrap. The Incorporated Society of Musicians warned in Music: A Subject in Peril (2022) that the discipline was vanishing. Local authorities, it reported, had diverted funding from instrumental teaching to “inclusion projects” and “community wellbeing.” The children who might have become performers are now subjects of “creative outreach.”

The contrast is grotesque. The State will pay £318,000 a year to keep one irremediably maladjusted adolescent in a “therapeutic” home, but will not spend £200 to give a bright child violin lessons. The result is not equality but barbarism. A society that silences its music to amplify its failures deserves the resulting noise.

This inversion of priorities is not new. The Thatcher Governments began the process by destroying the industrial working class through high-interest deflation and the overvaluation of sterling. The Blair Governments completed it by destroying the educational ladder that might have raised a new one. The present Labour administration merely tends the ruins. Each stage has been sold as reform. Each has deepened dependency. What began as the liquidation of unprofitable industries became the liquidation of human potential. The factory hand was replaced by the welfare client; the grammar-school boy by the “child in care.” The State exchanged citizens for clients, productivity for paperwork, excellence for equality.

Why should the rulers of Britain wish this? Because dependency is power. An intelligent, self-reliant population questions authority; a degraded one obeys. The destruction of selective education and the expansion of the care bureaucracy are therefore not opposites but complements. The first ensures that talent never matures; the second ensures that failure never dies. Both sustain the same machine of control. The monied interest—the financial oligarchy centred on the City of London—requires consumers, not citizens. It needs pliant bodies, not cultivated minds. The bureaucratic Left provides the moral cover for that need. It preaches compassion while supplying building up Marx’s lumpenproletariat.

Hence the obsession with “inclusion” and “representation.” The IB, with its discipline and rigour, embarrasses the ideology of grievance. Its pupils demonstrate that intelligence still exists. That cannot be tolerated. The care industry, on the other hand, produces perfect subjects: dull, dependent, pushing towards infinitely expensive.

The alliance of moralism and money explains why the system grows even when it fails. Every new “looked-after” child sustains jobs, contracts, and consultancies. Each scandal is an argument for expansion. Private-equity firms harvest profit; public-sector managers harvest virtue. Between them, they have created a self-licking ice-cream cone of moralised greed. The taxpayer pays for both. In 2013/14, spending on looked-after children in England was about £8.9 billion in real terms. A decade later it is £15.5 billion—a rise of over 60 per cent, against a 20 per cent increase in child numbers. The system inflates like a bubble of sanctimony, impervious to reason.

Imagine diverting just ten per cent of the £15.56 billion care budget—£1.5 billion—to scholarships, grammar schools, and elite training for gifted children from poor families. That would fund:

• 50,000 full bursaries at independent schools;
• universal free instrumental tuition;
• the restoration of selective sixth forms in every county.

Instead, the same £1.5 billion keeps around 9,000 “looked-after” children institutionalised—half of whom will end in prison and most of the rest on welfare. Their offspring will, in turn, re-enter the system. Each generation is more expensive and less capable than the last. A rational government would see the absurdity. Ours calls it “social justice.”

The modern welfare state no longer measures success by improvement but by participation in its rituals. A programme is not judged by results but by how much compassion it performs. The care system performs compassion on an industrial scale. Its social workers are the new clergy, its acronyms the new liturgy. They speak of “trauma-informed care” as their predecessors spoke of grace. They believe that every miscreant is a victim of “societal harm.” They will bankrupt the nation rather than admit that sin exists and must be punished.

This explains the moral fury directed at Michael Ashcroft’s kind of success. His pupils refute the creed. They prove that background is not destiny and that discipline, not therapy, produces excellence. For that heresy, they must be deprived of funding.

The financial waste is vast, the cultural loss incalculable. The England that built cathedrals, invented the steam engine, founded the modern sciences of Physics and Biology, among much else, did so because it rewarded intelligence and effort. The England that now spends £15.5 billion on failure and pennies on genius is a country committing cultural suicide.

The result is visible in every field—from the collapse of industry to the decay of art. A people that cannot educate its own elite must import technicians and entertainers. It becomes a market, not a nation. The IB programme was one of the last institutional defences against this decline. Its abolition is not a mistake; it is a signal. The State no longer wants citizens capable of thinking; it wants subjects fit to be managed.

A civilisation cannot survive long on such principles. When the last engineers retire and the last musicians emigrate, the bureaucrats will discover that their spreadsheets cannot repair the sewers. The “looked-after children” for whom the nation sacrificed its culture will be unable even to keep the lights on.

At that point, the government will import another underclass and call it renewal. The process will begin again, each turn of the wheel pushing England deeper into the swamp of sewage so carefully prepared for it.

Mr Ashcroft’s article calls Labour’s decision “nonsensical” and “spiteful.” It is something of both—but above all it is deliberate. The British State has chosen to spend its treasure not on the intelligent poor who might redeem it, but on the sub-intelligent poor who guarantee its power. The care system is not an accident of compassion; it is an instrument of control. Its clients are expensively warehoused proof that “equality” has triumphed over civilisation. The destruction of the IB and the starvation of musical education are the cultural corollaries of that biological policy.

We have created a welfare-industrial complex that breeds failure, baptises it as virtue, and persecutes success as elitism. The result is a country that funds stupidity and forbids excellence.

Reading List

• Michael Ashcroft, Failing Labour Education System is Failing Our Children, Daily Express, 2025.
• Incorporated Society of Musicians, Music: A Subject in Peril (2022), ism.org.
• Department for Education, Children Looked After in England, 2024.
• Welsh Government, Children Receiving Care and Support, 2024.
• National Audit Office, Children’s Social Care in England (2024).
• Institute for Fiscal Studies, Local Authority Children’s Services Expenditure, 2013–2024.