Politics & Power Quote by Adam Rickitt

There is a special kind of sting when disillusionment comes dressed as common sense, and Adam Rickitt’s line leans hard into that mood: not fiery ideological critique, but the quieter, more contagious belief that nothing will ever change. As an actor rather than a party operative, he speaks from the space of the “ordinary observer,” which gives the sentiment cultural traction. It’s not a policy argument; it’s an emotional verdict.

The specific intent is to name a breach of trust and convert it into a broader diagnosis: Labour didn’t just fail to deliver, it trained voters to treat politics itself as performance. The phrasing does a lot of work. “Promises made and never fulfilled” is a familiar political rhythm, almost biblical in its cadence, but Rickitt turns it into a psychological timeline: believing, then disenchantment, then the final slide into blanket cynicism. That escalation matters because it suggests damage that outlives any single election cycle.

The subtext is more ruthless: if “all politicians” are interchangeable liars, then accountability becomes optional and abstention starts to feel like wisdom. It captures a late-90s/2000s British drift toward anti-politics, when media-savvy leaders and message discipline made governance look like branding. Coming from a public figure whose job is literally to persuade an audience, the irony sharpens: he’s warning that politics has started to resemble acting, and that voters, exhausted, have stopped applauding.