We Need to Talk About Britain

Britain is going through a period of major decline. Strong opening, I know. In fact, you can already hear critics gleefully celebrating the fact that I’ve become one of the usual suspects claiming “the country has gone to the dogs” since the Victorian age.

The problem such critics have to contend with, however, is that the majority of British people are now in this camp. An Ipsos poll conducted earlier this year found that “68% of people in Britain say the country is in decline. [This] marks a sharp increase since 2021 when only 48% agreed that the country was in decline.”

Why do British people feel this way? Let’s look at the facts.

Politicians tell us the economy is growing. And who could disagree? In 2023, Britain’s economy grew by a whopping 0.1%! This magnificent result was achieved despite the economy shrinking by 0.3% in the last quarter of 2023 and 0.1% in the quarter before. When I was studying economics at university, we were taught that two consecutive quarters of “negative growth” was called a “recession”. Today, we call that “building an innovative economy”.

But are these figures an accurate reflection of British living standards? Not even close. Forget the fact that heroin consumption and prostitution contribute more to our GDP than volunteer work. Let’s look at GDP per capita, i.e. how much economic activity we produce per person. This is where the reality of British decline really comes to the fore:

What you can see from this graph is that GDP per capita fell sharply during the Great Financial Crisis of 2007-2008 and has still not recovered. What is more, this graph is not adjusted for inflation which, as we all know, has been a massive problem for years. Put simply, on average, British people are poorer today than they were in 2007.

And this is no accident. Because our politicians are judged on whether they have delivered GDP growth, they don’t actually care about whether you and I are richer or poorer. This is why the country experienced unprecedented immigration levels under the Blair/Brown Labour Government, and then even higher levels under the Cameron/May/Johnson/Truss/Sunak Conservative Governments. The easiest way to deliver GDP growth is to increase the number of people in the country. The way they have done this (importing low skilled, low wage workers) makes us poorer, but in a way that politicians can’t be blamed for.

Economic growth in Britain is not just anaemic, it’s an accounting trick. Think of it like this: You are a family with two children. Both parents earn the average British salary of £35,000 a year. Your household’s “GDP” is £70,000. Then your in-laws move in with you and chip in another £10,000 a year. Your GDP has grown by £10,000, but your GDP per capita has fallen from £17,500 (70,000/4) to £13,333 (80,000/6). Your household now makes more money, but each person is poorer. That’s Britain in a nutshell.

Money isn’t everything, of course, but the lack of it makes everything worse. The crumbling infrastructure, the release of dangerous criminals from prison because of overcrowding, the failure to catch criminals or even investigate crimes, growing NHS waiting lists and even the anger that spills out during riots is a product, in large part, of a stagnating economy.

The housing crisis means that across the country the average age of a first-time buyer is now almost 34. In London, where all the good jobs are, that is now nearly 37. In other words, even for people who can afford their own home, the point at which they are likely to buy one is now so late in life they may struggle to have children for purely biological reasons. While housing is not the only cause, it is clearly a contributing factor to the halving of Britain’s Total Fertility Rate in just 60 years. In 1964, British women had 2.93 children on average. Today we are well below replacement at 1.59.

Falling fertility rates are a common phenomenon across the Western world and beyond, one that has cultural, economic and spiritual dimensions. But the fact remains that a society not having enough children to replace its population is doomed to face both decline and the uncontrolled mass immigration we’re seeing today.

A nation can endure and bounce back from periods of stagnation and even decline, provided there is a sense of common purpose and a willingness to be honest about the problems it faces. In Britain, we have neither.

The nation - and the common purpose that came with it - is rapidly becoming a thing of the past, to be replaced with the much-celebrated “communities” we keep hearing so much about. Instead of seeing ourselves as British first and everything else second, we are now Asian, Black, White, Jewish, Muslim, Christian and LGBTQI+ first and little else second.

As for honesty, we shun, ostracise and increasingly set what is left of our police on people who express widely-held views about illegal immigration, the threat of Islamist terrorism, and the failure of multiculturalism—especially if they come from the working class, whose crass ways and ugly sentiments offend the sensibilities of the chattering classes.

I could go on but you get the point. And if you’re reading this in the UK, you live the point.

I see no urgency. When I listen to people of all political persuasions who run this country, they’re all doing their best to pretend that what is happening is normal. A problem to be managed. I assumed this was the face they were putting on for public consumption but, alas, behind closed doors they’re exactly the same.

This is one of the very best qualities of the British psyche: to remain steadfast and calm, no matter the circumstances. The world over, people admire the British when they hear the story of Antarctic explorer Lawrence Oates, who left his tent and walked into a blizzard to certain death because the gangrene and frostbite from which he was suffering were compromising his three companions' chances of survival, doing so with the words “I am just going outside and may be some time".

My point is, the British are a remarkably unexcitable people. As a result, we avoid an awful lot of trouble of the kind that comes with the impulsivity and quickness to action that we see both on the Continent and across the Atlantic. But this is only a strength if you are steadfast and calm while taking action. And that’s the problem: no one really knows what to do.

People say that if Britain was attacked, we’d struggle to get people to enlist to defend it. I think that’s nonsense. If our country went through what the people of Ukraine experienced in February 2022 or what Israel suffered on October 7, I have no doubt there would be millions of young men around this country who would volunteer to serve and millions of others who would support the war effort.

But we’re not in a war. There is no enemy to fight. There is just a creeping, unstoppable malaise. And so we don’t know what to do. Even now, with the wave of enthusiasm that swept through the United States, our equivalent coalition of the anti-woke centre and centre-right is cautiously positive and imperceptibly optimistic, but in an entirely unspecified way. Why?

Because there are, I’m afraid, two big differences between us and the US: