Over 100,000 people turned up in central London this weekend at the behest of anti-Islam provocateur Tommy Robinson. Both of Britain’s traditional governing parties are in a state of crisis, and face existential threats from populist rivals of left (“Your Party” and the Greens) and right (Reform UK).
The British economy has seen 15 years of low productivity and growth. But what looks like stagnation nationally is really the story of terrifying regional inequality. Large parts of the country have effectively been in recession for decades. Growth has come from London and the South East, but at the cost of a life-ruining rise in house prices, and an existentially disorienting flood of migration. In the hubs of innovation, Britain can impress with its new technologies and enterprises, but they are limited by the narrow horizons of national ambition. British companies struggle to scale up, and the most promising are invariably bought out by overseas money, as with the acquisition of UK AI start-up Deep Mind by Google.
According to recent research, some of the worst poverty in Europe festers here in one of its wealthiest countries, whilst UK workers are on average 20 per cent less productive than French or German equivalents, and 30 per cent less productive than Americans. Had we kept up with the States, the average worker would be £4000 better off a year.
A green paper published by the SDP has revealed that our electricity output has gone down by a quarter over the last 20 years, and demand has been artificially suppressed by rising prices. From its current to its currency, Britain is a nation perpetually squeezed by self-imposed austerity.
It is easy to point to global conditions, an aging population or competing policy imperatives to explain away our troubles. But we must be clear-eyed. Austerity is a choice, and more than that, an attitude — a state of mind and a malady of the national spirit. Anyone doubting this need only look to where we do spend our money. We have lost faith in the future. We don’t invest enough in work, education, industry, infrastructure, energy, research or defence. Public spending is concentrated in handouts, with 23 per cent of the population receiving benefits, and, for the first time, more than half of the population becoming net recipients rather than contributors to the public purse.
Most shockingly, the pensions “triple lock” has seen pensions soar by nearly 5 per cent this year alone. The state pension, along with public pensions, are not paid out of a “pension pot”, but come directly out of general taxation. This gigantic unfunded liability, along with rising care and health costs, will see an ever greater fiscal burden put on an ever more unproductive workforce, who will themselves see less and less of the benefits that they pay for.
Like so much morphine flooded into a dying patient — an overdose that can be safely administered because there is no hope of recovery — we have poured our remaining national energies into preserving the comfort and prosperity of the old. We shut embassies, cut regiments and sell off assets. Our intellectual and cultural imagination has dwindled to a small sphere. Far-off lands and the remote past are both perceived through the limiting lens of the present. The life of the intellect, the creative arts, and religious worship are generally disdained, as we instead worship wealth, convenience and superficial fame. Ironically, in our quest for comfort and material prosperity, we have lost our capacity to create either for any but a lucky few.
Freshness, youth, vitality, innocence, heroism and faith — where are these to be found in our country today?
Britain needs a revolution, not of politics but of the spirit. Freshness, youth, vitality, innocence, heroism and faith — where are these to be found in our country today? Where they exist, they are smothered by the weight of past errors, prior assumptions and collective indifference. Young lives find themselves already hemmed in by economic and conceptual limitations, poisoned by the pessimism and parochialism of a cynical elite. Instead of nourishment, we offer the poison of smartphones and distraction; social isolation and synthetic connectivity.
How can the aspirations of our children take flight? How can an old country be made young again? In the first instance, the material conditions of ordinary people must be improved, like the flinging open of a rusted door. The vast resources committed to a comfortable death must go into the stuff of life. Instead of endlessly expanding welfare, we must put vast energies into building new homes, improving infrastructure in every corner of the country, expanding power production, investing in industry, enriching education, developing the arts and advancing the sciences. Young people should be able to find cheap rooms to rent, cheap homes to buy.
The cost of living should be kept low enough that life appears again to be a bright palette of possible futures, in which risktaking is rewarded, rather than punished. In this new Britain, the decision to become an artist, start your own business, or quit a hated job should be made easier, rather than impossibly hard.
The vast unfunded pension liability should be turned into a source of energy and enterprise for the next generation. State and public sector pensions could be funded out of a national pension fund, operating like Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, and with a special focus in investing nationally and closing our national investment gap. The fund would pay out to pensioners, whilst simultaneously fueling the industries of the future. This monumental shift would be greatly eased if we could tap into the considerable natural resources Britain enjoys in the form of onshore coal and offshore oil and gas.
The green austerity of Net Zero, which has seen the future of the young wrecked in the name of exporting our emissions overseas, could be exchanged for a visionary project. Britain must aim not at a false moral innocence in an overheating globe, but should instead embark on a quest to rescue the world from the horrors of environmental destruction. New technologies, new ways of life and new sources of energy are not idle hopes for the country that initiated the industrial revolution. Britain may not rule the waves, but we could be the country to turn them back.
Britain has become a nation of clattering laptops and chattering committees, in which PR and spin are valued over poetry and science
Yet we have made electricity too expensive for industry to expand, and created conditions too costly to promote creativity and genius. This is a country whose government has abolished our independent space agency at a time when the economic possibilities of space have never been greater. Along with meeting the ecological challenge, here is another great frontier upon which the imagination and industry of a generation might be unleashed.
Instead, Britain has become a nation of clattering laptops and chattering committees, in which PR and spin are valued over poetry and science. In a way, the airiest of literary speculation has more in common with the hardest of material sciences, because both seek to connect us with the vital pulse of reality. It is the middle realm and middle brow of law, administration and management which, made an end in themselves, smother the human spirit and degrade advanced civilisations from within.
When will we stop playing it safe? There is no lasting security in stagnation, no ultimate benefit to slow decline over creative risk. The best guarantee for the future is to take not one risk, but many, in the certainty that at least some of them will pay off. Instead, with vast timidity, we crawl our way towards big projects like HS2, and ritualistically declare the folly of ambition proved for another generation. We have forgotten how to probe with bayonets, and instead twitch to the nervous impulses of bond markets, forever frightened of the fight.
Courage emerges from adversity. The spiritual crisis imposed on the young by social fragmentation and technology is already encouraging a “quiet revival” in traditional religion, and a shift away from political centrism in both directions. New political movements will make more mistakes; lead to fresh absurdities. But slowly, surely, the weight of error will be shifted, and competence and iconoclasm will be united in a new generation of leaders. Britain will be young again, one day.
