There was an article a while ago from the boring Starmerite quarterly Renewal that outlined a vision for “Mr Blobby Nationalism”. It earned derision from commentators on the right, but it did a pretty good job of setting out quite a popular stance on the left. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a pretty tough few hundred words to wade through if you don’t have much of a stomach for sickly sweet twee: “Yorkshire Tea adverts with Sarah Lancashire and Sean Bean, Greggs, Pete Postlethwaite’s speech in Brassed Off … This is what I love about our country … This is Silly Sausage Britain.”
There are lots of people that look at Britain’s problems and try to come up with lots of very complicated or esoteric approaches to them
Without being too humourless about it, the gist is that a Britain of aggressive redistributionist socialism, a relentless stamping on civil liberties, and beady-eyed thought policing is a country of saccharine whimsy, and if you don’t agree then people are liable to “get a bit sweary”. While the article isn’t exactly groundbreaking, I think that “Silly Sausage Britain” is a helpful way to categorise attitudes to Britain’s malaise.
There are lots of people that look at Britain’s problems and try to come up with lots of very complicated or esoteric approaches to them. These are Silly Sausages.
Let’s start by outlining what are the biggest challenges besetting Britain at the end of 2025.
As hedge fund manager Ray Dalio put it earlier in the year, Britain is in a debt-doom loop of high taxes, low growth, low productivity, high debts and deficit, and an inflation rate that remains sticky. Year-on-year consumer price index-measured inflation may have dipped to 3.2 percent at the last print from the ONS from being stuck at 3.8 percent over the summer, but it remains well above the Bank of England’s 2 percent target.
UK wage growth appears on first glance to be a healthy 4.6 percent, but the majority of this was driven by public sector wage increases running at 7.6 percent. This is not sustainable when the current budget deficit — the borrowing to fund day-to-day public sector activities — was GBP5.6 billion in November. At the same time, UK 10-year Gilt yields hover around 4.5 percent, while German and French equivalent debt issuance is yielding 2.9 and 3.6 percent respectively.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s attempts to tax Britain out of its problems is affecting capital flows, with the most productive members of the economy quite rationally deciding that there is no binding obligation to stick around and be sheep sheared by HMG. Many have used their capital mobility to simply leave, compounding Britain’s financial problems. People who were very happy with the idea of higher taxes to pay for state expansion as long as it were other guys who paid are having to come to terms with the reality that there are no Other Guys left.
Britain’s immigration burden remains extremely high — including net new arrivals through legal routes, illegal immigration including small boats, and the massive burden of servicing the costs of existing non-net contributing migrants. It is a mark of the scale of the influx into Britain that a drop to 204,000 net new arrivals was celebrated by the government after the most recent ONS release. To put this in perspective, a city of this size would usually contain a couple of hospitals, 20-25 secondary schools and around 60 primary schools. Britain increased its net number of schools by 24 in 2024. It finally opened Midland Metropolitan University Hospital — 6 years late and costing three times its initial projection. This year, the only major hospital opening, the National Rehabilitation Centre, has been delayed until 2026. Britain’s first new reservoir to be built in 30 years is scheduled for completion some time in 2036, and is scheduled to be operational by 2040.
Housing in Britain is incredibly expensive. Average UK monthly private rents increased by 4.4 percent, to GBP1,366, in the 12 months to November 2025. Average UK house prices increased by 1.7 percent. Britain isn’t building enough houses, and it particularly isn’t building enough houses in the places that people want to live. The long-running problem of the Town and Country Planning Act 1947 remains at the heart of most issues. Essentially nationalising planning permission rather than the case in similar European countries where development is often permitted by right, the UK’s system empowers local politicians and special interest groups to block developments.
Granted, it should be remembered that NIMBYism is not an irrational act, particularly in an ultra-high immigration environment. Blocking new housing is often one of the most straightforward and effective ways of private individuals protecting their community from having potentially dangerous new arrivals foisted upon them by government mandate, and an example of how the immigration crisis touches all parts of the economy. However this doesn’t detract from the fact that the planning system can be leveraged to hold developers to ransom in exchange for boondoggles for special interest groups.
One of the most clear examples of where state meddling in housing affordability has had quite the opposite effect is requirements under Section 106 (S106) agreements, which mandate a percentage of new developments (often 20–50 percent, varying by local policy) to be affordable homes sold or rented below market rates. These mandates can render schemes unviable, leading to delays, scaling down, or complete cancellation of projects. A spat over the onerous requirements has stalled the 251 home Claremont Quarter, Cricklewood development in London and the Home Builders Federation (HBF) indicates that over 700 housing developments stalled across England in the past three years.
Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) regulations have made for a corporate and regulatory environment that those who have the option would rather do without. FCA diversity requirements mean that any company that wishes to float on the stock market with an IPO must commit to women making up at least 40 percent of their board, and they require an ethnic minority director. This is not just a statement to any business operating in Britain that it is the state that directs business, rather than businesses being free to hire and appoint on merit alone, but it is also a needless burden on smaller businesses that would need to entirely restructure their board to meet the requirement.
Net Zero regulations have straightjacketed British industry and the UK has the highest electricity prices in the developed world. Its effects have wrought havoc — in 2025 Britain lost two of its six natural gas refineries with the Grangemouth refinery in Scotland and the Prax refinery in Lincolnshire shutting down. Sabic closed down its Olefins 6 cracker plant in Wilton, Teesside, after 46 years of operating. UK ferro-titanium production operator TiVac Alloys ceased its activities in Sheffield, and entered voluntary liquidation specifically citing the burden of high energy costs making margins zero or negative.
It’s tough to do business in Britain, then, and to afford to buy a home, and it is not even especially safe. For a large number of crimes in Britain, there is the feeling that the police have given up. For the year ending March 2024, the charge/summons rate for victim-based crimes (which include violence, sexual offences, theft, robbery, and criminal damage) was 5.5 percent. In incidences of theft, including burglaries, which result in a suspect being caught and charged, the success rate has declined from 10.8 percent ten years ago to just 6.4 percent. Only 11 percent of the violent and sexual offence cases in England and Wales were closed after a suspect was caught or charged in the year to June 2024.
Don’t expect the government to act on this — Keir Starmer is too worried about your tweets. Britain is in a free speech — and, more broadly, civil liberties — crisis. The Online Safety Act, touted as a way to protect children online, has had predictable (or just as likely, entirely intentional) consequences. It has been used to block distribution of parliamentary debates about Pakistani child rape gangs. It was used to censor footage of British people having their liberty of assembly suspended when they were arrested in Leeds protesting against asylum seekers’ hotels. We are all familiar with the persecution of citizens for merely exercising their liberty of speech, but we are also in the midst of a constant, petty, mean chipping away at the traditional freedoms enjoyed by the British. The government has announced that trail hunting is set to be banned in England and Wales as part of a wider crackdown on rural liberties. It comes ahead of the Home Office’s plans to publish a consultation of merging Section 2 (shotguns) and Section 1 (rifles) for the purposes of firearms licencing as a method for enforcing much stricter regulations on shotgun owners.
This is by no means an exhaustive list of the problems facing Britain, but if we are going to evaluate whether people are being Silly Sausages or if they are being Serious Sausages, it’s probably a good place to start.
The most dramatic reading of Britain’s problems is that the country is inescapably doomed, and that the only way that anything can be changed is if it gets so bad that there is no other option, or at its most extreme there is the view that there needs to be some form of civil war between Good (the people that will win and reform Britain along the lines best benefitting the doomer) and the Bad (those standing against the Doomer’s reshaping of the country). This is simply an impotent appeal for a deux ex machina to resolve the situation rather than even attempting to fix some, all, or any of its policy problems. This is very silly sausage behaviour.
The alternative is, well, an alternative. Some are more ideologically eccentric than others. Gaining popularity on the right is the view that Christianity is the key to solving Britain’s problems, and that the country must return to its Christian(ish) roots if it wishes to fight the woke. There are of course differing views on this, with the more extreme perhaps being the members of Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain that regularly promote screeds that would make Wulfstan blush. People that want to ban usury on Christian grounds are silly sausages, and also sausages that have never had a mortgage.
However, it would be wrong to paint the whole movement with the same brush. Instead, if the key that unlocks the solutions to Britain’s problems is devout Christianity, perhaps we can ask what the world would look like were Keir Starmer a devout Christian? I imagine it would have repercussions on euthanasia and abortion laws — though the nature of the modern Church of England hardly makes that obvious — but what of the policies that have helped to strangle British prosperity?
Somewhat helpfully, the famous toolmaker Rodney Starmer and his wife Josephine kindly had the foresight to guide us in the direction of a useful cheat sheet, by reputedly naming their son after the Labour Party’s first parliamentary leader, Keir Hardy.
It was that Keir that proclaimed: “The impetus which drove me first of all into the Labour movement, and the inspiration which has carried me on in it, has been derived more from the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, than from all other sources combined.” He added: “The Labour movement in its very essence is essentially religious.”
Would that Keir have thrown the 2024 asylum seeker protesters in prison for using unpleasant language? Probably. He had plenty of strong views on protecting British workers from foreign labour, but would he have turned away the small boats of those seeking asylum? Would a devout Christian socialist leader have any issue with burdening financial services firms with regulation?
I don’t think that this is an enormous “gotcha”, and that many postliberals would happily choose a “who remembers old labour values?” socialist Christian temperance movement over an atheist free market alternative. However, a Labour party returned to its nonconformist roots would remain a socialist party, with all of the puritanical, redistributionist zeal of the party of 2025 that wages war on landowners by attacking small farm inheritance, or imposes green levies and restrictions to try to bend citizens to its views of what is just and holy.
Socialism doesn’t become a valid response to economic problems just because it’s trad and based. Equal sharing of misery is equal sharing of misery — the problems of Britain are far less about a need for state religion, but of the existence of statism as religion. It is not the business of the state to attempt to make men angels, but to punish the wicked that do others harm.
Silly Sausage politics would of course not be silly if all other options had been tried. I have no problem with turning to God, but I can’t help but wonder if the solutions to elevated input costs killing off the steel industry aren’t more easily found in the 2008 Climate Change Act and subsequent Net Zero commitments than they are in Leviticus.
The answer to Britain’s ills is not hysterics, speaking in tongues, and fire and brimstone. It’s quite boring Serious Sausage politics of straightforward, but out of necessity very aggressive supply-side reforms. Serious Sausages should like to see a restructuring of the justice system so that it is one that protects property rights and people from real physical harm, rather than one that is used as a means to enforce the orthodoxies of the current government.
Britain needs Serious Sausages for serious problems
Doom and gloomers will be astonished at how effective removing ESG restrictions are at limiting the damage caused by ESG restrictions. They will gasp with amazement when they see how swiftly removing the Net Zero regulations that drive industrial energy prices so high will cause those prices to drop and for industry to breathe a sigh of relief. Removing welfare and other subsidy entitlements from immigrants will be a far more effective and targeted approach than any wild civil war scenario. Rolling back anti-free speech regulations for all will achieve far more than screeching for “hate marches” to be banned. It will be uncanny how much more relaxed people are about building some new homes in their village when those homes are not simply meeting the demand created by a new city’s worth of immigration each year.
It may not be as poetic — or as good for driving social media engagements — as Silly Sausage politics, but Britain needs Serious Sausages for serious problems.
Choose to be a Serious Sausage in 2026.
