Britain has engineered its own peculiar purgatory — a fiscal arrangement where every Englishman earns between £35-40k irrespective of skill or qualification. What was once a nation rewarding elite self-cultivation has become a compression chamber where ambition is taxed, talent is exported, and mediocrity is the natural order.
The architecture of this compression is both deliberate and insidious. Minimum wage legislation forces the bottom upward, while punitive taxation crushes the top. What remains of opportunity is hidden behind digital portals, outsourced recruitment, and one of the world’s largest HR sectors in proportion to our workforce. The result is a nation whose domestic wages offer little to aspire to. Britain is under-utilising its most lucrative commodity: The Englishman.
The Numbing Statistics of Mediocrity
The 2023 and 2024 ONS report — at figure 10 — reveals an interactive breakdown of pay by occupation that should shock any international observer. Judges and barristers earned a median of £52,000 — a sum that would scarcely merit consideration as a starting salary for a young attorney fresh from American law school. One would have to be a fanatic, unmotivated by financial gain, to deliver the granular detail these professions demand. Accordingly, such precision appears absent. Apply this logic to every regulated profession, and a startling pattern emerges: the incentive structures for functionality, let alone national restoration, are absent.
The Englishman has become Britain’s most criminally under-utilised asset
The highest median income occupation is Chief Executives and Senior Officials at £88,000. Without working for an American company, few domestic roles exceed this. The notable exception of the professional politician. An MP’s salary is £93,000, while ministers may receive up to £75,000 on top of this. Under UK law, the number of ministers who can receive a ministerial salary is capped at 109, established by the Ministerial and Other Salaries Act 1975. Career politicians with minimal philosophical underpinning are both plentiful and keen to hold onto these valuable domestic roles.
This political exemption is emblematic of broader dysfunction — those who create the regulatory apparatus constraining British potential are themselves insulated from its consequences.
The Architecture of Compression
Britain’s incentive collapse arose predictably from wage regulation and tax policy under both Labour and Conservative governments.
Minimum wage legislation began with Blair’s National Minimum Wage Act 1998. The rate has grown over 200 per cent since inception, far outpacing inflation. In 2016, the Conservatives rebranded it as the National Living Wage, now targeting 60 per cent of median earnings at £11.00 for workers aged 23 and over. Conservative MPs such as Neil O’Brien admit the policy — combined with mass immigration — has “flattened earnings across skill levels,” making it difficult for British workers to distinguish themselves through merit.
At the higher end, the threshold for 40 per cent income tax sits at £50,270. Anyone earning above that faces higher tax and child benefit clawbacks. Consider this perverse arithmetic: A single mother working 30 hours weekly on minimum wage (£11.44/hour), with Universal Credit covering 85 per cent of childcare costs and potentially rent, achieves an effective hourly rate of £24.84. A professional earning £50,000 for 40 hours weekly takes home approximately £18.03 per hour after tax and National Insurance. As such, dependency on the state has become the mathematically rational position for many.
The Portal Dystopia
The outsourcing of human judgment to algorithms, and a bloated HR industry, has accelerated wage compression. “Go to the website” is the mantra of our age, whether one wishes to book a table at the local pub or seek employment at a FTSE 100 company. The CV is dead; keyword algorithms now govern careers, not ability or suitability. One consequence manifests with brutal clarity, it is normal for young professionals to send several hundred, or even a thousand applications, with no response. What precisely is going on behind Britain’s byzantine civil service employment portals and third party recruitment firms remains mostly a mystery. The Telegraph reported on a job listing with 200 applications for a single position, with precisely one application from a British national, so the digital dystopia does not appear to be creating welcome outcomes.
When nothing works through normal human interaction, nothing works for the normal man.
Qualification Rendered Meaningless
Graduate premiums are falling. PhDs, master’s degrees and professional training cost more than they return. Nearly 40 per cent of the population will go to university, yet only 27 per cent of attendees (on payment Plan 2) will ever pay back their loans. The degree has become equivalent to a driving test — a basic credential rather than a marker of exceptional capability. A newly qualified doctor or barrister begins earning barely more than someone in retail. Meanwhile in the professions, regulators have chosen not to fix the system, but to look elsewhere for professionals.
Foreign-trained doctors are 2.5 times more likely to be referred to the GMC as unfit to practice than home-grown ones, with Bangladeshi doctors being 13 times more likely. They are, however, paid the same and competing for the same professional places. Sam Bidwell has written on the NHS’s self-imposed dependence on foreign labour, a dependence that is proportionate to our refusal to domestically train staff. In England, the number of overseas doctors joining the NHS was 73 per cent higher than the number of students who enrolled in a medical training course in 2022-23, wholly due to medical training caps.
In our legal system, the Bar of England and Wales supports a mere 501 pupillages in 2023; these are fiercely fought over by those qualifying at home. Meanwhile, that same year, over 873 foreign-qualified lawyers applied to transfer in, with more than half from Pakistan and Bangladesh. An AI-assisted analysis of Lincoln’s Inn’s Trinity call to the Bar list found just 19.7 per cent of names were British or European. The rest, overwhelmingly, were from the Indian subcontinent, Middle East, and Far East. This is not inclusion, it is displacement of the Englishman from his core institutions.
The NHS: Britain’s Costly Religion
The Englishman pays approximately £1,392 annually for the NHS through taxation, based on an average salary of £37,000. For this investment, one might reasonably expect expeditious, quality healthcare. Instead, we wait. The American does not, and while employed, pays less for an individual’s health needs, at an average of $1,401 per year. It should never be said that the NHS is free; the working UK taxpayer funds our National Health Service at considerable cost, it is only truly free to those who do not live here, or, choose not to work while they do.
The NHS employs more people than McDonald’s but is far more likely to kill you. In just over a year, it spends the equivalent of the entire Apollo Program, which ran for over a decade and put several men on the moon. It spent £2.6 billion on negligence claims in a single year and spends an estimated legal “cost of harm” bill of £5.1 billion annually. This sum doesn’t factor in the enormous public cost of regulating its 1.5 million employees, and the legal costs incurred by those regulators.
“Protect the NHS”, an arm of the state, was used as the moral justification for depriving us of our liberties for 2 years. The Human Rights Act (1998) provided the legal framework to do this, as I wrote here. These sacred cows, and their cost to the working man, must not be exempt from the butchers table.
The Under-Utilised Englishman
The Englishman has become Britain’s most criminally under-utilised asset. There are few things as pernicious as a man who has not been allowed to serve his country.
The UK has an unemployment rate hovering between 4.4 and 4.5 per cent, but an economic inactivity rate of 21.9 per cent — nearly 1 in 5 adults of working age are not working. The Office for National Statistics reports that 44 per cent of the United Kingdom now work remotely or in a hybrid arrangement.
We are exporting our most capable citizens and importing their replacements. The grotesque 1m+ levels of net migration from poorer nations hide another reality: 70-100k natives make the decision to go where they are valued monetarily each year, and 23 per cent of the native British population intend to in the next five. It is little wonder that they are considering this, given that the native population will be an ethnic minority in schools by 2035, as Charlie Cole has suggested. Some 11,000 millionaires left the country in the first half of 2024 alone, as Dr Jake Scott wrote here. More quietly, so did thousands of engineers, doctors, academics, and legal professionals. This is not just a loss of GDP, it is a loss of the very lifeblood of our country.
From State to Serfdom
What has emerged is a society of compliant serfs. That vision is still being realised in terms of culture, but has already been realised in terms of incentives. The young, trained, and able are discovering that every tool of personal improvement is functionally ornamental. The graduate premium, meaning a degree holder is likely to earn more than a non-holder, disappeared over two decades ago, as Paul Wiltshire wrote in March for the Times Higher Education. The degree, the chartership, the professional qualification — these things decorate an Englishman’s CV but no longer assist him to build a life.
In lieu of a carrot, or financial incentive for a job well done — we are instead forced to embolden and expand professional regulators to provide a stick. That is the only way Britain today is ticking along without calamity. Today, we live in perhaps the most censorious, professionally regulated and digitally observed time in our history. The UK has over 90 regulatory bodies covering most forms of work, all restricting public speech and action of named professionals — often venturing into their private lives. Our regulators see everything, and regulate almost everyone, from unskilled care workers to MPs. This is no way to organise a state.
Even starting a business is a form of self-harm, with legislation such as the Employment Rights Act alone adding £4 billion to compliance burdens.
The Architecture of National Restoration
Britain’s malaise demands restoration, and the appetite for it, on all fronts, is growing. Our current arrangement serves no one but the administrative class that feeds upon its continuity. Restoration requires dismantling this entire edifice.
First, we must reconstruct the tax architecture entirely. As Douglas Carswell has outlined, raising the 40 per cent threshold from £50,270 to £57,820 over a single parliamentary term would produce a £40 billion annual revenue reduction and assist 5.2 million households in escaping Britain’s aspiration penalty. We should move to abolish the punitive 45 per cent rate entirely. Over the longer term, raise the 40 per cent threshold incrementally toward £100,000, creating a near-flat 20 per cent rate for productive citizens.
Second, close the floodgates. No more foreign-qualified professionals entering regulated sectors until we have trained sufficient domestic replacements. The General Medical Council, Solicitor’s Regulatory Authority, and their counterparts have become immigration agencies disguised as professional regulators. British-trained professionals should command premium salaries. Foreign credentials should not be treated as equivalent.
Universities require fundamental restructuring. We must sever their addiction to the inflated fees of foreign students and drastically reduce admissions to those for whom higher education serves a legitimate purpose.
We also need to remove the regulatory burden choking entrepreneurship. The £4 billion compliance cost of the Employment Rights Act is simply bureaucratic parasitism preventing productive enterprise.
Britain’s salvation lies in unleashing potential. The Englishman remains this nation’s greatest untapped resource. He requires a system that rewards effort, recognises excellence, and punishes mediocrity. Until we construct such a system, we will continue exporting our best to more favourable shores. The alternative is clear: a country permanently locked in managed decline, its brightest minds departed, its institutions captured by foreign interests, its native population reduced to tax-paying serfs subsidising their own displacement. For now it remains, barely, reversible.
