What’s eating Britain? A look at the issues gripping its soul

On an unseasonably dank day in September, UK prime minister Rishi Sunak entered the press centre in Number 9 Downing Street to solemnly acknowledge what most people already knew: Britons are deeply unhappy at the state of their country. That day’s weather merely reflected the national mood.

With half his cabinet present to give him support, he was there ostensibly to announce a rollback of costly climate change rules. Yet as he took a heavy breath and looked out across the wood-panelled room, Sunak used his presaging remarks to capture a more general sense of declinism that, lately, has wrapped itself around Britain like a wet, heavy blanket.

“For too many, there is a nagging sense that the path we are on ... isn’t quite what we hoped for, and nobody has the courage to say so,” said the Tory leader. “We make too little, we spend too much, things take too long. And even when we know these things, we seem powerless to change them.”

Britain, he said, has “stumbled into a consensus about the future of our country that nobody seems happy with”.

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[ Sunak tries to paint himself as the change-maker as Tories prepare for election battle ]

[ UK elections guru: Tories ‘have had it’ but Labour struggling to sell ‘vision’ to voters ]

Blaming his predecessors, the man who leads the party that has ruled for 13 years promised change. Meanwhile, in the red corner, the Labour Party insists only it can arrest the slide.

Whoever wins the next election faces a daunting task to jolt Britain out of its post-Brexit stasis. Its economic growth is anaemic while its national debt tops levels not seen in 60 years. Living standards are in the middle of their biggest two-year fall since the 1950s due to inflation. Infrastructure is creaking, industrial relations are sour and national morale is low after years of political psychodrama.

The coming general election looks set to open a window into the soul of Britain. For those of us who peer through it, what are we likely to see?

Even Britain’s cherished National Health Service (NHS) is seen as more of a national embarrassment, festooned with strikes, escalating wait times and a ballooning bill that could swamp its public finances. Meanwhile, the country’s sense of ill-at-ease plays out daily in energy-sapping culture war debates over everything from trans rights to climate change.

Yet all is not lost. Britain remains the sixth biggest economy in the world and, if it can unclog growth that is stymied by its flagging productivity, a bounceback could still happen. Its politics may be under strain, but it remains a bastion of vibrant parliamentary democracy with multi-ethnic front benches in the main political parties. Britain has led the way in backing Ukraine against Russia and, despite its Brexit strife, its relations with its neighbours have warmed over the past year.

The death of Queen Elizabeth and the subsequent coronation of King Charles showed that Britain still retains a latent, if diminishing, ability to rally much of its citizenry around national ideals and sentiment. The nation wants better for itself and knows it needs change to get there.

The coming general election looks set to open a window into the soul of Britain. For those of us who peer through it, what are we likely to see?

Politics

“Our problems are serious and embedded. There is a worrying mismatch between how we see ourselves and what Britain is,” says Anand Menon, professor of European politics and European affairs at King’s College in London, and a prominent commentator on UK affairs.

“I was talking to a senior diplomat recently and he said he plays ‘world beating’ bingo every time that phrase is used to describe something in Britain. We bought into this notion of being world beaters at everything. Yet the objective facts are clear: we are not. It is our inability to think about this and to address it that is causing some of the problems. We face a difficult few years ahead.”

Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London and an authority on the fortunes of the ruling Conservative Party, believes the party has “slipped its moorings” as a stable centre-right force, and this is having ramifications for the UK’s system of political governance.

“A little bit of me died,” he says, when Sunak pivoted Britain away from its previously ambitious climate change strategy and started electioneering with talk of championing motorists instead.

The fiscal pincer – escalating social spending paid for by a weaker economy – that is gripping Britain means deep reform of its public services is imperative.

“If that is what we have come to, I do despair a little bit. We are at a much more serious pass than we have been for many years and our governing politics have gone off the scale. But before we run away with ourselves, it is worth remembering that the underlying pattern of the British political system remains the same as it has been for decades.”

Bale says the nation’s postwar political cadence has always moved to the same beat, and it goes like this. The Conservatives get into power and do not spend enough on public services, which eventually crumble. Voters decide they want better services, and do not care so much that it will cost extra taxes. Labour gets in, diverts resources towards public services and uses taxes to pay for it. Then people get fed up paying the taxes, and turn to the Conservatives again to change the dial.

“And so on, and so on. In Britain we swing back and forth, again and again. In a way, we’re still broadly in that pattern now. The underlying dynamics remain the same,” he says.

Economy and public services

The challenges for the UK are stacking up. The biggest one lies in its greasy till. If economies are the engines of nations, Britain’s is spluttering like a banger in need of a tune-up.

All reliable public polling, such as Ipsos’s monthly Issues Index, show economic worries are the biggest for British voters. The economy was the top issue for 37 per cent of those polled by Ipsos in September, more than twice as many who mentioned climate change. The related issue of high inflation/cost of living was second at 30 per cent, ahead of the NHS and immigration as worries in the minds of the public. Official lifestyle opinion surveys from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) paint a broadly similar picture. Britons worry about what’s in their pockets, and in their exchequer.

The UK’s record national debt of £2.5 trillion (€2.8 trillion) has recently topped 100 per cent of the size of its economy, as measured by GDP, for the first time since the 1960s. That proportion could triple by 2050 if nothing changes. The national interest bill of more than £100 billion has doubled in a year. If the interest bill was a government department, it would be the second biggest in Whitehall after Health.

Gerard Lyons, a son of Irish immigrants who is one of Britain’s top economists and a former adviser to Boris Johnson, says Britain meets the definition of being in a “debt trap” – when interest rates exceed growth rates. Growth is barely 0.5 per cent currently, while the interest rate is 5.25 per cent. “Something has to give,” he says. “Growth is the solution but nobody knows the answer to get it.”

Tom Clougherty, research director of the Centre for Policy Studies, says the cost of an ageing population is set to add a “large problem” in coming years. The ONS says England, for example, will go from having 18.2 per cent of its population aged over 65 in 2018 to 20.7 per cent in 2028.

Clougherty says public spending on the over 65s could rise to 11 per cent of the value of Britain’s economy in coming years, or annual spending of £250 billion. With little borrowing capacity and stunted growth, Britain may need to hike taxes. “But you could do the full [former Labour leader] Jeremy Corbyn agenda on taxes, and then some, and still only get a fifth of what you need.”

The only show in town remains the discourse on small boats and asylum

—  Rob McNeill

The fiscal pincer – escalating social spending paid for by a weaker economy – that is gripping Britain means deep reform of its public services is imperative. This spells trouble for the NHS, where the number of people on waiting lists grew to a record 7.3 million over summer. Meanwhile, the health service cannot find enough staff: roughly one in ten (about 150,000) posts are unfilled. Public satisfaction with the NHS is at its lowest since Tony Blair’s Labour swept into power in 1997.

Rory Stewart, a former Tory minister who quit the party in disgust over its post-Brexit populist trajectory, recently told a Chatham House event that repeatedly unfilled political promises to “fix” the NHS are an example of the “sense of scleroticism” afflicting Britain: “Politicians keep claiming they will do things that they cannot do. The health secretary says he can sort the NHS, but clearly the system is far too big and complex for any one person to do it.”

Immigration

A tried-and-tested way to boost economic growth and productivity, and provide workers for stuttering services such as the NHS, would be to boost immigration and bring in more workers from abroad. Britain’s economy is static, but so is unemployment at a reasonably low 4.5 per cent. The workforce is too skinny.

Yet to further boost levels of immigration looks politically impossible. It runs counter to the prevailing narrative, which sees net legal migration of 600,000 people, and the oft-conflated but separate issue of illegal migrants arriving on “small boats”, as gushing taps to be shut. Ipsos polling shows immigration is a top concern of 26 per cent of voters, fourth in the rankings but growing. ONS data, however, reveals the issue is far more important to the over 65s and to Conservative Party voters.

“Politicians are promising things [about their plans to cut immigration numbers] that are highly unlikely. It has been a hugely vexing issue that, apart from a two-year lull immediately after the Brexit vote, has driven British politics since 2010,” says Rob McNeill, deputy director of the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford.

The “lull” from 2016 to 2018 was because, he says, people felt the “job had been done” by the vote alone. Yet Britain’s net migration figures have doubled since before Brexit. He questions the wisdom of politicians setting immigration target numbers. Conservatives have often suggested they would like to see net migration below 100,000 per year. The recent surge, McNeill says, was down to factors including Ukraine and pent-up demand of inward arrivals after the pandemic.

“But as for the notion that there is a ‘right amount’ of immigration that can be measured in a technocratic way; there is no way of assessing that number because it doesn’t exist,” he says. He estimates the net figure will come down anyway in coming years, and “take the sting” out of debate.

As for illegal arrivals, the Conservatives will continue to pursue hard deterrent policies, such as flying them to Rwanda, while Labour favours diplomatic solutions to staunch the flow of refugees at source. “The only show in town remains the discourse on small boats and asylum,” says McNeill.

Race

Discussion of asylum inevitably spills over into racial politics in Britain. Politicians who bang the drum loudest on immigration, such as home secretary Suella Braverman and Brexiteer Nigel Farage, are often accused of race-baiting, which they deny. Meanwhile, discussion of race and multiculturalism abounds in a country that was fascinated with the death of George Floyd, 4,000 miles away in the US.

Tomiwa Owolade recently wrote a book, This is Not America, in which he argued that US-style racial identity politics have been inappropriately imported into Britain via social media. A British man born in Nigeria who immigrated when he was a child, Owolade says his personal experience tells him “the vicious day-to-day racism” of the 60s and 70s is over in Britain.

“That is not to say that racism has completely disappeared,” he told The Irish Times. “But with racial violence, the US and UK are completely different countries. The US is a far more violent country anyway and because of its history of race and slavery, violence there tends to manifest itself in a racial way. But it is not the same here in Britain.”

Owolade says the problem is not how to integrate Black people into Britain, but to recognise that they are integrated already, in many avenues such as sport and politics: “The future is about trying to accommodate this fact. If a Black British person went to Africa, the most striking thing about them there would be that they are British, not that they are Black.”

Britain’s racial sin, insofar as he sees one, is to “homogenise” the experiences of people of different races. Owolade says white British people tend to, say, view Black Caribbean people and Black Africans as facing the same issues.

“But they do not. Black Caribbean boys, for example, are more than twice as likely to be excluded from school. Understanding these kinds of differences are crucial for fixing problems.”

Religion

He also identifies another area where people misconstrue the effects of immigration on British society: religion. In the 2021 census, the number of people who identify as Christian in England and Wales dipped below 50 per cent for the first time, while a recent survey of Anglican priests also found that they believed Britain is “no longer a Christian country”.

Owolade says the decline of Christianity is sometimes blamed on immigrants when, in fact, the reality is often the opposite: “The decline would be even more stark were it not for immigration. Black Africans and Caribbean people go to church in large numbers. The irony of that is that London is at once Britain’s most secular and also its most religious city, because it is its most diverse.”

From race to immigration, public services to the economy and, threading all of those issues, the question of the stability of Britain’s system of political governance, the country is in the midst of a period of roiling, existential change.

The next election campaign will be the stage where all of this plays out, in a noisy, eager and very British way.