The confluence

Britain's problems are all compounding one another. We need a total change of direction.

At the moment I feel like Britain has a sort of confluence of problems. The country is facing several huge challenges which are all reinforcing each other.

1 Disastrous demographics

Even if we do nothing to restrict migration, the UK’s demographic outlook threatens to make this a miserable country in multiple ways. We are a rapidly ageing society with a collapsing birth rate, with births hitting a record low last year.

I wrote before about the terrible fiscal implications of an ageing society. If you go back 20 years and apply today’s spending and tax rates to the demographics of 2004 - changing nothing else, that would give the Chancellor an extra £84 billion a year to play with, enough to cut the basic rate of tax by about 13p in the pound. Roll forward 20 years and we will see the same, but in reverse - creating a huge hole to fill.

Unless something is done, every budget will fell like austerity budget as our economy withers. Taxes per person will go up, and even as public services crumble under the load of an old population. To counteract these trends with migration without fixing the underlying problem is impossible - you would require totally implausible and ever-accelerating amounts of migration. Ultimately, you have to fix the hole in the boat rather than just try to bail out water faster and faster.

But the direct fiscal implications are only part of the story. There’s every reason to think an older population will mean a less dynamic economy. Japan actually gets many things really right - their productivity growth is not at all bad. But nonetheless, over the last 30 years, growth in GDP per capita is worse than anywhere in the G7 except Italy - just because so many people are retired.

Ageing and the growing birth gap will change our society. More people will grow old without kids or younger relations. ONS say the number of women over 80 who never had children will triple over the next fifteen years alone. There will be more older people with no living relatives who will need more paid-for help. Given that fertility rates are currently collapsing to historic lows, these trends will go into overdrive later in the century. We are on course to become a very lonely country.

And changing demographics inevitably change our politics. Other things equal, fewer families with children and more older people shifts the balance of power away from those who might want more support for young families - a vicious circle.

Demographics are the driver of history. Today, South Korea and Israel are both developed countries. But at current fertility rates every 100 Israelis can expect 210 grandchildren and the Koreans just 15. They have created an economic miracle in my lifetime, but unless they fix this, that’s the end of South Korea basically.

And yet these trends can be shaped by policy. At current fertility rates, for 100 French people today we will end up with 77 French grandchildren - but only 44 Italians or Spanish. That’s because of consistently pro-bébé policies in France.

Indeed, if we in the UK had kept the same fertility rate we had in 2010, then for every 100 people we would expect them to have 92 grandchildren. But the rate is dropping sharply: at current rates it would be just 55 grandchildren. Gulp.

2 Mass migration & breakneck social change

Among private renters in Greater London around a third are white British. In greater London’s schools just over one in five school children are White British. The old conversations about “integration” and “assimilation” don’t really even make sense any more - in many places people cannot really integrate into the traditional majority culture - it doesn’t exist any more.

The effects of this are non-linear. Britain’s political system has held sectarianism at bay for a long time, but the last election saw sectarian MPs elected and similar candidates come close in many other places.

The local elections saw the victory of Azhar Ali as an independent in Rochdale, having been suspended by Labour for antisemitism last year, and also the election of Maheen Kamran - a young woman who pledged to "end free-mixing" between men and women. Worries about a “two tier” society - what David Goodhart called “asymmetric multiculturalism” - are growing, driven by various forms of unequal treatment based on skin colour.

The pace of change has been astonishing - around one in 60 people in the UK arrived in the country in the last year, and around one in 25 in just the last four years. The ONS predicts that all population growth will in future come from net migration, with deaths in the UK outnumbering births.

Even before the recent migration boom, the 2021 Census found over a million people could not speak English well or at all. Near where I live, English was not the main language of 30% people in Leicester even back in 2021 and in several London Boroughs the figure was even higher.

The most extreme changes have been in the relatively deprived areas into which asylum seekers are moved. Government promised a limit of no more than one asylum seeker per 200 local residents but this limit is currently breached in places like Hillingdon, Hounslow, Halton, Belfast, Glasgow and Coventry.

3 Oikophobia and the undermining of anything we can unite around

What we really badly need in the face of such unprecedented changes is a really strong, confident, unifying national culture that people can assimilate into as much as possible.

But what we have got is the opposite. Most of Britain’s cultural institutions are locked into a highly self-hating mindset.

On Remembrance Sunday 2021, the Imperial War Museum in London allowed a rap group to perform a piece criticising Winston Churchill, which concluded the two-minute silence.

The Wellcome Collection in London closed its “Medicine Man” exhibition, which displayed objects collected by Henry Wellcome, after declaring it “racist, sexist, and ableist.” The Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford removed its display of shrunken heads and other ethnographic artifacts from public view, citing their role in perpetuating “racist stereotypes” about indigenous cultures. The Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge updated its exhibition labels to highlight issues of “racism, sexism, and class disparity”, while the National Trust has done similarly across its properties.

There’s an an entire industry trying to make everything about slavery. Tate Britain’s "Hogarth and Europe" exhibition included a label for a William Hogarth self-portrait that suggested the chair he sat in, possibly made from colonial timbers, could “stand in for all those unnamed black and brown people enabling the society that supports his vigorous creativity.” Jane Austen and William Shakespeare’s old houses have been ‘decolonised’. The Royal Institution’s Faraday Museum introduced a display examining the “racist,” “slave-trading,” or “problematic” links of celebrated scientists like Sir Humphry Davy. The Church of England has agreed to pay £100 million in slavery “reparations.”

This sustained campaign of demoralisation by cultural elites is also reflected in many educational institutions - and it’s working. Young people have come to dislike Britain more than they did 20 years ago, and are more likely to think it racist, disunited and shameful.

4 Social breakdown & welfarism

More than 40% of children of GCSE age live in lone parent households in Southwark, Lambeth, Islington, Lewisham, Hackney, Knowsley, Blackpool, Liverpool and Greenwich. There are whole groups for who this is the norm: 63% of kids from a Caribbean background were in lone parent households in 2021.

And many two adult households are re-formed. In 2023, 46% of first-born children aged 14 years old did not live with both natural parents - roughly twice the rate of the 1970s. Children are much more likely to have a smartphone than live with their biological father. Sometimes people split up. Sometimes that’s better than not doing. But the dramatic growth in the number of families that split is a huge change.

And it has lifelong consequences, which start early. Among 5–10 year olds, 6 per cent of children with married parents experienced diagnosable mental health issues compared to 12 per cent of children with cohabiting parents and 18 per cent of children raised by a lone parent. Similar trends are apparent for school attainment, interaction with the criminal justice system and so on.

Social breakdown interacts with welfarism, with arrows running in both directions: lone parent households are more likely to require welfare, and the welfare state incentivises social breakdown - the benefits system creates a strong couple penalty for those in work, creating a strong incentive to live apart.

The scale of the welfare problem is breathtaking. There are nearly half a million people living in households where no one has ever worked – this has doubled since winter 2020. There are almost one million young people not in education, employment or training. Around one in ten working age adults are not in work because they are unemployed or long term sick.

4.1 million people in England and Wales are on an incapacity or disability benefit - that’s one in seven adults in the North East and Wales:

The big thing driving up working age claims is the growth of various forms of mental disorder and fragility. We’ve gone from 2% of 16 year olds claiming in 2002, to 8% in 2023. That’s about two kids in every average classroom.

Historically people have, (unsurprisingly) got sicker as they age, but 16 year olds are now as likely to be claiming as 50 year olds. An ONS breakdown found that in 2022, nearly two thirds (63%) of those aged 16 to 34 cited either mental illness or “depression, bad nerves or anxiety” as their reason for being long term sick. The cost of this is accelerating - real terms spending on sickness and disability benefits is forecast to grow to £100 bn by the end of this parliament, up from £50 bn in 2008.

Despite this, the present government has abandoned plans to tighten the Work Capability Assessment, which means 400,000 more people will be signed off as unfit to work. Despite promises of reform, the OBR notes that welfare spending will continue to rise overall, and since the Spring Statement the government has also announced plans to spend a further £3.5 billion a year removing the two-child cap on benefits.

The Mental Health Culture, together with the shift to a smartphone-based childhood is likely to accelerate this. Well-meaning people have created a culture in which young people are constantly prompted to worry about their mental health.

For reasons Robert Cialdini explains well, the risk is that this worsens the problem - if we constantly prompted people to worry about their gut health, we would soon have a major problem of upset stomachs - that’s social contagion for you. And spending crazy amounts of time online at a young age makes everything worse.

Social breakdown and welfarism have a kind of momentum too. When I was in government DWP officials used to say claims are contagious - the more claims there are an area, the more likely people there are to claim - people copy what those around them are doing. In many parts of the UK we are now several generations into self-reinforcing cycles of deprivation and dysfunction.

Social breakdown and the decline of authority also have physical manifestations which make the UK unattractive. People now visit other countries where things are clean and orderly - where stuff works - and then wonder why they should stay in the UK.

Most of course will stay. But it doesn’t make people happy to live in a graffiti-ridden land, with scuzzy public spaces; pitifully ugly new buildings; fear of crime; petty anti social behaviour like playing music out loud on public transport.

Online types talk about “anarcho-tyranny” - a fancy term to describe the way that on the one hand, the law abiding are caught up in petty bureaucracy and let down by scruffy, jobsworthy services, but those who breach the rules are granted impunity, and those who make themselves more dependent are given more. Britain is a country with messed up incentives.

5 A beached, hollowed-out economy

The OBR’s forecast for growth in living standards is pretty bleak, and got worse as a result of Rachel Reeves first budget:

There are numerous reasons for these problems - the growth of welfare; an unselective migration policy; bad demographics and an ageing society; the loading up of the struggling economy with costly objectives like net zero; issues with state capacity and the furring up of the economic arteries by excessive planning processes.¹

Amazingly public services productivity fell from 1997-2010. It then grew to 2019, but the pandemic reversed this progress, meaning the ONS measure of productivity in 2024 was at 1997 levels. That’s mindblowing stagnation.

As well as failing on the basics, the UK seems to be poorly placed for the future. One reason countries in Asia have so dramatically caught up with or overtaken the UK in terms of living standards since the 1970s is that they have created a successful innovation-industrial ecosystem, and consciously aimed to grow their capabilities².

In contrast, the UK has deindustrialised more than many other developed countries, struggles to scale successful companies, and has steadily lost the areas of technological leadership it had. Our research budget such as it is goes on academic stuff, mainly in universities, with excruciating bureacracy, while Asia dominates the kind of applied, industrial research that leads to economic growth.

You can see that in the way the UK’s share of patent applications has collapsed - the graph below needs a log scale so you can even see the UK, but we file only one patent for every 16 the South Koreans do, even though South Korea is a smaller country. Even in 2021 China filed 123 applications for every one we did - and the gap is probably bigger now. Unless something changes, the future will be made in Asia, not here.

The confluence

But the really worrying thing is the confluence of all this - the way all these problems reinforce one another. Arrows run between them in all directions like a Jeremy Deller mindmap.

• Unless things change, the demographic crisis will doom the economy, and with it drag down the public realm - lower growth, less money for public spending, worse public spaces.

• Unselective mass migration creates a burden on the economy. The Asylum system alone costs c£7bn a year. Migrants move to poorer places, and many of the places that have had the most migration have the greatest problems with welfarism, social breakdown and the decay of the public realm. It is harder to create a sense of shared purpose when fewer people have much history in the country.

• Creating a more divided society and undermining the sense of Britain as a shared project makes it harder to solve the other problems. Why come to, or stay in, such a country? Why fight for it when the chips are down? Elite cultural self-hate plus two-tierism pour petrol on the sparks of conflict that such rapid migration and social change inevitably creates.

• Social breakdown and welfarism cramp the economy - welfare payments drain the public funds we need for investment in the future, while scuzzy places don’t attract investment. The soft-touch welfare state helps to drive the worst kinds of illegal immigration and create a more divided society.

• A faltering economy meanwhile makes it harder to do the things we need to do to tackle the demographic crisis. Weak growth compounds welfarism and erodes the public realm - from potholed roads to urban streets that are covered in stickers and graffiti and smell of wee or weed. In a struggling economy the dynamics of a newly hyperdiverse society become more dangerous.

What we need

Many things in the UK feel doomy right now - and this post probably doesn’t help tbh - and the national mood seems febrile. People keep voting for radical change in different ways (in 2016, 2019 and 2024) - but not getting what they wanted.

Amazingly, within months of taking over, Starmer is at the levels of popularity that Rishi was at. People are casting around for change, and seemingly prepared to roll the dice.

In a recent polling report the group More in Common talked about the black mood among voters. One report from a focus group quoted Gary, a regional sales manager, saying that what the country needs is a coup d’état. It is not a good sign when Gary, sales manager, feels in the mood for revolution.

What we need is indeed massive change - though ideally more like a restoration than a revolution.

Ultimately what is driving all this is a bad set of ideas, and those ideas can be changed.

Perhaps the best example is Japan’s Meiji Restoration, which reunified and modernised the country, ending its balkanisation; abolished backwards practices and class privileges; and put at its heart the idea of aggressively acquiring knowledge and capacity from the rest of the world. The Charter Oath of the Meiji Restoration is not a bad manifesto for a country in need of a turnaround: “All classes, high and low, shall unite… Evil customs of the past shall be broken off … Knowledge shall be sought throughout the world.”

Conclusion

There has been a lot of chat about the idea of a “vibe shift” in politics recently. I think this both is and isn’t true.

Actually, many people have been worried about these problems for a long time. I used to hear about these concerns in focus groups 25 years ago.

Two things have changed though.

On the bad side, the problems have all got more intense and harder to ignore.

On a more promising note, new media has allowed a bottom-up conversation that wasn’t possible before. Social media has dismantled the barriers to entry, and an infrastructure of intermediate media (substack, online magazines, talk radio and tv) is increasingly allowing that to shape the national conversation. At the start of this year we went from an online argument about the grooming gangs to votes in parliament within a couple of weeks. Prestigious real world magazines can pick up ideas from the online world. Many taboos are suddenly collapsing, and gatekeepers are becoming irrelevant.

This country’s problems are monumental and interconnected. The only positive thing is that more and more people can see that, and want to do something about it.

1. As described by Britain Remade, Looking for Growth and Foundations.

2. David Sainsbury’s book Windows of Opportunity is excellent on all this.