Britain is getting worse and the old politics offers no solutions

No matter what the establishment claims, the public can sense that the country is at a tipping point

Is life in Britain getting better or worse? Fraser Nelson has ignited a vigorous debate by positing that “broadly speaking there has never been a better time to live in the UK”.

As evidence, he pointed out that overall crime, according to surveys, is only a third of the level of 25 years ago; that crime had fallen while immigration surged; that air pollution was at historically low levels; and that carbon emissions were falling.

His assertion feels implausible. Still, one cannot simply dismiss it with anecdotes, or just claim the data is wrong. Data does matter, and it’s not necessarily mistaken to use it to question the popular mood. After all, with Nelson as editor, The Spectator persistently opposed lockdowns on the basis that Covid was neither as dangerous nor as fast-spreading as the government claimed. Hard information proved the policy wrong.

So what is it that jars to so many of us – including this writer?

Well, first of all, it’s that if you are trying to assess the quality of life in Britain you must use all available information and analyse it properly. In fact, overall crime has stopped falling and is ticking up again. Crimes as various as sexual assault and shoplifting, crimes that matter to us day-to-day, are going up significantly. Moreover we are all adjusting our behaviour as shops, streets, and trains feel more threatening, and as the police seem ever less on the side of the law-abiding. The data doesn’t catch everything.

And crime is only one element of the picture. We’ve had a serious spike in inflation and we can see prices going up yet again under the very uncertain hand of the Bank of England. Vast numbers of Britons have given up working. And GDP per head has grown barely 6 per cent since its pre-crash peak in 2007 – 0.3 per cent a year. In this steady state economy, the only way you get richer is if someone else gets poorer. Look no further for the source of the social conflict of recent years.

So the wider data certainly gives a gloomier picture. But personally I believe something even more important is also going on.

People are sensing the country is reaching a tipping point and that the future is going to be different to the past. When this happens, existing data will, self-evidently, tell you nothing reliable about the future.

What a growing number of voters now see is that for 20 years we have taken the easy way out. We haven’t dealt with our problems and we have carried on living on tick. But now the various bills must be paid and it is not going to be fun.

For 20 years we have robbed selected wealthy Peter to pay collective Paul – or rather not pay, because we haven’t run a budget surplus in any of those years and now one government pound in every twelve is spent on financing debt. It’s not surprising people worry another financial crisis is coming.

For 20 years we allowed immigration to increase to its highest ever levels. The consequences are now visible well beyond our major cities and we have nowhere to put illegal migrants except in hotels in hitherto untouched communities. Is it any wonder that people are suddenly agitated about the scale of the problem?

For 20 years we told people that wind and sun could power Britain. Now they see fields covered with solar panels, their energy bills going up, and heavy industry leaving the country. Is it surprising that suddenly people think they have been sold a pup and fear the consequences?

Even in those fortunate parts of the country that remain relatively untouched by migration or crime, people are beginning to ask themselves “how long can it last”? No-one seems to think the problems can be fixed. All they hope to do is insulate themselves from them as long as they can.

That’s why people are right to be unhappy. So why have so many voices embarked on the implausible task of telling people things are not so bad? It’s because they have to. After all, if the last twenty years have not been spent on turning Britain into a close approximation of the Elysian fields, but rather on complacently storing up difficulties that are now bursting out, why should anyone have confidence in the political ideas of that period or the parties and politicians in charge during it?

The answer is that people won’t have such confidence and will turn to others. That’s why the establishment are so keen to persuade you that things are not as bad as they seem. “Trust us, it’s not so bad, we’ll put things back on track.”

Trust me, they won’t. The people who got us here, who tried to stop us leaving the EU, who told us we had to rely on immigration, who said we could safely run down our energy systems and outsource the consequences to China: these people won’t get us out again. Whatever Britain’s future, it can’t be like the past. Change is needed and change is surely coming.

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