No Sacred Cows

What kind of Britain are we trying to build? Before answering that, it is worth asking what happened to the Britain many people once thought they were living in.

For much of the post-war period there was a growing assumption that life would gradually improve. Not in a straight line and not for everyone, but in the main each generation expected to be a little more prosperous, a little more secure and a little more optimistic than the one before. Scientific and technological progress would improve lives, eventually beyond recognition. Democracy would spread. International cooperation would gradually replace old rivalries. War was over. Our children would inherit opportunities that we ourselves never had.

Today that confidence has largely evaporated. Young people increasingly struggle to buy homes. Many working people feel they are running ever faster, simply to stand still. Public services are visibly strained. Older people often speak of a loss of community and belonging. Trust in politicians has collapsed. International tensions are rising. Environmental warnings that were once dismissed as problems for future generations are beginning to unfold within our own lifetimes, yet remain politically marginal compared with the endless parade of daily outrages and manufactured controversies.

The result is not just economic frustration. It is a growing sense that something has gone wrong, even if Britons today disagree profoundly about what that something is. And when societies become anxious, people look for explanations. When they become angry, they look for somebody to blame. None of this is new. Throughout history there have always been politicians, movements and media outlets willing to provide convenient villains. Immigrants. Foreigners. Elites. Welfare claimants. Billionaires. Brussels. Royalty. London. The woke. The establishment. The list changes according to political fashion, but the mechanism remains remarkably familiar. Complex problems are reduced to simple stories and uncertainty is replaced by certainty in the form of comfortable delusions.

Some of those targets may occasionally deserve criticism. But when every problem has a single cause and every cause has a single enemy, doubt and scepticism are clearly required.

Britain’s difficulties are not the product of one group, one party or one ideology. Nor are they uniquely British. Across much of the developed world we see many of the same patterns: declining trust, political polarisation, rising inequality, social fragmentation, an increasingly toxic information environment, and institutions struggling to adapt to rapid economic and technological change.

That does not mean that the decline was inevitable, or that responsibility is so widely dispersed that nobody can be held accountable. Governments made choices. Markets were regulated in particular ways. Public assets were sold, investment was postponed, local government was weakened and short-term financial returns were frequently valued above long-term social resilience. Different parties contributed in different degrees, sometimes through ideology and sometimes through simple political timidity. But the deeper failure has been cumulative. Britain has spent decades consuming political, institutional and physical inheritance while investing too little in what would replace it.

Many of the achievements that transformed post-war Britain required governments to think beyond the next election: the National Health Service, council housing, new towns, expanded education, scientific research, transport networks and the rebuilding of national infrastructure. They were imperfect, but they rested upon the assumption that government could plan, build and act on behalf of generations not yet able to vote. Modern politics has increasingly retreated from that ambition. Governments announce initiatives, oppositions oppose them almost by reflex, policies are repeatedly redesigned, and long-term projects are subjected to short-term fiscal rules, ministerial turnover and the rhythms of the daily news cycle. Yet housing, education, energy, infrastructure, demographic change and environmental resilience develop over decades. A country that cannot think beyond the next election gradually loses the ability to shape its own future.

Yet much of our political debate remains oddly superficial. We argue endlessly about symptoms while paying far less attention to causes. We debate immigration while housing becomes increasingly unaffordable. We debate culture wars while wealth and influence continue to concentrate. We debate national identity while local communities weaken. We obsess over today’s controversy and neglect problems that develop over decades. Meanwhile, social media rewards outrage over understanding, political parties focus on the next election cycle, and news organisations compete for attention in a market where anger often sells better than nuance.

Behind many of these arguments lies a less dramatic but more fundamental problem – Britain has struggled for years to become more productive. Productivity sounds like the sort of bloodless economic term designed to end a conversation, but it determines how much value can be created from the work people do. When it stagnates, wages struggle to rise without inflation, businesses invest less, tax revenues disappoint and governments find it harder to improve public services without continually increasing the burden elsewhere. Britain’s weak productivity is not a failure of ordinary people to work hard enough. It reflects low and inconsistent investment, inadequate infrastructure, skills shortages, regional imbalance, policy instability and an economy too often rewarded for extracting value from existing assets rather than creating anything new.

This is connected to another increasingly obvious weakness – Britain has become remarkably bad at building. Not simply houses, although the shortage of secure and affordable homes distorts almost every stage of life, but reservoirs, electricity networks, transport links, laboratories, hospitals and other essential infrastructure. Projects become trapped for years between fragmented responsibility, political indecision, planning disputes, legal challenges, changing regulations and understandable local resistance from communities that are too often asked to absorb development while receiving few of its benefits. The answer is not to abolish environmental protection or silence local people. It is to develop a planning system capable of making timely, democratic decisions, compensating affected communities fairly and recognising that refusing to build also carries economic, social and environmental costs. A country cannot promise more homes, cleaner energy, secure water supplies and modern public services while opposing almost every physical structure required to provide them.

None of this means that immigration, identity, taxation, welfare or national sovereignty are unimportant questions. They are important. But they are not the whole story, and pretending otherwise has done little except deepen division.

Demography also imposes constraints that no slogan can repeal. People are living longer, which is an achievement, but an ageing population increases demand for pensions, health care and social care while reducing the proportion of working-age people supporting them. Rising long-term illness adds further pressure. Immigration may affect that arithmetic, but it cannot permanently solve it, and simply restricting immigration does not make an ageing society younger. A serious politics would explain these trade-offs honestly rather than promising Scandinavian public services, American levels of taxation, early retirement, controlled immigration and permanently balanced budgets as though all could be achieved simultaneously without difficult choices.

A better Britain would also have to confront the weakening of the institutions through which people once encountered one another as citizens rather than as competing political identities. Trade unions, churches, clubs, local newspapers, youth organisations, libraries, community associations and political parties once provided imperfect but important forms of connection. Their decline has not left an empty space. It has left more people isolated, more dependent upon commercial platforms for information and belonging, and more likely to encounter one another through algorithms designed to maximise attention rather than understanding. Close personal relationships remain strong for many people, but that is not quite the same thing as belonging to a functioning community or possessing confidence in the wider society around us.

Trust matters here, not because institutions should be obeyed uncritically, but because no complex society can function if every institution is assumed to be corrupt, every expert dishonest and every unfavourable fact fabricated. Trust reduces the friction of ordinary life. It allows strangers to cooperate, contracts to be honoured, elections to be accepted, public health advice to be followed and political opponents to be regarded as mistaken rather than treasonous. Trust must be earned through competence, transparency and accountability. But once destroyed, it cannot be restored merely through better public relations. Institutions have to become demonstrably more trustworthy.

A better Britain will not emerge from finding a new enemy to hate. We already have plenty of those. Nor will it emerge from nostalgia. The Britain of the past contained its own injustices, failures and myths. There is no golden age waiting to be rediscovered.

It will not emerge from technological optimism alone either. Artificial intelligence, automation and other advances may increase productivity, improve medicine and remove some of the most repetitive forms of work. They may also displace employment, narrow entry routes into skilled professions, concentrate wealth and power still further, and overwhelm the public sphere with cheaply manufactured falsehoods. Technology does not arrive with its social consequences predetermined. Those consequences depend upon who owns it, who regulates it, whose work it replaces, who receives its benefits and whether education and public institutions can adapt quickly enough. Britain must decide whether it intends merely to consume technologies developed elsewhere, or to help shape them in the public interest.

That makes education central to any serious project of national renewal. Education cannot be reduced to producing employable units for the labour market, important though skills are. A democracy also needs citizens able to evaluate evidence, recognise manipulation, understand probability, distinguish expertise from assertion and change their minds without experiencing it as humiliation. Scientific, civic, political and media literacy are no longer optional refinements. In an information system capable of placing endless quantities of persuasive nonsense in every pocket, they are part of the basic infrastructure of democracy.

What is needed is something less dramatic and probably less satisfying. A willingness to think beyond tribes, slogans and scapegoats. A willingness to value evidence even when it challenges our assumptions. A willingness to judge ideas on their merits rather than on who proposed them. Above all, a willingness to think beyond the next headline and ask what sort of country we want future generations to inherit.

That requires a more realistic understanding of Britain’s place in the world. Britain remains a wealthy country with considerable diplomatic, cultural, scientific and institutional strengths. But it is no longer an imperial power able to dictate the terms of its engagement with others, and pretending otherwise merely converts reduced influence into theatrical defiance. In a world shaped increasingly by continental economies, technological blocs, climate pressures, migration, pandemics and geopolitical rivalry, national resilience and international cooperation are not opposites. Sovereignty is not simply the freedom to act alone. It is the practical capacity to achieve results, which frequently requires countries to act together.

Because the uncomfortable truth is that many of the challenges we face today cannot be solved within a single parliamentary term. Some may take decades. That requires patience, honesty and a degree of political maturity that has become increasingly rare.

Environmental change makes that need for maturity unavoidable. Climate disruption, water insecurity, soil degradation, biodiversity loss and threats to food production are often treated as separate green concerns, to be considered when economic conditions permit. In reality they are conditions upon which every economy and society depends. Flood protection, heat-resistant homes, secure water supplies, resilient agriculture and a functioning natural environment are not luxuries. They are forms of national insurance. The costs of preparation may be politically inconvenient, but the costs of permanent reaction to repeated emergencies will be far greater.

None of this offers the emotional satisfaction of a revolution or the reassuring simplicity of a five-point plan. It requires choices, compromise and institutions capable of maintaining direction across changes of government. There will always be legitimate disagreement about taxation, ownership, public spending, regulation and the appropriate balance between national and local control. A mature democracy does not eliminate those disagreements. It develops the capacity to resolve them without abandoning evidence, inventing enemies or restarting the country from first principles every few years.

Perhaps that is where rebuilding begins? Not with more promises to make Britain great again. Not with endlessly recycled phantom villains. But with the recognition that a healthy society depends upon trust, competence, critical thinking and a shared sense of responsibility for the future.

It also depends upon recovering the habit of solving real problems together. Democracy does not require citizens to agree about everything, or even to like one another very much. It requires enough common ground to accept that reality exists independently of political allegiance, that opponents may sometimes be right and that compromise is not necessarily betrayal. Without that foundation, every difficult decision becomes another battle in an endless culture war and the future is steadily sacrificed to the performance of present grievance.

The question is not whether Britain can be made perfect. It cannot. The question is whether we can leave it wiser, fairer, more resilient and better prepared than we found it. Perhaps that is ambition enough for one generation?