Who Broke Britain? The list of suspects.

Part 4 in a series

The first three in this series of posts looked at the various ways very different people think Britain is ‘broken’. Not all of them are right - some of the complainers are just grumpy old men. But some of them are on to something. I looked at what is behind the aspects of the complaint that are justified and concluded that most of the problem is economic in nature.

The twin problems of economic stagnation and large rises in inequality are to blame.

Britain, like the United States, has become a winner-takes-all economy - but without US-style productivity growth. Indeed, Britain’s main economic problem is a mysterious disappearance of productivity growth. Alongside high inequality, low growth is an even bigger problem than many people realise.

Despite all the grumbling about ‘Broken Britain’, little of the detail has become a topic for daily discussion in the media (with honourable exceptions) or across the UK’s dinner tables. I think that’s because it is horrendously complicated with many drivers of the decline - the suspects. Just identifying them is hard enough, let alone trying to come up with solutions. But admitting you have a problem is the only way you begin to solve it.

Nick Cohen, a prominent British journalist, is one of the rare beasts who has picked up on all of this, in his Substack. It’s worth quoting him at length - he picks up several of themes discussed below and in my previous three Substacks.

Economic historians look at Britain’s dismal performance, and say that the UK has seen nothing like it since the industrial revolution. We are not merely in relative economic decline against our competitors – we’ve experienced relative decline since the late 19th century – but in a period of stagnation of such length and severity that we are decoupling from the rich world.

Unless current trends are reversed, the UK will become like Argentina and Italy[i]: a country that was once was prosperous, and might have been more prosperous still, but lost its way.

You do not need to be an economist to feel our decline. You see it in the shabbiness on the streets, the worn faces and clothes of passers-by, the frustration and disappointment of the young, the ambulances unable to discharge the sick and the dying, the pound shops and charity stores, the befouled rivers and beaches, the creaking criminal justice system, the inability to build anything from homes to a railway line, and above all in the decline in living standards.

Modern media are not well adapted for the long haul. Nor indeed are most people. Like old age for an individual, national decline creeps up on you. There are moments of crisis that are the equivalent of a stroke or a hip replacement operation: the banking crash of 2007/8 or the Brexit referendum of 2016 that shock us.  But for most of the last 15 years the UK has just quietly tottered away from the prosperity of countries it once considered its equals.

In my posts I often refer to the one media outlet that has done a good job of chronicling Britain’s decline. Like Cohen, I begin this post with a picture, from The Economist, that tells a thousand words: this shows the stagnation in the median household’s income and its corresponding decline relative to other countries - nations that British people normally think of as economic peers, not superiors. Remember, median income, by definition, is bang in the middle of the income distribution. We are not looking at the bottom 10%, this is middle Britain.

Whodunnit? The list of suspects: