Britain is currently quite broken. This is the premise of The Land Where Nothing Works, a new book by historian A.G. Hopkins. It’s also a widely accepted truth among Brits of all stripes. Once seen as a country punching far above its weight, the United Kingdom has now spent some time—to quote one of its famous authors, Terry Pratchett—sauntering vaguely downward.
To pick only a few of the facts mentioned in Hopkins’ first chapter: Middle-income families were, in 2023, 20 percent poorer than their German counterparts, and 9 percent poorer than their French ones. The figure rose to 27 percent for low-income families, in comparison with both countries. Britain has the highest degree of inequality in Europe. Its productivity growth since 2008 has been half that of the 25 richest Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries.
Britain also has the highest rate of incarceration in Western Europe, and it’s the pothole capital of Europe. On top of it all, its recent prime ministers have hardly had an encouraging track record, from David Cameron’s botched Brexit vote to the moral vacuum of Boris Johnson.
So, what exactly happened?
Many historians and journalists have written books on the topic recently. The narrative goes something like this: Britain has been in slow but steady decline for around half a century, beginning just before Margaret Thatcher’s premiership in the 1980s. Thatcher’s reforms weakened the state, and the leaders that followed merely applied Band-Aids to the country’s deep wounds. After decades of muddling through, followed by the 2008 crash and a stringent austerity program in the early 2010s, Britain was hit by the twin crises of Brexit and COVID-19. Amid all this, the nation kept lying to itself about its place in the world, as it went from colonial superpower to mid-sized country off the edge of Europe.
Hopkins’ thesis hardly deviates from this assessment. As he puts it, the current malaise can mostly be explained by two trends: namely, “the historic shift from manufacturing to finance and services, and the associated transition from … the ‘compulsory globalisation’ of the imperial era to the ‘elective globalisation’ of the post-imperial world.” In short, the world changed in the 20th century, and Britain struggled to keep up.
Though its arguments may not be entirely unique, the book provides a pacy and engaging romp through British political history. It mostly picks up at the end of World War II, with Britain’s “golden age” between 1945 and 1973. In those years, “[u]nemployment was reduced to minimal levels; inflation remained low; real incomes rose.” Inequality and child poverty fell, life expectancy rose, and workers and women received more rights than ever. As Prime Minister Harold MacMillan put it in 1957, “most of our people have never had it so good.”
For a while, Britain managed to more or less coast by virtue of not having to regroup and rebuild quite as much as other countries affected by the war. But with the decolonizing process gathering pace and the 1973 oil crisis, Britain found itself in an increasing state of disrepair. The infamous 1978-79 “winter of discontent” followed, when a combination of freakishly extreme weather and waves of nationwide industrial action hobbled Britain, and eventually led to Labour losing power.
Decline only accelerated after Thatcher’s election in 1979. As Hopkins writes, GDP growth fell, unemployment and child poverty rose, inequality worsened, and the productivity gap between Britain and its European peers widened. Sure, the City of London was unleashed, but deregulation mostly helped the rich get richer. The rest is both history and more of the same.
Children wait in line for lunch at St. Mary’s RC Primary School in Battersea, south London, on Nov. 29, 2022. At 48 percent, the school has one of the highest proportions of children entitled to a taxpayer-funded lunch, as record inflation affects families. Daniel Leal/AFP via Getty Images
