Britain is heading for utter oblivion. Here is why

Telegraph

5 hours ago

At the moment I feel like Britain has a confluence of problems. There is no one single issue which is damaging the nation; there are several. And from demographics to immigration, family background to welfare, these huge challenges are all reinforcing each other.
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; births hit a record low last year.
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. Unless something is done, every budget will feel like an austerity budget. Taxes per person will go up; public services will 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 to make up for it. 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 gets many things 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 – and this is 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 relatives. The ONS says the number of women over 80 in Britain who have never had children will triple over the next fifteen years alone. We are on course to become a very lonely country.
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. South Korea has created an economic miracle in my lifetime, but unless they fix this, that's basically the end of the country.
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.
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 because 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 anti-Semitism last year. They also saw the election of Maheen Kamran – a young woman who pledged to 'end free-mixing' between men and women. Worries about a 'two tier' society 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 per cent of people in Leicester back in 2021; in several London Boroughs the figure was even higher.
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 very 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.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 artefacts 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 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.
Social breakdown and welfarism
More than 40 per cent 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 whom this is the norm: 63 per cent of kids from a Caribbean background were in lone parent households in 2021.
And many two adult households are re-formed. In 2023, 46 per cent 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 that 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, which creates 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 per cent of 16 year olds claiming in 2002, to 8 per cent 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 to be sick as 50 year olds. An ONS breakdown found that in 2022, nearly two thirds (63 per cent) 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 billion 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.
Social breakdown and welfarism have a kind of momentum too. When I was in government, DWP officials used to say claims are contagious. 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.
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's 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 capabilities.
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 goes on academic stuff, mainly in universities, with excruciating bureaucracy, 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 around £7 billion 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.
A more divided society 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 and two-tier justice pour petrol on the sparks of conflict that 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 creates 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 the 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.