Talking Britain down is no help to young people

Times

09-07-2025

I t is hard not to notice that Britain is in a bad mood. This is not the usual cultural self-deprecation, but something more corrosive. A mood of deep, almost masochistic despair has crept into our public discourse — the sense that the country is fundamentally broken and that nothing can change.
As a first-year university student, just beginning to confront the adult world in which I am to build a life, I find this national mood increasingly disorientating. At the very moment my generation is being told to step up — to work, to contribute, to find our place — we face a wall of fatalism. The economy is broken, we are told. The NHS? Beyond help. Getting on to the housing ladder? Think again. Let's not even start on welfare reform; the entire system, it seems, is doomed.
This mood used to belong to the political extremes. The populist right has long cast Britain as a fallen nation, betrayed by the 'metropolitan elites'. The radical left has framed it as irredeemably imperialist and structurally unjust. But now that language has drifted into the reformist centre ground. Many of those who once championed steady, incremental change now appear to believe that the system is so dysfunctional it may not be worth trying to fix at all.
Robert Colvile, director of the Centre for Policy Studies, wrote in The Sunday Times this week that 'the consensus is profoundly depressing', and that the British state has become so broken it 'increasingly needs radical solutions'. Rory Stewart, the patron saint of centrist dads, now sounds uncannily like Dominic Cummings in his critiques of dysfunction. Even Simon Case, the former cabinet secretary, warns of a looming debt crisis over which politicians have little control. Is Sir Keir Starmer the last member of the establishment who still believes the system can deliver, or has he too lost faith?
If young people are told again and again that the country is broken beyond repair, what incentive is there to invest in it? Why build a future in a failed economy? Why feel a duty to a country that no longer believes in itself? What makes all this even more baffling is that, by most objective measures, Britain is still a functioning, relatively wealthy and stable democracy. We have free and fair elections. Our institutions, for all their frustrations, remain among the best globally. We enjoy broad civil liberties and a lively civil society.
Of course, there are serious challenges, but pessimism is no substitute for policy, and resignation is not a strategy. So here's my plea: stop indulging the narrative of decline. Because if Britain is written off, do not be surprised when my generation downs tools and walks away.
Charlie Rowan is a first-year student at Cambridge University