Whenever the British look abroad for inspiration, I think of fish.
The “Michigan fish test” in 2001 found striking differences in the interpretations by participants from Japan and the US of an animated scene of fish swimming underwater. When asked to report what they’d seen, the Japanese viewers were more likely to describe the whole scene – a lake or a pond, say – while the Americans mentioned the big fish in the foreground: the “main characters”. When shown different versions, with changes to background scenery (seaweed, rocks, bubbles), the Japanese found it easier to spot the differences, whereas the Americans were less likely to notice. This simple test neatly demonstrated the psychological gulf between collectivist East Asian and individualist Anglosphere mindsets.
This is perhaps why Britain’s imported ideas are usually pinched from societies seen as somehow analogous: the New York City-coined “broken windows theory” behind New Labour’s Asbo; the “Australian-style points-based system” for immigration brought in by the Conservatives; the “Danish model” for asylum now being implemented by the Labour government.
It is refreshing, then, to read the journalist and former New Statesman editor John Kampfner’s latest book, Braver New World: The Countries Daring to Do Things Others Won’t, which skips the same old Scandi success stories in favour of lesser-known trailblazers, such as Taiwan and Costa Rica. (A peculiar title, given Aldous Huxley’s World State is hardly a model nation. Though in fairness Kampfner makes no apology for including harder-line regimes with poor human rights records in his travels. In Morocco, he notes, just about teetering on the right side of wistfulness, “It helps that when the king decides on something, it gets done.”)
Spanning ten countries and the problems of our era – ageing populations, integrating refugees, climate crisis, housing shortages, the double-edged tech revolution – Kampfner still finds space for the idiosyncrasies of Britain’s malaise. It’s a worthy work and one I suspect was at once exciting (Tokyo! Sahara! Bangalore!) and depressing to write. The equivalent of going on a lovely holiday, then returning to a rubbish airport like the oxymoronic London Luton and discovering all over again the feeling of a moribund home country.
Kampfner, who started out his journalistic career watching the Berlin Wall fall and East Germany with it, has always had a touch of the Reuters about him. He is best known as a Germanophile and a From Our Own Correspondent-style chronicler of ex-Soviet states’ peculiarities rather than solely the UK’s. His compelling bestseller of 2020, Why the Germans Do It Better, tapped into the post-Brexit, mid-Covid frustration with a Britain too pig-headed, complacent and silly with sleaze to learn from its closest neighbours.
Veneration of the level-headed Europeans, with their horseshoe parliaments, science degrees and subsidised rail fares became something of a cliché among the centrist dad commentariat, and Kampfner shared some of these sympathies: contrasting “grown-up” German politics with what he deemed Britain’s shallow bombast and nostalgia.
But what elevates Kampfner from the Remoaning classes is that he is, at heart, a shoe-leather reporter – curious, sceptical and, by his own admission in his latest book, a “pessimist”. It’s these qualities that make Braver New World a valuable reflection on the great policy conundrums – and the neutered state of Western liberal democracy – rather than some pollyannaish manual.
This ambivalence is clearest in Japan, which is on the front line of the demographic doom many advanced economies face. Japan has the lowest “potential support ratio” in the world (the number of people aged 15-64 to the number aged 65 and above), and is where one in three people are 65 or older. Chemists there sell more adult nappies than baby ones.
Via many notably effortless train journeys (the Japanese do it better), Kampfner zips around discovering responses to the trend, from multi-generational facilities where the elderly live alongside students on subsidised rents, who in turn hold monthly tea parties for their older neighbours, to the Tokyo commuter-belt care home that is simply a row of shared housing along a public lane, with neighbourhood kids running up and down and popping in to see the residents. These business models are underpinned by the sort of timely planning that is beyond the imagination of the UK’s gnat-like political minds: a long-term care insurance model introduced way back in 2000, paid for by taxation, compulsory insurance from the age of 40, and capped fees.
It all sounds pretty great, until we come across a rather familiar shortfall of hundreds of thousands of care workers. The Japanese, unaccustomed to high immigration, are thought to be wary of migrants who may not speak their language being involved in their intimate care. One statistician emphasises the need to mix in “non-human labour”. Enter the robots: Kampfner encounters one called Pepper, a humanoid courtesy of the investment giant SoftBank, compering a quiz for elderly dementia patients. But they were growing bored of Pepper’s pre-installed programmes – they’re stuck with the same quizzes for its five-year contract. Still, an “uncomfortable thought, but worth pondering”, writes Kampfner, is which is better: the “reluctant relative” visiting once a month and glancing at their watch, or the “all-smiling, ever-patient robot”?
Vienna, too, brings familiar obstacles. The city is renowned for its social housing projects: 60 per cent of residents live in subsidised accommodation – of all incomes and backgrounds. This housing is so aspirational that architects compete to design it, and of such good quality that most tenants don’t bother buying their flats or becoming homeowners. Yet even the municipal socialist spirit of Red Vienna, which has survived since the 1920s, isn’t immune to a common capacity problem across major European cities: 200,000 new residents each year mean “no matter how fast Vienna builds, how far in advance it plans, people keep on arriving”.
However, it is chiefly a cultural chasm that Kampfner senses may stop a country like the UK from adopting such housing practises. Austria has one of the lowest homeownership rates in Europe at 54 per cent, whereas through a combination of Margaret Thatcher’s Right to Buy and consumer journalism fixated with the “housing ladder”, the British Dream appears rooted in owning one’s home.
And that’s not to mention the collectivist spirit of the housing cooperatives Kampfner witnesses, where each inhabitant is required to donate, say, a dozen hours a month to each other (the plumber neighbour mends leaky taps, the teacher helps kids with homework, the IT worker might help fix your laptop). The German word for this is mitmachen – an invitation to join in that has no direct translation in English, “which in itself says something”, writes Kampfner.
Over and over, he encounters mentalities that feel alien to the cynicism of the Brit. In Finland (the happiest country in the world), schools operate on the principles of “meaningfulness”, “equity” and “joy” – a sure way for an English school to find itself derided in the Daily Mail. “Schooling reflects the structure of society and the priorities of politicians,” Kampfner reflects. “Just as so many of the areas I’m covering do.”
Estonia’s fully digitised state requires high levels of trust with personal data in the government, whereas public approval of mandatory digital ID in the UK plummeted earlier this year, and Keir Starmer dropped plans to introduce it. Taiwan’s health service, the best in the world, charges small fees at each appointment – an idea that has proved toxic for any British politician daring to suggest it. Morocco ended up with the largest concentrated solar plant in the world after switching much of its electricity generation to renewables following the 2008 rise in oil prices. Like much of the rich Western world, post-crash Britain stuck to “business as usual” with a little extra banking regulation.
To overcome what Kampfner characterises as Britain’s self-defeating “hang-ups”, it’s time for a culture shift – for a new consensus to form, one that accepts “our post-1945 system is coming to a shuddering halt”. One that, a little incoherently, reaches back for the utopian ideals of postwar housebuilding and town planning, but moves on from NHS sentimentalism. This is a rare example of a Broken Britain book with answers – but also exposes how stubborn those Michigan fish swimming in our minds can be.
Braver New World: The Countries Daring to Do Things Others Won’t
John Kampfner
Atlantic, 400pp, £22
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[Further reading: Paging Prime Minister Farage]
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This article appears in the 13 May 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Never-Ending Chaos
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