The temptation to wallow in our atmosphere of national decline is usually too difficult for me to resist, even in my most Pollyannaish of moods. I am so used to looking for the symbols of our collective malady that I am unable to ignore them whenever and wherever they appear.
The latest example of this, in my own experience, is the increasing number of people I know who have had their bags snatched, bikes stolen or cars broken in to. I recently met a friend in a coffee shop, where we fell victim to a classic con. A respectable-looking woman approached asking whether she could borrow the spare chair at our table. Of course, we replied, looking to the seat at which she was gesturing. And with that, my friend’s handbag was gone. My own life has not changed much as a result of this incident. But these small indecencies add up: social confidence starts to erode, and the perception that life is getting worse, not better, takes over.
In one sense, such a feeling isn’t really political. Neither the Labour Party nor the Conservative Party is responsible for that little incident. And yet these moments are political. Of course they are. At the end of July, I appeared on BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions? and realised halfway through that I was giving a similar answer to each point that was raised; but this is just another example of our systemic failure! The questions were on all the right subjects: energy policy, social care, Thames Water, regional inequality. And one after the other, they pointed to the same fundamental reality.
Successive governments have left us more dependent on foreign sources of energy than most, and with the highest energy prices in Europe. Our social care system is a mess, even though every government for the past quarter of a century has known this to be the case. No one would dare defend the water companies. And, of course, everyone can see how poorly our economy has performed since the financial crisis of 2008. As a friend of mine put it recently, none of this was inevitable. As a country, we made bad decisions, each of which made the situation worse. And so, we are where we are.
Thinking about all this on the way home from the BBC studio, I remembered a little anecdote I had stumbled across while researching my book about Britain’s long and difficult relationship with Europe. Ahead of the 1975 Conservative Party leadership election, Margaret Thatcher informed Edward Heath she would challenge him. “You’ll lose,” Heath had responded, sullenly. Almost every other publication at the time agreed with this assessment. The Spectator’s political editor, Patrick Cosgrave, however, insisted she was the only choice for conservatives like him. “What seems to me to be distinctive about Mrs Thatcher’s candidature,” he wrote, “is that implicit in it is the conviction that Mr Heath’s leadership of the Conservative Party has been a very bad one.”
Cosgrave and Thatcher may well have been wrong, misguided or just unfair in their estimation of Heath and the postwar period they came to believe he represented. Any reasonable account of Heath’s time in office must reckon with the reality that he would probably have won re-election if the 1973 oil crisis hadn’t happened. (Such things could never happen today of course…) Still, I now think of this as the Cosgrave challenge. When thinking about our leaders today, do they believe that the past couple of decades of political rule have been, as he put it, “very bad” – resulting, as I said on Any Questions?, in the systemic failures we see all around us? Or do they think our challenges are driven by individual personalities?
Just as Cosgrave’s account might have been simplistic, I have realised that while Britain’s failures might be profound, they are far from total. Someone very close to me went through something extraordinarily traumatic recently and the care they received has been of the very highest order: thoughtful, attentive, professional, kind. The smallest things were taken care of. As a result, the experience was slightly more bearable than it otherwise would have been. Why did these small things matter so much, I began to wonder afterwards. I think it’s because if we are attentive about those small things, then we will also be attentive about the most important ones. Little details matter. And they add up.
[Further reading: The Ceuta crisis has exposed Europe’s hollow centre]
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This article appears in the 05 Aug 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Europe's shame
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