30 July 2025

Britain’s decline is as much intellectual as political

Where are our storytellers to shake us or point a way ahead?

Illustration by Gary Waters / Ikon Images

Early August is always an important time in the political year: Westminster empties out and the stuffy, self-obsessed political class is scattered across the country. So long as politicians look, listen and think, it is an essential, annual reality check.

This year, of course, any sentient, respectful parliamentarian will be venturing into the streets with a mixture of foreboding and guilt. The prospect of anti-migrant riots spreading is real. Even the neighbour’s cat knows an economic crisis is close. The political class is loathed. Part of what the returning MPs will find is the burning, despairing Britain the right-wing media so delightedly describes, and sometimes incites – a country Nigel Farage says is undergoing “societal collapse”.

Let us talk about potholes instead. Confession: in the past, any politician talking about the importance of potholes got short shrift from me. Boring. Small-scale. Raise your eyes, comrade.

This was my failure of empathy. Think of driving down any road, and the sudden bang and grind of a pothole – the unease about what it’s done to the undercarriage of the car, the faint nausea from the jolt, the closeness of losing control and a serious accident.

Yes, that bang is just another small irritant in an average day. Yet it’s also a reminder of the degeneration of the public realm. It’s the transport equivalent of seeing a phone thief scamper off unchallenged or going past a high street half of which is boarded up. It’s another part of the realisation that everything’s going to pot (hole).

Sorry about that. But now imagine the potholes have been filled in and the jolt never happens. The drive is smooth. The day is, in a tiny way, better. This is increasingly likely. Back at Christmas, the government announced a record £1.6bn investment to fill potholes and repair roads, an increase of nearly 50 per cent on local road maintenance funding from last year and enough to fix the equivalent of seven million extra potholes in this financial year.

Wider point? Public investment has risen by £113bn relative to Conservative plans, bringing it to the highest levels since the 1970s, and much more, as a share of GDP, the level seen during the last New Labour government.

Beyond potholes, the evidence of change should begin to be apparent. With investment in diagnostics, NHS waiting times have fallen for four to five consecutive months, including the first April decrease since 2008 – though this is threatened by the resident doctors’ strike.

If you have young children and a low income you may already be using one of the first tranche of 750 breakfast clubs, or you might be near a Best Start family hub – a one-stop shop for early-years parents, into which the government has put £500m, opening up to 1,000 by 2028. These will affect the least privileged families most; so, you won’t read about them on the front pages of most newspapers. The same goes for the new school-based nurseries, designed to build a habit of attending primary schools, with the first 4,000 places available in September.

This is not to mention the new laws to crack down on shoplifters, or the £275m more for skills training and apprenticeships in defence and engineering, or the private inward investment such as Amazon’s £40bn, bringing thousands of jobs to Hull, Northampton and the East Midlands (there are many other examples). I am not saying that any of this should stop us talking about the government’s failures over stopping the boats, or crime – which will be the major Reform theme this summer.

The positive side of the balance sheet should not stop us from dwelling on the impact of the tax changes on small businesses and farmers, or the bad missteps on benefits and winter fuel allowances. But the further you are away from the hothouse recriminations of Westminster, the more you see hard evidence of positive change.

The truth is that, away from the flashpoints we focus on, much of the country is a calmer, more civil and quietly improving place than the current “we’re all finished, let’s leave Britain now” of anti-Labour media hysteria. Keir Starmer thinks it just takes time to turn things round after more than a decade of steady decline, and that evidence of investment and rebuilding will become apparent everywhere – not now, but well before the next election. That’s not daft.

This is not an argument, really, about this policy or that, but about proportion and reasonableness, qualities rarely found in the theatre of Westminster politics – a shabby old music hall in which, sadly, ministers are mostly not very accomplished performers.

And yes, obviously, there are many signs of real national decline. There were in the early 1980s, and in the late 1990s, too. And it’s the job of the media, our social antennae, to show them. No modern British journalist ever improved their reputation, or salary, by an exhibition of cheerfulness.

We are experiencing decadence, as part of the wider European culture, which is also in long decline. Our readiness to take risks, innovate and plan long-term seems diminished compared with last century, when we were already falling.

What is new and disorientating is that we have so few storytellers to shake us or point a way ahead. We have hardly any public philosophers of left or right; no nationally discussed novelists or poets. As leaders of a bigger conversation, our navel-gazing universities have become entirely useless.

This means that we push our anxieties, our frustrated hopes and our confusion even more on to the shoulders of political leaders who are entirely unsuited to bearing the weight. They are simply poor at making big arguments, whether about faith and community integration in a migration-changed country, or the natural limits of the welfare state. Once we had thinker-politicians who could, for good or ill, catch our imaginations: Tony Benn, Enoch Powell, Tony Crosland, Margaret Thatcher. Once we had great journalistic explicators, from Christopher Hitchens of this parish to Alan Watkins or Peter Jenkins. Much less so now. Even if we had, only half the country say they read regularly, and only a third of children and teenagers say they enjoy reading for pleasure, a record low.

It’s true we have fine playwrights and television writers – consider Lucy Prebble, Michael Winterbottom or James Graham – but it’s hard to avoid the impression that we are falling away from a more literate, ideas-driven and therefore confident public culture. Is it fair to expect a harried political class, who don’t read much themselves, to fill the gap? The fault is not in our stars but in ourselves.

Yet historically, the thing about democracy is that when a culture needs to pull itself around, it usually finds the people to help it do so.

Keir Starmer thinks the country isn’t broken. He says, in effect: just hang on, go out there into the real world, real communities, real workplaces, away from the headlines, and wait for the investment as it comes in, and everything will feel a lot better.

Yes and no: we have been a much-too-low-investment economy for far too long. And we are sliding towards a social and economic crisis that needs clearer leadership and greater urgency. Meanwhile, I beg for a sense of proportion and a certain decent patience. In general, things are rarely as bad as we fear or as good as we hope.

But this I know: if the answer to our troubles is to be Starmer and Labour, the Prime Minister needs to start grabbing our attention – inspiring us, making us think again – in ways we haven’t seen during this first year in government. Let’s hope he has a few hours in August to think about it.