Britain isn’t working – for different reasons, voters across the political spectrum affirm this view. You don’t need to subscribe to the more dystopian accounts of the country’s state to recognise its validity.
Back in January 2008, BBC News ran an article charting how the average British person would soon be better off than their US counterpart for the first time since the 19th century. Today, UK GDP per capita at $54,950 is more than a third lower than the US’s ($89,678). Here is one illustration of why, ever since the financial crisis, Britain has felt like a poorer country than it expected to be.
A No 10 aide speaks of how “we don’t have the country of the 1990s” and of a “profound living-standards crisis” that has endured beyond the inflation spike of 2022. But what was the moment that Britain took a wrong turn? This isn’t merely an academic question but a highly political one. As Phil Tinline charts in his book The Death of Consensus (2022), successful leaders tell a story about the nightmares of the past as well as the dreams of the future.
For my piece on Labour’s “summer of discontent” I featured some exclusive polling from More in Common on this question and the full results are worth exploring. Sixty per cent of voters believe that Britain is on the “wrong track”, while just 22 per cent believe it is on the right one (among 2024 Labour voters the split is 45 per cent to 41 per cent).
Brexit is the most popular source of blame (29 per cent) followed by the Covid-19 pandemic (18 per cent), the election of Tony Blair (14 per cent) and the election of Margaret Thatcher (7 per cent). There are some revealing subsets: while 40 per cent of Labour voters and 41 per cent of young voters cite the EU referendum, 35 per cent of Reform voters and 26 per cent of Conservative voters cite Blair’s election.
The salience of Brexit is striking. By pursuing a trade deal with the EU, Keir Starmer showed that he is prepared to take political risks. Labour strategists point to his decision to meet European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen during the local election campaign as evidence that they are not chasing Reform’s tail. But while the deal was well-received by the public, it has quickly faded from the political conversation (some in Labour believe Starmer should be doing far more to pin an unpopular Brexit on the populist Nigel Farage).
If voters routinely complain that they do not know what Labour stands for, it is partly because the government has not been clear enough about who and what it blames for Britain’s state – and the different course it would chart. As work begins on Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves’ conference speeches, here is a question that should be at the heart of them.
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here
[See also: One year on, tensions still circle Britain’s asylum-seeker hotels]
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