Are you having the same conversation with your friends that I’m having with mine? While last night it was all about Oasis – they were amazing at Wembley – the main topic these days is whether or not to leave the country, or at least – the state of the country, and what it means for the future.
I’ve been the Editor of City AM on and off since 2015, and I’ve seen my fair share of ‘Britain is doomed’ stories. We had them aplenty during Brexit, we certainly had them during the dying days of the Tory government and of course, the sentiment is often driven by politics – I don’t like the government we’ve got, I don’t like its policies, the country’s gone to the dogs, it’s frankly part of the British character.
But it feels as if something has changed.
The sentiment I detect – the sentiment I feel myself – is that the country’s decline is now strikingly evident – and while this government hasn’t helped, the emergence of this state of mind is down to bigger factors than one election result or one particular government.
I can only speak for people I spend most time with – largely professional, largely middle class, mostly nearing 40 – and I can’t even speak for all of them – but among this cohort, friends of mine, contacts, family even, I don’t think a single one feels that the country – or their experience of it – is on the up.
I’m an optimistic guy and City AM is an optimistic paper – I can point to evidence of success, or progress, of innovation, or dynamism – but I’ve come to feel that these examples break through in spite of the conditions we face, not because of them.
In other words, the country doesn’t have the wind at its back.
A poor country that thinks it’s a rich one
You could argue it’s been that way for years – and to varying degrees, you would be right. Structurally, we have been holed below the water line since 2008.
Productivity, earnings, living standards – all have stagnated.
Consider the astonishing fact that once you adjust for inflatio,n the average working person in Britain today probably earns a lower (or not very different) wage now than the average working person in 2008.
I wrote a column recently suggesting that Britain is a poor country that acts like a rich one.
When looking at GDP per capita we are decidedly middle of the pack by European standards and embarrassingly far behind America. The per head figure in the UK is around £37,000, in contrast to £60,000 in the US.
This week, the US economy recorded a growth rate of 3 per cent.
Do you know when the UK economy last grew at that rate? More than a decade ago, in 2014 – and that was unusual. Excluding the post lockdown bounce back, the best we’ve done over the past decade was 2.2 per cent in 2015. As for today, growth isn’t registering. Growth is at the heart of this story, but individual pages tell a more complex, albeit related story.
We’re taxed too much. We’re writing cheques we can’t cash. We’ve lost control of basic state functions such as border security, while house prices skyrocket and shoplifting and phone theft become the norm on our streets.
A generational disaster
And we can muddle through these conditions, we always do, and there will be pockets of success and grounds for optimism here and there – but what of our trajectory?
I’m a father to two young children, 5 and 8, so I think about the future a lot.
I think about their future and that means I think about the level of public debt, the commitments to public spending on pensions and welfare, the insane vulnerability of our public finances and the fact that – astonishingly – typical real income is set to grow by a pointless one per cent over the next five years, meaning that the lost decade we’ve endured since 2008 is turning into a lost 20 years. That’s a generational disaster.
And so, that’s the context in which so many people I know talk about leaving the country. A poll this week showed that just under 30 per cent of the under 30s are either seriously considering leaving or are actively planning to do so. Good luck to them.
But here’s the thing; the vast majority of the people I know who talk and feel as I do about the uncertainty of the future, about the fact that life just feels tougher than it ought to, will not leave. I certainly won’t.
Professional ties, family ties, loyalty, circumstances, and a preference for this country, despite its challenges, will keep us here. And so we’ll plough on, wading through ever higher taxes towards an increasingly uncertain future.
That’s just the way of it. But many will leave. Not just the non-doms and the super rich, but people who feel – rightly – that their efforts aren’t rewarded here, that taxes or regulations or political decisions just aren’t in their favour – and that will be a loss, a huge loss that we can ill afford.
And in the meantime, those of us that stay will wait for our politics to catch up with reality. Maybe Labour will engineer that much-needed growth, maybe the Tories will return from Opposition with a bold plan for national renewal. Maybe somebody else will.
For now, it’s a case of keep calm and carry on.