The Weekend Intelligence: The state of Britain

Ryan Reynolds
Hey, I'm Ryan Reynolds at Mint Mobile, we like to do the opposite of what big wireless does. They charge you a lot. We charge you a little. So naturally, when they announced they'd be raising their prices due to inflation, we decided to deflate our prices due to not hating you. That's right.

We're cutting the price of mint unlimited from $30 a month to just $15 a month. Give it a try at mint mobile.com. Switch $45 upfront for three months, plus taxes and fees. Promoting for new customers for limited time unlimited, more than 40gb per month slows full terms at mint mobile.com dot.

The Economist since the 1920s notwithstanding, wartime Britain has been bouncing back and forth between being led by Labour governments on the left and conservative or Tory governments on the right. When I first got here, it was the Tony Blair years. Labor or new labor? As I came to learn, a little less trade uniony and a little more market forces y than the party had traditionally been. Then it was labor again under Gordon Brown, Tony Blair's chancellor, his finance minister.

All of that seems so very long ago, because in 2010, the pendulum swung again and we had a conservative prime minister. And then they just kept coming, some for longer than others. Next week, though, Britain heads to the polls again. And this time, unless every pollster in the land is wrong, it's going to be Labor's turn. Their inheritance, though it's not pretty.

I'm Jason Palmer and this is the weekend intelligence. The economist's special correspondent, Andrew Miller, has been traveling the length and breadth of Britain, trying to take stock of a country on the verge of profound political change. They don't know what, like us living here, how people struggle on this estate. We are the forgotten people. It's a journey across the country, but also across some of the seismic moments of the past 14 years, from the aftermath of the financial crisis to Brexit.

Jason Palmer
To Covid, we still haven't worked out. What that did to us and what that fear did to us. All in all, it's a sobering look at where the country finds itself and the many challenges itll face in the years to come.

People, thank you. Andy Bell, five news. First of all, congratulations to you both. Prime Minister, Deputy prime minister. Secondly, prime minister, do you now regret, when once asked what your favourite joke was, you replied, Nick Clegg and Deputy prime minister, what do you think of that?

We're all going to have. I'm afraid I did once.

We're all, I'm back. We're all going to have things that we said, thrown back at us. But we're looking at the bigger picture. We're looking at what a bold move like this with a strong, stable government can achieve.

Jason Palmer
That was how it began 14 tumultuous years ago, as I recall, it was a lovely, sunny spring day in May 2010, and David Cameron was speaking in the garden of ten Downing Street. I was writing the Economist's budget column on british politics at the time. I was there, dimly worrying about sunburn, at the historic moment when Cameron and Nick Clegg, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, announced the formation of the first coalition government in Britain since the second World War. Although the economic outlook was tricky after 13 years of Labour rule, there was lots of talk about bold ideas and a new kind of politics, along with lots of dodgy puns about nuptials involving Cameron and Clegg. I was as guilty of those as anyone.

The two politicians, I said in a column headlined the Lovin made a startlingly lovely couple. Both Cameron and Clegg, I noted a bit meanly, were 43 tall, posh, and, as Martin Amis wrote, of a certain kind of well bred englishman, pointlessly handsome. That coalition lasted five years, longer than many observers expected, after which the Conservatives governed on their own.

Now, after several more general elections and no less than five prime ministers of varying degrees of competence, it looks as if the Tories will lose power at the election on July 4. By the end of next week, Saqir Starmer, the current Labour leader, will probably be the prime minister this time. There isn't much optimism in the air, truth be told, more a kind of scratchy exhaustion. But how far does the reality of Britain justify the ambient sense of fatalism and dismay compared with 14 years ago? How different a place is the country today?

These questions aren't only about politicians and policies. Countries are always more complicated and interesting than that. Back in 2010, before the era of podcasts, I look back on the labour years for the Economist, and I realised that over such a long stretch of time, a nation, like a marriage, can change in slow, tectonic ways, which, day by day you hardly notice, and that many of these changes have little to do with governments. Back then I mentioned the continued rise of asian manufacturing, plus the development of the Internet and budget airlines. When I thought about what the outgoing government had achieved, I realized that some of its innovations had already become orthodoxies, civil partnerships, the minimum wage, the scottish parliament now on the cusp of another transition of power.

I wonder what other changes I might have lost sight of, and which will be remembered by history. In 2024, after 14 years of Tory rule, after the Brexit referendum and the COVID pandemic, what is the story of modern Britain?

So, we've just got on the train that goes from King's Cross in London to Edinburgh. We're going to get off at York and make our way to Richmond. And although it's a bit disingenuous to pretend to capture the entire state of a country just by going to a few places, we're going to try to look at a few different spots on the map where life may have changed in different ways over the course of that long time frame.

Since 2015, Richmond has been represented in parliament by Rishi Sunak, the probably outgoing prime minister. The area is one of the most beautiful bits of the country. Is this Rishi Sunak's house? Yes. That one here?

Yeah. Yeah, I thought so. Okay. Are you on the street? No, we're not, but we are journalists, so we just wanted to have a look, see where he lived.

It's the landscape of dry stone walls, the rolling countryside of the Yorkshire Dales, picture postcard villages and pubs named after agricultural animals. If you have an image in your mind of rural England, this is probably what it looks like. There's something kind of eternal about it, immune to the ravages of politics. At least, it seems that way.

We are approaching the town of Richmond in North Yorkshire, which is known for its picture castle. It's also known for having voted conservatives since 1910. I believe it's a place with very low levels of deprivation, not sort of super wealthy population, but very few who are struggling very badly. Good schools, low levels of crime, high levels of property ownership. So let's find out what the concerns are of people in the run up to the election.

We're going to do that first by talking to Daniel Callahan, who is the Liberal Democrat entrusted with the task of trying to unseat Rishi Sunak, the prime minister.

Now, if you read the headlines about Britain, they tell a pretty bleak a saga of debt, dereliction and decay. It's a dirge about a failing state, a punishing cost of living. Well, that's not exactly the story my producer and I heard in Richmond and villages nearby. That's not to say that life there is perfect. It has its problems, as Daniel, the liberal Democrat candidate, insisted to me.

I think, yeah, you arrive here, it. Is a beautiful place, but if you. Look under the service and if you speak to people who are actually living here, you find out life has become harder. At the same time, they weren't the problems you hear about amid the sound and fury of the national election campaign. Another kind of nationally big issue in this election is immigration.

Jason Palmer
Would you say? Does that come up here? I mean, I don't know how much immigration there is. It seems to me that much. But correct me if I'm wrong, it doesn't come up.

In short. I mean, I can't remember the last. Time someone raised immigration on the door here.

Jason Palmer
Human beings don't live in the headlines. Life is not all deficits and war and inflation. Another way of putting it is that it's dangerous to make sweeping judgments about a country of around 68 million people. The safest generalizations about it may be that the population has grown roughly by a whopping 5 million since 2010 and become even more diverse, although not enrichment, which is almost entirely white. People I met in North Yorkshire brought up grievances with agricultural policy and the paucity of rural bus services.

They also mentioned the cost of housing, a theme that crops up across Britain, as we'll see in Richmond's cobbled marketplace. I asked people what they liked about the area, what changes there had been, or they would like to see nothing. Really, I think, no, it's quite a safe town, I think. Yeah. And in that time you lived here, or maybe in more recent years, what sort of changes have you noticed?

What big changes? Shops closing is the most. Like, we've got the banks. We used to have four banks here and I've only got one. And what about improvements?

What's got better, would you say? Thank goodness there's been no improvements. In that sense, the place has stayed the same, which is great because it's got so much going for it. Local shops closing. That's another thing I heard about from people in different parts of the country.

It gives a place a feeling of being down on its luck, even if, like Richmond, it isn't. Standing in the ruins of the town's norman castle, watching sheep gamble on the banks of the River Swale, I discuss the local situation with Colin Grant. Colin has been deeply involved with local regeneration projects, including Richmond's beautiful 18th century theatre. He loves the town fiercely. It's not a place in decline and.

It'S not a failing town centre by any manner of means. I mean, it has its ups and downs. It's a glaringly obvious point, but it's worth making anyway. Even if the government seems set to be turfed out in a landslide and every day seems to bring a fresh scandal or national embarrassment. Not everyone or everywhere in Britain is struggling.

Jason Palmer
And where people are struggling, as Tolstoy wrote of unhappy families, they're often doing so in their own distinctive ways.

Well, we're on our way back to London from Yorkshire. So I think really what we've learned overall is that there's a lot of truth in the Adich, that all politics is local, and that the overall picture you get of a country in decline and disintegrating, you know, is misleading because there are places like Richmond, where people love the place they lived. So I think in the kind of catastrophizing that dominates so much political discourse, it's worth remembering that other side of the story.

That was the upbeat part, because I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news. All that dereliction and decay is real. In a way, my jaunt to Yorkshire is a preamble to saying this. Britain has accumulated lots of problems over the past 14 years of the government's making and otherwise. But the burden has been shared unequally because the truth is in lots of ways.

And in some places, the country does indeed seem to be falling apart in England has hit a record high, as new figures show that more than a million patients are on more than one train. Drivers will go out on strike again. At the end of the month in. A new series of walkouts over pay. England's prisons are overcrowded and running out of space.

From next week, some prisoners will be released 70 days early as part of a government plan to free up space in England's prisons.

Jason Palmer
If you survey Britain's public services and economy, the overall picture is bleak. A litany of shortages and strikes and closures. Parents who, like me, have children in british schools will tell you about the lack of teachers. The courts are overwhelmed and the prisons are bursting. Local councils have closed libraries and swimming pools.

Some of them are going bust. The government repeatedly pledged to control immigration. Instead, it soared to record levels. There's a general feeling in the country that nothing is working well. I asked Sir Verdon Bogdanore of King's College London what he makes of it all.

He's one of the wisest observers of british political history. I used to chat with him a lot when I was writing the Bagehot column. He tends to be a bit more upbeat than I am. I'm very worried about the future of the country. The health service obviously crumbling.

The health service obviously crumbling.

Jason Palmer
Now, probably the most vital and cherished public service is the national health Service. These days, unfortunately, you're liable to wait a worryingly long time for an ambulance. You may wait long painful hours in the emergency room, and then, if you need an operation, long, agonizing months before you get it altogether, more than 6 million people are now waiting for hospital treatment in England. Over 300,000 of them have been waiting longer than a year. That adds up to a vast mass of avoidable pain.

According to the Institute of Government, the performance of hospitals is arguably the worst in the NHS's history. The pandemic is partly responsible, but other european health systems haven't been gummed up in quite the same way. Not surprisingly, patients are angry. Having peaked in 2010 when the Tories came in, public satisfaction with the NHS has plummeted to its lowest recorded level. Much the same goes for public services overall as for the public finances.

In 2010, the Conservatives promised to fix them. Maybe you remember, they talked a lot about Labour having maxed out the national credit card. Well, it hasn't worked out that way. Belt tightening was followed by shocks and splurges, leading to rocketing public debt and the highest tax burden in 70 years, measured as a share of GDP. The economy is sputtering in real terms.

Average earnings have stagnated in a way unprecedented in the last 200 years of british economic history.

The sewage discharges into rivers and seas. Reached record levels last year. To top it all off, there's a noxious scandal about leaks of of sewage into Britain's waterways, including into the Pretty River Swale, which runs below Richmond Castle. Commentators have seized on the effluent as a metaphor for the general woe. But it sometimes seemed to me that Britain is turning into a giant dysfunctional metaphor for itself as a result of all that.

According to a recent poll for YouGov, three quarters of Britons think the country is in a worse state now than it was 14 years ago. I've been thinking about this ever since your email. Jack Thorne is one of Britain's top modern playwrights and screenwriters. He's probably best known for Harry Potter and the cursed child, but he's also written some biting state of the nation dramas. If you were writing a play about now, what would be not necessarily the story, but what would be the mood?

I think genuine confusion. Genuine confusion about what's going wrong and why it's going wrong. Genuine confusion about why we're in this mess and who brought us here. As you would expect, there are lots of answers to that question, some specific to Britain, some extending beyond its borders and, as I mentioned earlier, beyond the control of the government. For instance, when historians look back at this era, I suspect one change they will highlight is the way technology and social media in particular, have affected the way people relate to each other and how we all think about politics.

Jason Palmer
The rising susceptibility to conspiracy theories, the way the news moves so fast that politicians can get away with fibs in ways that weren't possible in days of yore. In terms of the economy, you could argue that one of the most important factors in the last 14 years happened before the Tories came to office. The financial crash of 2007 to eight, from which the british economy has recovered painfully slowly. The opening barrel is going to ring in 5 seconds, and to be honest with you, we wish it wouldn't. Traders here working the phone say a lot of their customers are freaked out, waiting to see how low the dow will go.

But another defining feature of those years for which the Tories were definitely responsible is the policy of austerity. While other countries wrestled with paralyzed political systems, our coalition government has united behind. The swift and decisive action of in. Year cuts and the emergency budget.

That decisive action became known as austerity, a term for a program of hard, fast cuts to state spending, welfare and public services that began in 2010. Communities all over Britain are still living with its effects.

We're here in Easter House in Glasgow on a misty morning. I came here in 2008 when David Cameron, not yet prime minister, then leader of the opposition, made a speech about the broken society, which was his term for kind of deprivation, family breakdown and associated ills.

We've come back to see how this place is doing after 14 years of Tory government, and whether those problems have been addressed or not.

Easterhouse is a large housing scheme in the east end of Glasgow, Scotland's biggest city. It was built from the 1950s as the slums of Glasgow were cleared, a place founded on good intentions that didn't pan out in practice. Instead, many of the residents of the grey tenement housing were to be impoverished and neglected. Then, in the 21st century, Easter House became a landmark in conservative thinking. The hardship here inspired Sir Ian Duncan Smith, a former party leader, to think anew about poverty.

And he took his thinking into government as Cameron's welfare secretary. In my very first act as leader of this party, I signalled my personal priority to mend our broken society. Part of Cameron's solution to the broken society and the problems it connoted, like ill health, crime, addiction and welfare dependency, was what he called the big society. I didn't invent the big society. It's been evident in many of our communities.

What I want to do is just make sure that we do more of it that we enable people to play a bigger role and community groups and voluntary groups to play a bigger role. Alas, the big society was a pretty wishy washy idea. It was never really clear whether it meant the state would provide services in nimbler and more imaginative ways, or just stand back and hope someone else got on with it. The big society became one of many slogans, along with levelling up and take back control, which are no longer much mentioned. A bit like embarrassing relatives.

Jason Palmer
We are going to unite and level up. Unite.

It would be nice to think that one result of the past 14 years will be an end to government by slogan. We'll see. Anyway, to go back to Easter House, I took a tour around the neighborhood with Stuart Patterson. Stuart is a fast talking raconteur, a man with a big smile and an eventful backstory. So I dropped out of school at 15 in that building.

Looked like that then. And then I started back 32 years later in Glasgow. Kelly. These days he's a pastor and community worker. But as a teenager growing up here, he was a member of a territorial gang and became a drug addict.

Jason Palmer
As Stuart showed me, a lot of the original tenements have been replaced with more modern and spacious houses. That revamp had already started when I came here in 2008, but now it's gone much further. And in another improvement, the street gang culture of earlier decades is no more. So this was another gang's area. This was our rivals, their main rivals.

You know, you've seen west side Story. Yeah. That was lived out in these streets. Stuart pointed out the roads down which he was chased, and the fields where his gang fought pitched battles with their enemies. But it was clear that he loved the place.

Today, this is a great community that just needs to be shown some love. Yet, despite the renovated housing and the decline in violence, Easter House remains a deprived and troubled place.

Jason Palmer
So we're heading to an old library building in the Lochs shopping centre, which has been turned into a community centre where all kinds of activities for pensioners and children take place. And we're going to talk to the founder of that centre, Richard McShane, about his view on the situation in Easter House today. It used to be a library, is that right? It was an old library. It was way empty for about 13 years.

When I came in the side door, the place was full of pigeons. Biggest pigeon loft in Glasgow. Place was flooded. As it happens, the Phoenix center is the sort of thing Cameron probably had in mind when he talked about the big society. It's run by volunteers and tries to keep youngsters off the streets and out of trouble, prevent loneliness and help older people stay well and healthy.

Jason Palmer
I mentioned the renovations in the neighbourhood to Richard are dogged and impressive local crusader. That's cosmetic. They're not dealing with underlying problems, you know, I mean, the root cause. But why is a twelve year old, eleven year old drinking? I mean, we've got that on the estate.

We don't do birthday parties after ten years of age. We don't do them because we've got eleven year olds, twelve year olds drinking. So if we bring them in here, you can search them as they come in, but they hide stuff outside. So it's unfortunate if you're 11, 12, 13 in upwards, you're not going to get a busty party on the estate because it's trouble brings along with it. That's very sad.

That's terrible. We were talking about the impact of austerity on neighborhoods like Easterhouse. Richard was scathing about its architects. They don't know what, like us living here, how people struggle on this estate. We are the forgotten people.

That's the way I look at it.

Ryan Reynolds
Hey, I'm Ryan Reynolds at Mint Mobile, we like to do the opposite of what big wireless does. They charge you a lot. We charge you a little. So naturally, when they announced they'd be raising their prices due to inflation, we decided to deflate our prices due to not hating you. That's right.

We're cutting the price of mint unlimited from $30 a month to just $15 a month. Give it a try@mintmobile.com. Switch $45 upfront for three months, plus taxes and fees. Promoting for new customers for limited time unlimited, more than 40gb per month slows full terms at mint mobile.com dot.

Jason Palmer
As it happens, I rocked up at the Phoenix centre during a chair yoga session attended by 40 or 50, mostly older people. They stretched and breathed and giggled while an instructor led them through an hour long routine. It's a way to keep people mobile and give them a chance to socialize. I spoke to a couple of ladies about their situation and their neighbours. I'm trying to put this politely.

Don't worry.

The changes in the government, I don't. The austerity is worse. I would say that definitely the kids that I see, how many people are going to food banks. I personally have no need to go to a food bank, but I know a lot of younger women with kids that have had and they really needed them.

Jason Palmer
Food banks. That's another thing I heard a lot about on this little odyssey around the country. They didn't used to be a big feature of life in Britain, but in recent years, millions of people have come to rely on them. I heard other complaints about the Tories in Easterhouse, even from people who, atypically for the area, once supported them. I think I liked Boris Johnson because he was a bit of a clone.

He made me laugh, he made me want to like him. Joe voted for him, be honest, votes for him. And then you get in and the whole place, filthy pieces.

Jason Palmer
To get a sense of how far Easterhouse and places like it have or haven't changed over the past 14 years, we needed more than anecdotes, we needed statistics.

I'm fine. Sure? Okay. Yep. For the facts and figures, we visited Glasgow Caledonian University in the centre of town.

What we're looking at is the map for 2020, which is the most recent map of deprivation in Scotland. It's area deprivation, so small areas are mapped and what you see with Glasgow is a really interesting pattern. So the deeper the red is, the more deprived the area is considered to be, and the deeper the blue is, the least deprived the area is seen to be. And you can see there are. That's Professor John McKendrick.

Jason Palmer
He's an engaging guide with a bleak message. The basic picture hasn't changed, so that. The west end is more blue, it's more affluent, the east end is just a mass of red. And Easter house is, again, it's a mass of red and it tends to be an Easter house, a darker red, meaning it's among the very most deprived areas.

Looking at equivalent maps going back to 2010, the pattern has been pretty constant. I guess this is sort of the mirror image of what we found in Richmond, only there, the locals were content with the lack of change. By contrast, Easterhouse was and is one of the most deprived parts of Scotland. The same holds for other deprived areas. The welfare reforms that were supposed to replace despair with hope haven't worked.

And the sort of hardship we saw is sadly not uncommon in Britain as a whole. Child poverty has risen since 2010. The Joseph Rowntree foundation, the think tank, has gauged levels of destitution. In other words, people going without some of the essentials of life, like shelter or food. In 2022, around 3.8 million people experienced destitution in Britain, well over double the number in 2017.

Visiting Richmond and North Yorkshire was a reminder that life in Britain is not all about dysfunction and hardship. Visiting Easterhouse shows that the hardship is very real and also that quietly heroic people are trying to do something about it now. A decade ago, in one of the big dramas of the Tory years that these days feel like ancient history, Scotland had a referendum on whether to become independent. It voted no. Yet its status in the United Kingdom and that of Northern Ireland is still wobbly, in part because of the other bilious referendum that followed.

In 2016, both Scotland and Northern Ireland opted to stay in the European Union. The decision to leave bolstered the argument for divorcing Britain. Instead, the Brexit referendum did, and meant a lot more than that. It was the great political rupture of the past 14 years in Britain. It was a horrible, poisonous, dishonest contest, joining the miners strike of the mid 1980s and the Iraq war, among the most divisive political episodes of my lifetime.

I wasn't actually in Britain at the time of the vote. I was a correspondent in America, based in the south, which is home to lots of Trump supporters. Quite a few people congratulated me on the result, which was a bit awkward because I wasn't celebrating at all. Watching the results in a motel room in Kentucky, I had a distinct, sinking feeling that Britain was changing irrevocably. As we leave the European Union, we will forge a bold, new, positive role for ourselves in the world, and we will make Britain a country that works not for a privileged few, but for every one of us.

That will be the mission of the government I lead, and together, we will build a better Britain. What really drove that outcome is still contested. Was it a misguided quest for perfect sovereignty? A protest against mass immigration? The end of the dream of economic liberalism?

Jason Palmer
Or just a yelp of anger and despair? Whatever it was about, by now, the results are becoming clear. In economic terms, Brexit has been a failure. It has hurt Britain's long term prospects for growth and productivity. It has damaged investment.

Other developed countries have faced many of the same economic problems as Britain, including sputtering growth, aging populations, and inflation. But we have exacerbated them with Brexit. I suppose you could call that an exercise of sovereignty. Politically, it's been even worse. Brexit released a miasma of dishonesty into public debate as ministers defended a flailing policy that some of them never believed in.

Permanent crisis engulfed the government, which was too distracted and riven by Brexit to focus on much else. Now, parties that govern for long enough tend to wind up sinking in their own mistakes in office but barely in power. Weve seen that movie in Britain a couple of times before. Even so, the chaos unleashed by Brexit has been unique in modern british history. Without it out of her depth, Theresa May would probably never have been prime minister.

But it is now clear to me that it is in the best interests of the country for a new prime minister to lead that effort. Britain would probably have been spared the disgrace of Johnson's premiership. It is clearly now the will of the parliamentary conservative party that there should be a new leader of that party and therefore a new prime minister. And of course, the tragic comic cameo of Liz Truss. I recognize, though, given the situation, I cannot deliver the mandate on which I was elected by the conservative party.

Jason Palmer
Come to that, Rishi Sunak might still be a junior minister. It all reminds me of a scene in succession, the hit tv show by Jesse Armstrong. It's the bit when Logan Roy, the patriarch, turns to his adult children and scathingly says, you are not serious people. Partly to investigate the effects of Brexit, I visited Basildon in southeast England, about 25 miles east of London.

We've come to Basildon, a town in Essex in southern England, and we've come for a couple of reasons, really. One of them is that Basildon Mann was once one of those legendary swing voters that british political parties competed for. He embodied upwardly mobile, aspirational working and middle classes. Now, Basildon is a town that's, you know, neither rich nor poor. At least neither rich nor poor on average.

Basildon was a new town built after the war, in part to house the overspill from London. It's a pretty normal place in lots of ways. In fact, last year, the economists crunched the numbers on housing earnings and so on, and found it was the most typical place in Britain. But in one respect, it's an outlier. In the referendum of 2016, Basildon was one of the most pro Brexit towns in the country, despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that it's had little foreign immigration.

One of the Brexiteers main gripes. More than two thirds of residents voted to leave.

We're in Robbins pie and math shop in Basildon town centre, which is, by a long way, the liveliest bit of Basildon we've seen. And you really get a sense here of the sociology of quite a lot of Essex, which is, this is basically a part of England that is home to lots of people who've moved out of the east End of London, either because of bombing in second World War, because of, you know, overcrowding and new people moving in. And in this pie mash shop, you've got a very recognizable menu to anyone who, you know, grew up a long time ago in the east end. It's pies and mata and the only other option is hot eel. 20 years ago, I wrote a book about London's east end, so this atmosphere made me feel a bit nostalgic, but not nostalgic enough to eat a hot eel.

Do you live in Basildon? Unfortunately, I do. Oh, dear. That doesn't sound very pogba. Don't like the place?

Never did. How long have you lived here? Over 30 years. Really? And you've never liked it?

No. What are its kind of disadvantages? We have no shops except secondhand shops, pound shops, vaping shops.

Can't think of any houses, but there are others that are useless. Yeah. Do you think that's changed? Has it got worse in terms of, like, the local? Well, since COVID it's got worse.

Yes, of course it has. I think Covid's killed a lot of shops. Oh, it's got a lot to answer for, in my opinion. Yeah. Closed shops again.

Jason Palmer
The problems people notice and worry about aren't always the big ticket ones. We also, of course, asked about Brexit and how people in baseline think about it now. I heard that it was interfering with regeneration projects because of trouble with labor and imports. David Barnes, a ponytailed it entrepreneur, bemoaned the extra admin in delays it has involved. It really is those costs, the paperwork and the headache and the time, you know, where they're just in time ordering and just in time delivery.

They've. They had something in the order of. It was like two weeks. You're now looking at four to five months and. And that's added a production cost.

Jason Palmer
But it's not that you've met. People say, you know, hold up my hands. I got it wrong. You're not at that stage. It's almost.

Almost down the pub when you're chatting over a beer. People have said, maybe if I was doing it again this time, I would think differently. It's fair to say that the minority in Basildon who voted to remain feel vindicated. I mean, it's on its knees now anymore. It'd be on its elbows and your face will be in it.

And as for the. The sewerage, what a disgrace.

They've lied about Brexit. They didn't tell us the truth and they didn't tell us how, you know, it was going to be so wonderful. Every week, we send 350 million pounds to Brussels. Money that's wasted. There's a bloody great big lie, and Boris should be shot enforage actually.

Jason Palmer
Now, because of the timing, some of the effects of Brexit are hard to disentangle from those of another great rupture, the pandemic. To those historians of the future, this will almost certainly rank as the biggest event of the Tory era. From this evening, I must give the british people a very simple instruction. You must stay at home. When we think about the way Britain has changed, the coronavirus has been a big part of it, as it has for other countries.

First and foremost, the suffering and bereavement. Then the momentous policies to prop up the economy and their huge costs, the long term effect on businesses, hybrid working and city centres. And, as the playwright Jack Thorne says, probably other things that we're not aware of yet. I think we still haven't worked out what that did to us and what that fear did to us.

Although, as an aside, not all the changes that were anticipated have come to pass. You may remember there was a lot of talk about how when the virus was conquered, there would be more social solidarity, more value and respect for key workers. It reminded me of the optimistic talk about the London Olympics of 2012. Yep, that was under the Tories too. If you were in London in 2012, you'll recall the heady atmosphere of that summer.

But the whole country can benefit from the legacy of the games because of the inspiration that these games will bring to people, young and old, right across the country. James Pond epic, starring Daniel Craig and Her Majesty the Queen.

Jason Palmer
The Olympics, people thought and hoped, were going to change Britain, making it more tolerant and united. A generally atomized, sometimes fractious place has seemed to cohere, I wrote in a column. Well, im not sure those hopes were fulfilled after the Olympics, nor in the case of COVID Most of its lingering consequences have been negative. A boom in mental health problems and in people leaving the workforce because of chronic illness. A huge rise in absenteeism in schools.

In Basildon, I got a glimpse of the cumulative effects of these austerity, Brexit, Covid, and then a rising cost of living, spiking energy prices and higher interest rates on mortgages. I heard about how all that had brought money troubles to people who'd never experienced them before and probably never expected to.

Something else you detect in Basildon and elsewhere is that all this has been especially hard for young people. I have teenage children and I'm conscious that they've grown up with a sense of permanent political emergency, from the financial crash to Brexit to Covid and war, not to mention the looming threat of climate change in important ways their generation is having a rough time. Jill Willis, who runs a marketing firm in Billericki, just outside Basildon, was insightful about the cumulative effects of austerity and Covid on disadvantaged youngsters. There's tons of opportunity, it's there for the taking. But unfortunately, if you're from a less fortunate kind of group, family without access, it just becomes an even greater divide that you're unable to cross without support.

That chimes with research last year for the Centre for Social justice, which found that the gap between the haves and have nots is in danger of becoming a chasm. Then there's the issue of housing. Amid strangulating planning rules, the average house price in England has risen to 8.3 times average earnings, almost double the ratio at the turn of the millennium. For lots of young people, it's prohibitively expensive, like these 17 year olds in Basildon. My older sister, she's in her twenties.

We've had to build a summer house in the garden because it's just not realistic, especially if you're going to move out on your own. I mean, you would have to live with one or two other people. House share is probably the only way I could afford. That's something that Jessica Power, a newly elected can do counsellor, is all too aware of. I think if you were to speak to a young person, they don't see.

They don't. It's not that they lack ambition, because that would be incorrect and unfair. They would. They don't see a way to those things, don't see a way to those high skilled jobs. They don't see a way to owning their own house.

Jason Palmer
Jessica showed us around Basildon town centre, pointing out the brutalist buildings that were due for redevelopment. Like Colin in Richmond, she clearly has a deep affection for her hometown. What Jessica had to say about the town resonated more widely. She said one of the problems in Basildon was that people get stuck, businesses get stuck. They were mostly doing all right, but were being overtaken by snazzier places.

Everyone just kind of okay. I think it's that raising that aspiration level and realising, actually, yeah, you can. Do better in a way. I wonder if this description applies to the country as a whole. Lots of people and places are doing okay, like some of the folk I met in Richmond, but too many people are struggling, like some of those in Easterhouse.

Jason Palmer
And overall we are falling behind some other countries. People sense this and theyre not happy about it. Ipsos, a research firm, has asked Britons whether they expect youngsters to have a worse quality of life than their parents. In 2008, as the financial crisis struck, only 12% thought that would be the case. At the last count, 41% were pessimistic about the future.

When historians look back at this period, I wonder if they'll see it as a time when Britain subsided into its fate as a poor, rich country. And I wonder if the death of the Queen, one of those events outside politics that can count for so much, will come to be seen in the future as symbolic of an era ending in a wider sense, too. Within the past few minutes, Buckingham palace. Has announced the death of her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the second. A second.

Of course, it isn't all doom and gloom. There are pretty bits of the picture of Britain, not all of them. In North Yorkshire, for instance, the fact that so many people still want to come here. The immigration figures have been an embarrassment to the Tories, but they're a complement to the country. London has bounced back from Brexit and Covid.

It's still one of the world's most magnificent cities, even if the gap between it and the rest of the country is widening. When it was meant to shrink, Britain has risen up some international tables of educational performance. Theres been progress on renewable energy and less tangibly, and not in a way that anyone intended. Perhaps the country has found an overdue sense of humility. Henceforth, it might be less likely to brag of its healthcare or armed forces being the best in the world.

It may be less reflexively determined to punch above its weight. For those who think Britain has suffered from a form of post imperial hubris, thats a hard won gain.

Meanwhile, alongside the woes Britain has faced, consider those it dodged. Some cynical british politicians have tried to ignite us style culture, wars about statues and how history is written and taught. But by and large, Britons have responded with a shrug, which is not as excitable as Americans about that kind of thing. Britain is still an orderly, law abiding, polite sort of place. It's still a country in which strangers apologise to you if you step on their foot.

Sir Vernon Bogdanor was consoled by its enduring virtues. I think we can congratulate ourselves on that. We're profoundly stable, profoundly constitutional and profoundly moderate. In confounding times, Britain has once again proved less susceptible to extremism than some other countries. At least it has been less susceptible to extremism so far.

I include that proviso because, along with the complaints about vacant shops and the cost of housing, one thing you hear across the country is rage against politicians. They tend to be looking after themselves and tell with the country, oh, everybody's been doing, son, is lying in their own pockets, as far as I can see. Maybe I shouldn't have see that, but that's what I meant. How can I put it politely? Nobody feel nobody's doing anything for them.

I think politicians lie and I have no respect now for many politicians at all. I think they are liars. I don't think you can trust any of them.

Jason Palmer
Perhaps this too, is partly a result of Brexit, which has left lots of people on both sides of the argument feeling let down. But it goes deeper than that. I think in 21st century Britain, as in other countries, people want the state to protect them from pandemics, from the fallout of globalization, from foreign threats, from inflation. And instead, here it seems to be floundering. I asked David Kynaston, a distinguished historian of post war Britain and another of my wisest sources, what he made of the current situation.

He mentioned the resurgence of populism in the shape of the Reform party, led by Nigel Farage. And in trepidation he invoked the famous ending of the second coming, a poem by WB Yeats. You know, it's the one with the lines, things fall apart, the centre cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. The best lack all conviction, Yeats wrote, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

Then this thrilling conclusion, and what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be borne.

Ryan Reynolds
Thanks for listening to the weekend intelligence. This week's episode was reported by Andrew Miller and produced by Sam Westrin and Henrietta McFarlane, with help from Barclay Bram. Fact checking was by Lizzie Peet. Sound design by Nico Raufast. The executive producer of the weekend intelligence is Gemma Newby.

We'll all see you back here on Monday.

Even when we're on a budget, we still deserve nice things. Quince is a place to scoop up stunning high end goods for 50% to 80% less. In similar brands, they have buttery soft cashmere sweater starting at $50, luxurious italian leather bags and so much more. Plus, Quintz only works with factories that use safe, ethical and responsible manufacturing. Get the high end goods you'll love without the high price tag.

With Quince, go to quince.com style for free shipping and 365 day returns.

The Weekend Intelligence: The state of Britain

Primary Topic

Episode Summary

Main Takeaways

Episode Chapters

1. Introduction

2. Historical Context

3. Regional Focus: Richmond

4. Regional Focus: Easterhouse

5. Conclusion

Actionable Advice

About This Episode

People

Companies

Books

Guest Name(s):

Content Warnings:

Transcript