‘Britain doesn’t need to become great again – it already is.’ That’s the flattering verdict of the former Polish ambassador to both the UK and USA, Piotr Wilczek, writing in the Spectator.
After the year-long gloom fest that was 2025, Wilczek’s positivity will come as a surprise to many. Descriptions of Britain as ‘one of the most astonishing places in the world’ and reminders that we are in fact ‘the sixth-largest economy on earth’ and home to some world’s best universities don’t chime with the experience of 82% of Britons who think the country is in a bad state.
The Times soon published data which seemed to back Wilczek up. Almost 80% of Britons feel safe walking the streets, we are fifth globally in terms of defence spending and our average happiness is higher than that of the Americans and the French. This apparently gives us a final verdict of ‘surprisingly upbeat, given everything’.
These pieces are well-intentioned – they are intended to make us feel good about ourselves and the state of our nation. But they also make my nostrils flare and fists clench.
The hard truth that Panglossian commentators fail to swallow is what many of us feel reading their articles: that holding up the continued existence of certain institutions and meagre economic prosperity as proof of British glory is a coping mechanism in the face of near total stagnation. We should not be setting the bar for national success at not yet having fallen into oblivion.
Across the board, Britain does not work as it should, and our decision-making class is all too happy to give in and accept that status quo.
After mismanagement under the Conservatives, we now have a Government that, after promising to reverse that economic decline, is intent on making matters worse.
Rachel Reeves’s November Budget raised taxes by almost £30 billion, which according to the Office for Budget Responsibility will shoot the tax burden to a record high of 38.3% of GDP by 2031. The Centre for Policy Studies recently calculated that Reeves’s decision to freeze income tax brackets will make workers on around £50,000 hundreds of pounds worse off in real terms by 2030.
Saddled with increased taxes and employment legislation, businesses can no longer afford to hire people like they used to, contributing to what is expected to be an 11-year high for unemployment in 2026. So much for an administration ‘laser-focused’ on growth. While our economy is predicted to grow at a rate of 1.2% over the coming year, Poland – the home nation of the optimistic Spectator author – will see economic growth of 3.4%. You can appreciate why he felt we needed a pat on the head.
Short-termist attitudes to economics are mirrored in our politics. Migration – a top issue for voters – is case in point. Despite it being clear that a hideously unselective immigration system could never deliver the economic improvements some had predicted, only now are politicians hardening their positions, and only now is there any evidence of numbers beginning to fall. In the meantime, cultural tensions have festered amid the scandal over predominantly Pakistani rape gangs and recent reports of asylum seekers in taxpayer-funded accommodation going on to commit acts of violence on British streets.
Zooming in with the microscope, our culture of political avoidance worsens even the smallest of issues. Take driving tests. We have a backlog of 1.1 million tests that were not taken in the 2020/21 financial year due to Covid pandemic, and around 360,000 of these have still not been booked. Last September, the average waiting time for a test was 22 weeks, but 70% of test centres reported waiting times of 24 weeks. Fixes have been suggested. Ellen Pasternack advocates rolling out Approved Driving Instructors to get through the backlog, in much the same way as volunteers were quickly trained to administer Covid vaccines. This is clearly too much like hard work for the Government, which is instead consulting on enshrining the delay into law by requiring learner drivers to wait six months before taking their test.
A more honest appraisal of Britain is that it is only successful in how remarkably well it has held up under the weight of its own incompetence.
This might hold for now, but all the metrics show an economic and political implosion if we continue on this trajectory. The solutions to our problems are available and regularly detailed on sites such as CapX. For the meantime, I think we’ve all had enough grinning into the abyss.
On July 27, 2025, the US President Donald Trump invited the President of the EU Commission Ursula von der Leyen and other top EU officials to his golf course, Trump-Turnberry on the West Coast of Scotland. Their meeting sealed a trade deal, which von der Leyen described as ‘huge’, but which critics described as a […]
After the Government’s timid attempt to slow the growth of welfare spending collapsed under pressure from its own backbenchers and disability activists, ministers needed a way out. Their answer was to agree to the Timms Review of Personal Independence Payment (PIP) ‘co-produced’ with disability groups. It never stood a chance. With a steering group overwhelmingly […]
This week, Nimby Watch is in Winstanley, in the historical county of Lancashire. But, like certain other people in Winstanley right now, we’ve got our eyes on Westminster… Okay then, why are we in Winstanley. Where exactly is Winstanley, anyway? Well, if you’re part of the southern Westminster elite, you might say that Winstanley is […]
