After thirty years living in Asia I have returned to the UK and after living here for a year I cannot help but think that I have returned to the 1970’s.  In that decade there was the three-day week, fuel crisis, firemen, ambulance men, miners’ strikes, and a few more. There was inflation, unemployment, and an apocalyptic sense that everything was unravelling.
 
The reaction then was that although everyone was a member of the Slightly Cross Brigade, both on the left and the right, a lot were slipping over into the Really Cross Brigade and some had gone into the Very Angry Brigade. Anarchists and communists were plotting revolution. People were heading off to country mansions to train in the use of AK47s! Banks were being bombed. The Militant Tendency took control of Labour Party’s Young Socialists and demanded the taking of the “Economic Heights of the Nation”. And as for the IRA!!! Well, then it all ended in 1978 when we got The Winter of Discontent. Rubbish piled up on the streets as the country ground to a halt and just when we thought civil war was afoot, along comes Margaret and we got a police force on horseback looking not unlike Cromwell’s New Model Army - probably a well thought out design meant to evoke the primacy of Parliament as they charged down the massed ranks of King Scargil’s subjects, the striking Miners.

Bolshie badass battling Brits have been a long and not necessarily well cherished tradition, but a tradition from Boudicca onwards that we have managed to maintain. Until perhaps today! People seem a bit polite in comparison, except when posting to social media.
 
Since the civil war the odd riot has ensued but outside of Ireland rarely any consistent programme of civil disorder. Given that the student population, a not uncommon source of such activity, has since 2000 grown from 30% of youngsters to 50%, the equanimity with which the present day crisis greeted is surprising.
 
Today’s students, one would imagine have more to be unhappier about than anyone else. They have more debt than the Boomers who received free university education. And the courses that they attend are not necessarily high standard or indicative of future earnings. There is a sense that one takes a course merely to postpone unemployment. The lack of vocational training is surprising. There is an argument in favour of educated plumbers, but a plumber needs to be educated in plumbing as well as mixed media studies! Hence the importation of plumbers and other building trades from overseas and for the older generation, the growing sense of national decline.
 
Despite having strikes, three days in the office, inflation, wage stagnation, collapsing social services, failed and half-baked infrastructure projects, supply chain collapses, productivity collapse, housing market collapse, massive corruption, and government incompetence, all of which has plunged Britain into a recession making this the poorest rich country whose economy is actually growing less than Russia’s… I’m pausing for breath here… Despite all that, we don’t hear about revolution or civil war, but we get a rather soporific groan about “Britain in Decline!” to the accompaniment of a debate about whether one can choose one’s gender based pronouns at will. As my father, who’d be a hundred years old by now, would have said, and did frequently, “this isn’t my country anymore!”
 
So what are the statistics? Ian Stewart, The chief economist of Deloittes, gives us a good run down of the state of things. He is, I assume, an optimist, but on a close look at the stats, it is a very mixed picture that it paints.
 

THE STATS
 
Since 2000 technology, education and healthcare workers have increased in numbers by 40-50%.  Government spending in these areas in 2000 was 34%. Now it is 38%. Interest rates in 2000 were 5.7% whereas now they are 0.5%, which is just as well as government debt is now 80% of GDP rather than the 28% it used to be. And there is this sense that none of those sectors have been managed well, neither for those who use them, nor for those who work in them.
 
Education and medical sector wages have stagnated and the technology sector seems to have become a playground for corrupt companies wangling government contracts that they barely fulfil. Education and healthcare are perceived as so badly managed that results are worse than they were in 2000. Consequently in the last twenty years the costs of medical services has risen by 130% and the cost of education has become four times higher.
 
As the interest rates increase, that government debt is just going to blow up everything. Remember how Liz Truss managed to instantly throw the bond market into a downward spin by announcing she was going to spend spend spend, or as she cancerously put it, go for growth growth growth. It was as if she had not checked the bank account before making the announcement. And it did not help that she came across as autistic and not in the Elon Musk crazy genius sense.
 
So where are savings being made to ward off a debt crisis and the intervention of the International Monetary Fund? According to Deloittes Chief Economist, the cuts are in the area of the Police, Prisons, Local Government, and working-age benefits.  I am sure everyone has noticed this and it has not increased our sense of safety, either from potholes or highwaymen, and definitely not the day light robbers lurking in The City.
 
So what other statistics do we glean from Deloittes Chief Economist? He points out that one million fewer work in manufacturing, which is a decline of 25%. Manufacturing output is unchanged though because of automation. This has also reduced the costs of clothing and footwear and audio-visual equipment. Those cameras, phones and TV’s now cost 80% less, not that one buys the cheap ones if one wants to use the latest apps, which of course you have to if you wish to use bank accounts and other services such as the health service. And despite price falls here, the cost of living has gone up 51% since the year 2000.
 
There has been a massive move from publicly traded companies to private companies. In 2000 there were 12,400 and in 2023 there are only 5,700. And private companies have increased from 1.3 million to 4 million. Whether this is a good thing or not is hard to say. Public companies have a lot of public scrutiny attached whereas private one’s do not, but then most private companies are small affairs and one can argue one cannot ever get enough of them! What one can say about the shrinking public company statistics, is that some companies have got rather large and their owners have become fewer and richer.
 
For those concerned about the problems of climate change there is some good news. Greenhouse gas emissions are down by 37%. Coal generates less than 1% of electricity. Wind and solar energy has increased tenfold. Car passenger miles may be up 5% but rail passenger journeys are up by 90% and as for those diesel burning buses and coaches, their passenger miles are down by 24%. Though given the way globalisation has outsourced the dirty jobs, whatever gains made here are probably lost elsewhere in the world. A quick burst of a Delhi smog will alert you to the difficulties building up for the future.
 
As one can see, none of this looks that good. The UK was once the globalised nation par excellent, or evil imperialist, depending upon your point of view, then it changed to a role as a fulcrum between Europe and America, then it became a leading exponent of neo-liberalism, and now it can lay claim to being none of those things.
 
Even if one seeks a big picture vision of the future from a magazine like The New Statesmen, their article on the decline of Britain states that we have a political elite that hates the things we are good at, which it lists as the University Sector, a huge strength in professional and technical services such as accountants, financiers etc, and of course our creative industries. Which basically is harkening back to the Cool Britannia idea of the Blair years. Though the New Statesman points out that the problem here is that these areas employ very few people and the issue then becomes how to share the benefits. Somehow money has to be filtered out of The City into retail workers - who are surely an endangered species as Amazon rules – and child care, health service etc etc. Which sounds like tax the rich and give it to the poor, and I can hear the offshore tax havens and purveyors of shell companies licking their lips at the prospect of doing even better business. All of which still prefers finance over industry and infrastructure investment, in short they ignore the graft that my father said did nobody any harm, unless of course one was the person doing the grafting.
 
The Atlantic magazine’s take on all this points out that living standards and wages have fallen significantly behind those of Western Europe and are lower than they were fifteen years ago. The 2008 financial crisis set the government on a policy of austerity worried about debt rather than productivity or aggregate demand and real wages fell for six straight years. The government blamed bureaucrats in Brussels, immigrants, asylum seekers, which of course induced Brexit, thus cutting trade ties just to make things worse.
 
The Atlantic seems to prefer the idea of investing in industry. It points out that fifty per cent of automatic car washes have disappeared and been replaced by men with buckets and that the UK manufacturing base has less automation than any other rich country. The average robot density is below that of Slovenia and Slovakia. Only London and finance has higher productivity than western European peers. In short, Britain is de-industrialising and has bizarrely voted to reduce global access to trade and talent.
 
On the cultural side of things there is a left wing aversion to growth as that damages the ecology and the climate and a right wing aversion to openness as that brings in immigrants of all kinds. And there is an older economically insulated voting bloc that doesn’t care one way or the other about the future. In short: the country is rejecting industrialisation, productivity, globalisation and becoming bitter, flailing and nonsensical in its politics and posturings.
 
So what do people think about all this? The IPSOS MORI POLL says that seven out of ten Britons agree that the UK is in decline, whatever that means. But it seems a bit of a generational assessment. The older generation believe that the younger will have it harder than them but remarkably the younger think, that they will have it easier, which basically means they aren’t even cross despite only 17% thinking that decline is reversible. If decline it is, the young don’t seem to mind as much as the boomers think they should.
 
Mind, South Africa, South Korea, Italy, and Brazil are even more pessimistic about their countries and one assumes that they are less sanguine about the prospect. France, Belgium and Spain thought things were sort of OK but going to be much worse for future generations and India was the most hopeful, despite the terrible pollution they suffer.
 
All across the globe there are high levels of discontent with traditional ways of doing things and a belief that the system is rigged in favour of the rich. Which perhaps indicates that this poll did not ask too many members of the Taliban who rather like traditional ways of doing things and a Warlord is a war lord, so needs his wealth and women to compensate for his short life. Some people just don’t get the idea of development and do not want to move away from the village - an attitude that one detects has seeped into Little Old Brexit Voting England as well. Despite impending climate crisis, the young are surprisingly optimistic and seem to ignore the collapse of civilisation that others may well deduce from the picket lines, scandals and populist politicians popping up that everyone loves to hate and strangely seems willing to vote for. There seems to be some kind of idea that one can ignore the politicians, buy a croft somewhere and indulge in sustainable farming methods.

 
A HISTORY OF DISCONTENT
 
Determining the mindset of any population is fraught with misunderstanding. The experience of the seventies brought out a generation of politicians determined to change everything and despite the support of the Soviet Union and popularity of revolutionary rhetoric among the student classes, the change that came was not quite the change that the Soviet Union might have wanted.
 
Margaret Thatcher opened up the financial markets to the comprehensive school educated greedy for loads of money folks that she correctly guessed lurked beneath the surface of the average university student with their book shelf containing unread copies of Mao’s Little Red Books and half read copies of Jean Paul Sartre’s La Nausea. The daughter of the Grantham grocer with the affected accent had her ears somewhat more tuned in than she was given credit for. She had seen the sixties and recognised it for the sales gimmick it was.
 
The dippy hippies of the sixties might have slipped into a marijuana and acid fuelled fantasy of eastern spirituality but it was accompanied by rampant consumerism stoked by free education and health care. It released the masses from the grind of industrial grimness. And British fashion, music, art and style took the world by storm. British accountancy unfortunately turned into a joke. Being an accountant was seen as the most boring occupation you could have. So the swinging sixties left the grafters of the economy mired in their common sense and outmoded industries that no longer paid. Consequently the IMF had to step in to sort out the books. Then the party ended and the bitter cold wind of the seventies blew.
 
Thatcher’s solution was to ridicule hippies and unleash Loadsamoney Louts and Punks! And Anarchy in the UK was launched. Anger, to misquote Johnny Rotten, was an energy that could be unleashed upon the world, but not as a socialist revolution but as a money making venture. Never Mind The Bollocks! It’s Filthy Lucre that we desire! It was both cool to be a yuppie as well as great fun to mock a yuppie. And if you could not quite be a yuppie or witty enough to mock them, you could at lease buy your own council house with a cheap mortgage.
 
My father of course was frothing at the mouth. Just when his contempt for the lazy privileged hippies had given way to an “I told you it’ll end in tears,” another bunch of idle louts had suddenly got money in their pockets for nothing, as far as he could see, and inflation had wrecked his pension. Hard graft was supposed to not do anyone any harm, but here was proof indeed that it did not do anyone any good either.
 
The Labour Party realised that the British considered money grubbing to be vulgar and so opted to make everyone Cool with being Cool and began a sixties revival. The Swinging Sixties had been all about UK music, fashion, films, and theatre, and so why not shift some of that dodgy money that was flooding into the City of London into financing the UK’s Coolness, only this time fuelled less by the soporific spliffs and hallucinogens, and more by cocaine and amphetamine. And of course sex. But this time round it was feminist sex and gender bending unmacho anti-patriarchal Germaine Greer Boy George approved sex, not the birth control pill fuelled mania of mars bars and orgies much loved by The News Of The World.
 
Blair’s “Big Lie” propaganda backfired when Social Media suddenly emerged and began spreading the suggestion that the lack of Weapons of Mass Destruction was not merely a mistaken assumption based upon circumstantial evidence, but an outright lie deliberately orchestrated to justify a bloody display of machismo. Sometimes it seems conspiracy theorists are correct.
The Washington Post argues that what they call “Declinism” has infected the UK regularly ever since it was noticed that other countries were industrialising and competing. But, they optimistically proclaim, British declinism was a matter of relativity and that it was merely a political tool by which one party could accuse the other of creating the mess the country was habitually in.  It ignored external factors and blamed internal factors and failed to notice that although Britain was less imperial, it was wealthy and as ever would muddle on rather than collapse into whatever countries collapse into when they self-destruct.
 
A country is an emotional attachment, its history, fake or otherwise, has a story that people buy into. Merry England, Great Britain, The United Kingdom, are all names that confuse foreigners but outline a story of radical cultural shifts coupled with a consistency of style. We compromise and we fight. We are an island of various ancient tribes who have learnt to live with each other but never quite trust each other but we speak out! We believe in freedom, at least in as much as having the freedom to sit in a pub and say whatever we like. The individual matters. Margaret Thatcher said society did not exist and although hardly anyone believed in her certainty, we tend to err on the rights of the individual and have little truck with social conformity. We like odd balls and eccentrics, which can be the only explanation as to how Liz Truss became briefly Prime Minister. 
 
There is, however, a hierarchy that has plagued us ever since the Normans took over. A thousand years later, the feudal society they instituted still clashes with the underlying warrior society of the Saxon and Brythonic Tribes they came to subdue. On the one hand this tension brought us to a point where we ruled the waves and were a world power, but it did so more by driving our most energetic out of the island in disgust. Even that quintessential Englishman, Oliver Cromwell contemplated emigrating to America. In fact something like two to three million went in the 17th century, which out of a population of six million meant a lot of people thought chancing their scalps was preferable to putting up with the nonsense of the English class system.
 
Even so, the lads making their pile in the colonies, often returned to good old Blighty with their wealth and a desire to marry into the aristocracy and have their own little feudal fiefdoms. There are many stately estates that never really made money, but rather depended upon wealth gained elsewhere in various not always healthy ways. Sugar barons and Nabobs wanted nothing more than to be thought of as having a bit of class. And one might add that despite our egalitarianism, peasant uprisings and chopping off of Kings heads, nowadays we have a minister for “Levelling Up”, not one for “Equality.”
 

A SORT OF CONCLUSION
 
The country my father believed in is long dead now, if it ever existed, so what is it that exists and what is it that we fear is declining? Is it patriotism? Is it loyalty to a ruling class? Is it Victorian respectability that we miss? Is it mere change? We can see that every so often the country has had radical shifts in culture and populations and gone through periods we could characterise as a “failed state.” Are we now heading into a “failed state” led by a rapacious asset stripping bunch of old Etonians?
 
If we dip into the New Left Review the idea of a country becomes irrelevant as globalised capital knows no borders and cares nothing for culture and community. Decline for the writers in the New Left Review is but the ebb and flow of heartless capitalism, which the global working class somehow has to unite against.
 
One cannot argue with the idea that borders make a country. If one opens them, globalises them, so to speak, it becomes just a piece of land that we drift through depending on economic necessity. A bit like the way modern football teams recruit people from around the world, and just label them Manchester United or Liverpool, and sell T-shirts to their fans. Your local team is not exactly made up of locals.
 
Having been one of those globalised individuals happy to live in several other countries and delighting in dipping in and out of other cultures, I can see little need for borders. One of the slogans of an on-line travel vlogger I follow is, “We are all the same!” And my experience has been that that is true. We really do have more in common than differences. Cultural differences are very thin. Even so, culture matters. Some cultures create economies that are not productive. Perhaps we are moving in that direction while at the same time, going on strike because nobody wants to be poor. Societies are not logical. They are a mess.
 
From 2010 onwards the UK has stagnated due to three things: the financial crisis of 2008, Brexit and the Covid pandemic. These are not entirely external factors, though they can be arguably seen as an unfortunate triple whammy that we can overcome because essentially we are a wealthy country with a resourceful if often fractious population. However, if one compares the UK with what it was in the year 2000, rather than 2010, one finds that the sense of our being a wealthy country erodes.
 
Not everyone is wealthy and for the majority, they are getting less wealthy despite the wealth of a few. The political choice it seems to offer is a toss-up between those wanting to level up and those wanting to destroy the corporate oligarchs. Nobody has much faith in either of these objectives being achieved, or actually solving anything, And in this existential shrug, one senses the idea of decline.
 
It could be more a decline of the boomer generation and the rise of those they characterise as snowflakes and populists. To put it in British stand-up comedy terms: one side wants sustainable vegan cheese farming with solar powered vehicles and the other wants only financial vehicles and to turn the cheese farmers into a class of peasants. Nobody seems to want to fill the potholes and despite a lot of this debate being fuelled by advanced technologies, there seems to be a fear that technology will take over and humans will be redundant! It is a common trope of English literature.
 
H.G.Wells book “The Time Machine” gave a Victorian spin on this by imagining humans evolving into two breeds, the flower loving Eloi living ignorant lives of plenty served by the bestial Morlocks and their machines, who turn out to be less servants of the Eloi but rather farming them for consumption.  In his even more apocalyptic “Shape of Things To Come” he concludes that technology and exploration are all that will save us from a collapse of civilization. He asks: “All the universe or nothingness? Which shall it be?”  We know which side Elon Musk is on. But he is not exactly making it cool.

And despite the sense of decline, the UK appears to be very attractive to immigrants. In fact immigration has been the biggest factor behind job growth! Two-thirds of the 5.6 million increase in the UK workforce has been due to immigration, not all of it legal, and curiously not all of it by those impressed by British culture and willing to abide by the “live and let live” compromise that has long been a trait of these islands. Even so, the reason for most wanting to come here has been the UK’s preference for freedom and tolerance and that is something that appears to be not in decline.

And while I have your attention, why not head over to the Goodness Grays YouTube Channel and check out our vlogs about our return to the UK after thirty years in Asia, not to mention our documentaries about Johor.
So Subscribe so that you can be informed when new series and Vlogs emerge.

Head off to GOODNESS GRAYS