Why is Britain such a mess?

On the unravelling of a country and the death of seriousness.

Jun 22, 2025

As a young twenty-something at the start of this century, I thought of Britain as a country that mattered. Not just because of its past — though that cast a long shadow — but because it seemed, even then, disproportionately influential on the world stage.

Its cultural reach was extraordinary. Its music shaped global charts; its writers won international prizes. Its film directors, documentary makers, and even comedians punched far above their weight. But more than that, there was a sense — perhaps naive, but not baseless — that this was a serious country. Open. Tolerant. Reasonable. One of the good ones.

I felt, in a quiet and slightly self-conscious way, rather proud of it.

I left Britain not out of frustration or political despair, but because I was drawn by the pull of travel and the chance for adventure. What started as a short break turned, almost without planning, into something more permanent. Life moved on and I never settled back in the old country. But the warmth I felt toward Britain never really faded.

Now, whenever I come back, something feels different. Not just poorer or more frayed, but somehow dimmed — as if something essential has quietly slipped away. The place looks the same in parts, but the atmosphere is different. More brittle, less anchored in anything solid. What I once dismissed as political noise now feels like a profound shift — a cultural unmooring.

This is not just nostalgia. It is the slow realisation that the country I left behind has been hollowed out — not by some foreign power or global catastrophe but by its own elites.

A country that jails mothers for foolish tweets but dithers for years over child exploitation. That waves through radical legal changes in the dead of night, yet agonises for weeks over what pronouns to use in official documents. A country where doctors strike for more money as services collapse, and where government DEI departments swell with well-paid functionaries who appear to serve no one but themselves.

Behind all this dysfunction lies something deeper: the death of seriousness and the rise of a political and cultural class more concerned with moral performance than moral responsibility. We live in an age where cruelty can be repackaged as compassion, provided the narrative is correct; where irreversible harm is done in the name of inclusion; where slogans substitute for thought.

This is not just political incompetence. It’s a refusal to ask hard questions or to tolerate those who do. Across issue after issue — immigration, Net Zero, gender, criminal justice — a strange consensus has emerged among those in power. One that presents itself as progressive, compassionate, and forward-thinking, yet remains curiously hostile to scrutiny, allergic to dissent, and firmly opposed to the public will.

We might call it the ideology of moral vanity: a worldview more invested in the display of virtue than its actual consequences. Under its influence, our institutions have become theatres of performance. Our schools teach children what to feel, not how to think. Our news media shame more readily than they investigate.

And at the centre of it all stands the ‘lanyard class’ — credentialed, insulated, and oddly incurious — who mistake conformity for principle and status for wisdom. They say all the right things while presiding over all the wrong outcomes.

The result is a nation in open contradiction with itself. A politics of imposed consensus dressed as democracy. Policies made in defiance of public opinion, then defended as moral necessities. We are told that mass immigration is a strength, that Net Zero is non-negotiable, that gender is both sacred and fluid, and that to question any of this is to be on the wrong side of history.

But what happens when the political and cultural elite believe not in truth, only in narrative? When it prefers symbolic virtue to material competence? When it sees the public not as partners in a democratic project, but as obstacles to be managed?

This is the nation that birthed the Industrial Revolution, but which now can’t lay a stretch of track between two major cities without the entire project descending into farce. A country that surrendered part of its own territory — against the wishes of its residents — while paying over £12 billion for the privilege. A country that once led the world in ending slavery, but fixates on symbolic atonement while paralysed by the idea of historic guilt. Its only growth industries are quangos, the diversity sector, and OnlyFans.

What we face is not just political incompetence but a kind of intellectual surrender. A culture that recoils from judgment, that confuses technocratic drift for vision, and performance for principle. A ruling class more afraid of Guardian disapproval than of national decline. And a public slowly waking up to the realisation that no one is coming to save them, because the people in charge do not see saving the country as their job.

Renewal won’t come from hashtags or heroic leaders. It will come, if it comes at all, through a return to seriousness: institutions that serve the public rather than perform for them; leaders who value duty over display; a culture that remembers what it means to be grown-up. That may not sound like much. But it’s how civilisations recover — not in revolutions, but in small acts of repair.

Perhaps, though, in 25 years, none of this will matter. Not because it will have been resolved, but because the country we knew will no longer exist, replaced by something else. A new Britain in both form and spirit. Changed by mass immigration. Reshaped by demographic upheaval. Reprogrammed by digital life and the logic of AI. A place where the values we once thought self-evident — duty, restraint, truth — will seem faintly ridiculous.

And no one will remember quite why any of this once felt worth saving.

Veridaze

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