This article is taken from the May 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £5.
We are more than a quarter of the way through the 21st century and much of the world has never had it so good. In the last 26 years, life expectancy has increased by over eight years to 72 in India and by a similar extension in China to 79.
In contrast, the average Glaswegian man dies at 74, having been “not in good health” since the age of 54. In this he can, at least, take comfort that he is not from Blackpool, where health outcomes are even worse.
Averages conceal considerable variations (although, if we are to compare like with like, the difference in life expectancy between Britain’s most deprived cities and, for instance, Calcutta has narrowed to about two years) and health and longevity are hardly the only measures of better times. Living with a sense of purpose might be a better gauge.
Millions of Britons still have this sense, professionally, personally and in and for their families and communities. Quietly, even stoically, they carry on just as their parents’ and grandparents’ generations did before them. Yet, their forebears had one important comfort denied to modern Britons — they knew that whatever their role in it, Britain was a serious nation, full of purpose at home and abroad.
It is not necessary to recite our ancestors’ feats of derring-do (they are now condemned and denigrated by our educational and cultural instructors as people to be hissed at) or imagine that life wasn’t hard for most people, to appreciate that Britain’s loss of collective purpose is a recent development.
By most measures, Britain ended the last quarter of the 20th century in a better place than seemed imaginable in 1975 (when only half of British adults had a bank account).
Wealthier we certainly became, with better and more privately-owned housing and material possessions, but 2000 was measurably better than 1975 in other ways too: fewer strikes; inflation tamed; IRA terrorism curtailed; the spectre of world communism seen off.
Can comparable advances be identified over the same timescale this century? Apart from benefitting from technology mostly devised or made elsewhere, what is better about British life today compared to at the beginning of the Millennium?
The loss of direction comes from the top. We need not over-romanticise the lives and works of politicians we previously rejected to recognise that on the front benches sat serious and occasionally inspiring people.
Comparing the talent that Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson and Margaret Thatcher assembled around the Cabinet table with that of today acts as both symbol and symptom of our diminishment.
National wealth has atrophied like its citizens’ health
With what vision do today’s statesmen and women inspire us? For the first 20 years of this century they failed to leverage Britain’s membership of the EU in the service of a clear national interest. Then, presented with the opportunity that Brexit offered to rethink ways of doing things, they couldn’t think of much.
Now, they have begun the humiliating task of creeping back, but this time with Britain as a colony rather than a member. Binding us to regulations but without any input of our own is the epitome of a political class that has lost interest in leadership. Even Starmer’s Europeanism is visionless.
Great mistakes were made in the 1950s and 1960s, but at least Britons could see their country had ambitions to go faster, higher, stronger. Across much of the country this is no longer evident.
As this magazine discussed in the April issue, a rare area where the government does take an active lead is in committing billions of pounds in subsidies to renewable energy providers so that one of the world’s most efficient energy markets has become one of the most expensive and, simultaneously, less reliable. Our government boasts that this is where we are setting an example to the world.
If only such zeal could be directed at projects that got the country moving rather than stalling. We have spent the last 17 years thinking about (but not building) a third runway for our biggest airport. Amsterdam’s Schiphol has six.
Such has been our inability to deliver infrastructure on time and to budget that the loudest cheer Rishi Sunak got at the 2023 Conservative party conference was when he cancelled HS2 north of Birmingham. It’s not even going to reach central London until the 2030s.
In this issue of The Critic, our political editor, Henry Hill, analyses how Labour imagined it would kick-start the economy without a coherent plan to do so. Sebastian Milbank writes about the boost to mankind’s imagination and the huge tangential benefits generated by the United States space programme.
Fred Sculthorp reports from Dubai, where — despite the Iran conflict — a quarter of a million Britons have decamped, pursuing dreams of wealth and fulfilment in a can-do emirate that they no longer find achievable in a can’t-do United Kingdom.
What links these themes is modern Britain’s acquired lack of national purpose except for policies that are self-harming.
Our expats include a fair share of dreamers and grifters, but also the hard-grafting and aspirational go-getters that can’t see a future in a Britain that spends more on welfare than it raises from its remaining workers’ income tax and where, since 2008, the national wealth has atrophied like its citizens’ health.
“We’re here because we’re here” was once a fatalistic joke. Let it not become the UK’s mission statement.
