Britain's strengths
In 2025 I published a paper called ‘Broken Britain - 16 Problems Facing the Country.’ I wrote that Britain is broken, and that no-one on the horizon seems to have any notion or plan on how to mend it. I have listed the ways in which the country is locked in a downward spiral of doom, and has lost the self-confidence it had a generation ago.
This need not be permanent because there are genuine reasons for optimism, even though they require some honest accounting against the opposing headwinds.
The structural strengths are real and durable. Britain retains assets that are genuinely hard to replicate. The English language remains the world's lingua franca and the default medium for commerce, science, and culture, an effortless network advantage. We might rename it the lingua anglica.
London is one of only two or three cities on Earth that can credibly claim to be a global financial, legal, and cultural hub simultaneously. The Common-Law tradition, property rights, and contract enforceability remain among the most trusted in the world. These things do not just disappear during a bad decade.
The talent infrastructure is extraordinary. Four of the world's top twenty universities are British. The NHS, whatever its operational failures, at least means that illness does not have to be a financial catastrophe. The creative industries, such as film, music, games, architecture, and fashion, punch absurdly above their weight and show no signs of declining. The concentration of AI and biotech talent around Oxford, Cambridge, and London is genuinely world-class.
And the political cycle may be turning. The post-2016 period was unusually chaotic even by British standards, with six prime ministers in seven years, a pandemic, an energy shock, and a prolonged constitutional argument. That was an unusual cluster of disruptions, but the underlying institutions held. Courts pushed back on overreach. The civil service maintained continuity. Parliament kept functioning. The fact that the system bent without breaking is itself evidence of a kind.
Reform ideas exist and are ready. Unlike some countries where the policy debate is genuinely exhausted, Britain has a well-developed supply of reform proposals, on planning, on the regulatory state, on energy, and on capital markets. The Adam Smith Institute, the Resolution Foundation, and others across the spectrum have done serious analytical work. The constraint is political will, not intellectual poverty. Political will can change faster than institutions.
Demography is less bad than it looks. Britain is ageing, but less rapidly than Germany, Italy, Japan, or South Korea. Net migration, whatever the political controversy around it, has kept the working-age ratio better than it would otherwise have been. The dependency ratio problem is real but not yet unsolvable.
Optimism has to be tempered by the fact that the housing crisis acts as a tax on everything, on labour mobility, on family formation, and on savings. Productivity growth has been anaemic for fifteen years. Regional divergence is severe. And the NHS is in a condition where it risks becoming a drag on rather than a support for the broader economy.
The case for optimism is not that things are going well; they are not. It is that Britain has the raw ingredients, including its institutions, talent, language, geography and soft power, to recover faster than its recent trajectory suggests, if the political and policy logjam can be broken. That is a conditional, but it is a less fragile one than it might appear.
Madsen Pirie