The chief things wrong with Britain today
Britain's central problems are structural and political rather than technical. The solutions to most are widely understood, but the incentives to implement them are weak or perverse.
Growth has been anaemic for fifteen years. Planning restrictions strangle house-building, making labour immobile and consuming household income in rent. Infrastructure takes decades and costs multiples of what comparable countries spend. The tax system is riddled with distortions that discourage investment and reward asset-holding over enterprise.
Possibly the single most damaging policy failure is in housing. A combination of green belt orthodoxy, NIMBYism institutionalised through local planning, and the political economy of existing homeowners has made Britain one of the least affordable housing markets in the developed world. This cascades into inequality, low birth rates, workforce immobility, and a hollowing-out of public sector capacity in expensive cities.
In the NHS demand has outpaced capacity for a generation. The model of a free-at-point-of-use state monopoly discourages the insurance and co-payment mechanisms that allow comparable countries such as France, Germany, and the Netherlands to deliver better outcomes at similar cost. Political taboo prevents serious reform.
Britain is one of the most centralized states in the democratic world. Local government has almost no revenue-raising autonomy, creating a system where accountability is diffused and local initiative impossible. Westminster absorbs all political energy while being structurally poor at managing complex delivery.
State capacity is in decline. The civil service has become risk-averse, commercially naïve, and institutionally opposed to bold implementation. Major procurement and IT projects routinely fail. Defence capability has been hollowed out to below what treaty commitments require.
Prisons are overcrowded and are not rehabilitative in intent or effect. Police are visibly risk-averse and have retreated from street-level enforcement. Sentencing decisions and parole practice are poorly calibrated to public risk. Reoffending rates are high precisely because the system has no coherent theory of what it is for.
Perhaps the deepest problem is that we have an exhausted political class. Both main parties have governed for extended periods without confronting the structural questions above. The Conservatives ran out of ideas after 2016; Labour appears committed to high public expenditure without the institutional reforms that would make it productive. The media incentives, the electoral system, and the lobbying power of vested interests all conspire against the kind of long-horizon policy thinking that genuine reform requires.
The thread connecting most of these is the same one The ASI has written about for decades - the gap between what is analytically known to work and what the political system can actually deliver, and the need for strategies that make good policy the path of least resistance rather than the path of greatest resistance.
Madsen Pirie