UNSENT STUDIOSYSTEMSEIGHT ESSAYS
BRITAIN REMEMBERS THE ANGER.
THE COUNTRY
THAT FORGOT
The squeeze is remembered. The arguments are everywhere. But the choices that shaped the pressure keep slipping out of the story.
There is something strange about Britain at the moment.
We are angry.
About prices. Immigration. Wages. Housing. Taxes. Public services. Politicians. People on benefits. People with money. People without money. Someone going on holiday when somebody else cannot afford one.
Listen to a phone-in for long enough and everybody has an answer.
The individual arguments change. The pattern underneath them doesn’t.
Britain has become remarkably good at discussing what is happening to us while becoming much less comfortable discussing how we got here.
THE PATTERN
The cause falls out of the story.
DECISIONS HAVE CONSEQUENCES
We made decisions.
Brexit did not happen to Britain.
Britain voted for it.
17.4 million people voted Leave in 2016: 51.9% of valid votes. That doesn’t mean every economic problem since 2016 was caused by Brexit. It doesn’t mean everybody who voted Leave wanted the same thing. And it certainly doesn’t mean the other 48.1% disappeared.
It means a consequential national decision was made.
The Office for Budget Responsibility’s current forecast assumption is that the post-Brexit UK–EU trading relationship will reduce long-run UK productivity by 4% relative to remaining in the EU. This is an OBR estimate and assumption, not a claim that Brexit explains every pressure Britain faces.
SOVEREIGNTY IS NOT CONTROL OVER OTHERS
We remember the sovereignty.
We forget the limits.
Perhaps nowhere is the contradiction clearer than immigration.
We wanted control of our borders. Fair enough.
But Britain having sovereignty does not give Britain sovereignty over France.
France has a government. France has laws. France has borders. France has interests of its own.
That sounds painfully obvious. And yet listen to some of the solutions casually proposed in Britain’s political conversation and you could be forgiven for thinking somebody forgot.
The Empire went.
Some of the assumptions survived.
THE ECONOMY WE SAY WE WANT
We need people.
We don’t want immigration.
Britain needs workers.
And yet immigration is repeatedly discussed as though it exists entirely separately from the economy that requires those people.
We want the labour. We want the tax receipts. We want the services. We want the vacancies filled.
But politically, we increasingly want fewer immigrants.
When Britain says it has a problem with immigration, which immigration are we actually talking about?
Because those conversations are not always as colour-blind as we pretend they are.
CITIZENSHIP AND PUBLIC UNDERSTANDING
Perhaps we were never very good at explaining the system.
England has statutory citizenship education at Key Stages 3 and 4 in local-authority-maintained schools.
Parliament. Elections. Political parties. Government. International governance. Public finances. Evidence.
Which raises a more interesting question than simply saying schools don’t teach politics.
If this is what we say we teach, how much of it survives into adulthood?
We measure education constantly.
But perhaps there is another kind of education that is harder to measure:
Understanding the society you have been educated to live in.
ATTENTION REWARDS SPEED
Then we built an economy around the argument.
Politics increasingly arrives as clips, callers, confrontations, headlines and reactions.
Understanding takes longer.
Anger is quicker.
That doesn’t make the public stupid. It makes the environment worth examining.
THE SERIES
Eight ways
we forgot.
Decisions become consequences. Consequences become grievances. Grievances become stories. Somewhere along the way, the original decision disappears.
The country that forgot its own decisions
Brexit. Austerity. Spending. Tax. Public services. What happens when we remember the pain but forget what preceded it?
READ PART ONE ↗ PART 02The country that thinks it still runs the world
Britain, France, borders and the lingering assumption that sovereignty somehow gives us authority somewhere else.
READ PART TWO ↗ PART 03The country that was never taught how to think politically
Citizenship is on the curriculum. So what happened between the classroom and adulthood?
READ PART THREE ↗ PART 04The country that thinks politics is personality
Money. Holidays. Likeability. When did judging politicians become a substitute for understanding policy?
READ PART FOUR ↗ PART 05The country that thinks wealth is a moral signal
Conservative means rich. Labour means poor. A complicated political world reduced to coloured rosettes.
READ PART FIVE ↗ PART 06The country that thinks struggle should be shared
If I can’t afford it, why should you? When falling living standards turn aspiration into resentment.
READ PART SIX ↗ PART 07The country addicted to outrage
The phone-in. The clip. The caller. The headline. What happens when anger becomes the product?
READ PART SEVEN ↗ PART 08The country that feels worse than it understands
The squeeze is real. But are we getting any better at understanding what produced it?
READ PART EIGHT ↗KEEP THIS PAGE CURRENT Replace the temporary card links as each essay is published. Refresh the dated evidence panel when reliable new figures are released.