How Britain became a poor country with rich illusions

Fifteen years of stagnation, self-inflicted wounds, and political denial have left Britain diminished—economically weaker, socially fragmented, and still pretending it’s a major power

There was a time when London didn’t just walk tall — it strutted with the unapologetic arrogance of a city that knew it didn’t need to explain itself. A generation ago, it carried the air of a capital of consequence. The money moved like floodwater, the energy was all swagger and edge, and the mood suggested history was always unfolding just out of sight — in a club basement off Soho, or in the whiskey fumes of a Commons bar.

Back in the early 2000s, London gave the impression of being unattainably expensive and yet somehow still yours — if only for a stolen night. It was a performance in perpetual motion. You didn’t just live in it, you tried to keep up. The city was full of foreigners but still spoke fluent Englishness — the kind you found in the smoked-glass hush of Bloomsbury pubs, the unrepentant snobbery of Chelsea cafés, or the glorious grime of Camden where nothing matched and nothing mattered. London didn’t posture like Los Angeles or polish itself like Singapore. It never asked for love. That was the point — and the pull.

Now the show’s still on, but the theatre’s crumbling. I was back recently, and what startled me wasn’t the decline — decline is rarely news in modern Britain — but how everyone seemed to wear it like an old coat. London today feels like The Rolling Stones: still charging premium prices, still belting out the old hits, but slower on its feet and haunted in the eyes. It used to be a low-rise Manhattan. Now it’s mid-tier America with delusions of grandeur.

The walk from Soho to Camden, up through Warren Street, was once a meander through the eccentric veins of the city’s soul. Now it opens the eyes in the way a slap does. Along the pavements, clusters of tents huddle like the aftermath of some quiet, unreported disaster. The quiet permanence of human lives arranged on concrete — a resigned architecture of abandonment. No one moves them on, no one even takes much notice. It's as if the state has entered into an unspoken truce with destitution: you stay there, we’ll look away.

The streets wore their filth without embarrassment. The trains shuddered along the tracks like they’d lost the will for grace. Shops pushed out tat with all the charm of a street market clinging to a cancelled parade, and money-changing kiosks stood like monuments to decline — the scent of a 1990s Budapest clinging faintly in the air. Everywhere, the sting of inflated prices: seven-pound pints in pubs that didn’t even bother pretending to be anything more than average, a basic fry-up in Camden that cost enough to feed two families in Lisbon. These are Manhattan prices for a city that no longer has Manhattan’s hunger.

The money still comes, yes — London hasn’t lost its appetite for it. But prosperity, real prosperity, has gone missing. The city, like the country it anchors, wears decline not as catastrophe but as custom. It’s in the things that don’t scream — the chipped kerbs, the broken signage, the weary face of a cashier who’s seen the rent rise faster than her wages. You sense it most in the silence, in the sense that decay has become so routine, it no longer offends.

This isn’t just the muttering of the disenchanted. The National Institute of Economic and Social Research, not exactly a den of dramatisers, has put it plain: by the cold arithmetic of living standards and salaries, Britain can no longer count itself a rich country. Productivity has flatlined like a punch-drunk boxer hanging on the ropes. Since 2007, real wages have scraped a meagre 2.2% gain. In the preceding seventeen years, they rose by 42%. Now the average British worker earns £4,000 a year less than if the country had merely kept pace with the Americans. That’s not a hiccup — it’s a quiet collapse.

And it gets starker. In parts of Birmingham and the North East — places with history in their hands and soot in their lungs — the average household is now poorer than its counterpart in the least affluent corners of Slovenia and Malta. Once, Brits looked at these places as the butt of jokes. Now they’re slipping past them with the calm confidence of countries that still believe in their own improvement.

The British decline wasn’t instant and dramatic, but more like a slow and almost gentlemanly surrender. The 2008 crash rattled the frame, but it was the decade that followed — defined by austerity dressed up as virtue — that drained the life out of the system. Public services were hollowed, investment throttled, and infrastructure provision became a shitshow. Witness the tens of billions already wasted on a high speed railway which will never be built. And what was perhaps most galling was the air of patrician glee that hung about it all — as if David Cameron and George Osborne fancied themselves not as surgeons performing triage, but as headmasters punishing a disobedient child. And now everyone carries the bruises.

Cameron’s Brexit gamble was the moment Britain stopped bluffing about its footing. Not because of the bunting or the backbench theatrics, but because of what seeped out after. Trade, once the bloodstream of the island, began to clot. Investment drifted, quiet as mist. That old reputation — Britain the safe pair of hands — started to twitch. The Boris Johnson era was less government than farce, a Punch and Judy show directed by a deceitful buffoon. As for Liz Truss, the less said the better. Foreign firms, once tethered to London by prestige and predictability, began slipping anchor. The capital lost something then — not its wealth, but its nerve.

And what can you say of housing, except that it has ceased to be shelter and become speculation? The country stopped building homes and started hoarding assets. Bricks and mortar turned casino chips. For those without the buy-in, movement became a luxury. Entire generations now sit still, not from idleness but from arithmetic. The poorest, meanwhile, are left to trudge uphill through treacle — backs bent, prospects shrinking. Social mobility, once a quiet point of pride, now lies where the hard shoulder meets the ditch.

Even Chester, lovely old Chester, bears the marks. A city that wears its Roman bones with quiet dignity now feels like it’s waiting on something that isn’t coming. The train station — tired and joyless. The buildings — fraying round the edges like a once-loved overcoat. The economy — not dead, just dozing, as if sedated by years of governmental neglect. This wasn’t a place overtaken by time. It was a place carefully and conclusively abandoned by politics.

And yet, through the fog of decline, the people endure. There remains, somehow, that ingrained decency — the dry humour, the practiced politeness, the instinct to queue before complain. But you can feel the strain. The smiles still come, but more often now they’re worn like uniforms — dutiful, a little frayed at the edges. Even British stoicism, that old warhorse, is beginning to limp.

What fills the silence now is resentment — not the frothing kind, but a slow-brewed bitterness aimed squarely at a political class that prefers its enemies to be foreign and imaginary. Ministers thump the lectern about Russia, China, Iran — anything to keep the conversation away from the failure to build new council flats, collapsing high streets, and hospitals that run on fumes and goodwill. The real enemy, they insist, is somewhere east of Suez — never at the end of your street.

So no, it’s not surprising that Nigel Farage is on the march again. Reform offers no real answers, but it at least names the anger that others pretend isn’t there. The Tories are running on muscle memory, Labour on caution and clichés, and the electorate — battered, overtaxed, and underwhelmed — is tired of being told that the ship is steady when they can feel the deck slanting beneath their feet.

There is, too, the matter that speaks in silences — the question of identity. Twenty years ago, London still wore its Englishness with a careless ease, like a man in Savile Row tweed who didn’t need to check the mirror. Today, it wears something else entirely. This isn’t a lament born of prejudice — only of observation. The transformation has been staggering, almost cinematic in pace. And while there is vigour in that new tempo, there is also confusion. A sense of place unpinned. Of a city unsure for whom it now performs. London is still many things — but is it still home?

What stings most is the knowledge that none of this was inevitable. Britain had the tools: the language of commerce, institutions that once inspired envy, cities steeped in the grandeur of empire and the energy of reinvention. But inheritance, like reputation, decays without care. Cultural capital must be spent wisely or not at all. And pride, if it is not matched by upkeep, turns quickly into nostalgia — the last refuge of countries that used to matter.

There’s still time, perhaps. But time, like the trains, no longer runs on schedule. Reversal will take more than slogans and borrowed optimism. It will demand something rare in Britain now — candour about what’s broken, and the courage to face who broke it. Without that, decline won’t just be a chapter. It will be the whole story.

They used to say the sun never set on the British Empire. Now it barely rises over Euston. It’s no longer Rule Britannia. It’s cruel Britannia.