No future: is Britain losing hope?
Britain faces a deep, decade-in-the-making crisis of hope, as rising costs, stagnating opportunities, and widening structural failures leave both young and middle-class people feeling trapped, disillusioned, and asking if a viable future in the UK is still possible, says Eliza Filby
Throughout my conversations in recent months it’s become clear to me that the country’s overwhelming emotion now is not just anger at politicians or anxiety about taxes, but something more troubling: a loss of hope. This is not confined to one Budget or one administration but has been building for well over a decade (possibly two). The basic life‑building project in Britain – growing a business or career, forming a family, building a home – now feels persistently harder and, for a growing number of people, improbable without parental help.
Looking back, the 2010s appear full of a kind of naïve and misguided optimism, whatever side you were on. From the idealistic tech bro thinking life could be solved by an app, to the climate change activist committed to net zero, to the Brexiteer fixated on the EU bureaucrats as the enemy, each was animated by idealistic projects that now feel oddly out of step. In retrospect, much of that fervour also acted as a distraction from deeper structural problems.
The clearest test of whether a society still believes in its future is what happens to the young, and here the picture is bleak. In September this year, 946,000 people aged 16-24 were not in education, employment or training, while many more remain financially dependent on parents far longer than any generation before them. Others who had begun to build momentum are now being steadily clobbered by tax and debt. Forget a marginal squeeze; this is an effective re‑shaping of what professional life now delivers.
And people know it. The starkest illustration of this malaise lies in the emigration figures. Britain is now experiencing its highest long‑term outflows since the early 1920s, as confidence quietly drains away.
Running to stand still
People are now running simply to stand still, which is what happens when a nation carries more than £2.7 trillion in debt and spends roughly £105bn each year servicing the interest before anything else is funded. While fiscal drag is a device that has been deployed by successive governments to finance this by stealth, Rachel Reeves might find she’s the first Chancellor not to get away with it. In 2030 more than 10m additional people will be paying higher rates of income tax than in 2023 – not because they are flourishing but because thresholds have been frozen while earnings increase.
We talk about young people moving but I’m seeing a different trend amongst my peers, with close friends moving not in their carefree 20s but in their 40s with children, uprooting at the most chaotic time in their lives and leaving family and friends behind because they don’t want to raise kids in the UK.
Last Friday, Gary Stevenson came round for tea for his television project I am contributing to, and we talked at length about his calls for a wealth tax. He was both charming and generous in person, but at heart he is an activist rather than an economist. His focus on wealth is understandable because, alongside immigration, that is what is most visible and where the political anger now sits. National debt is not visible.
Gary Stevenson came round for tea. He was both charming and generous in person, but at heart he is an activist rather than an economist
But the central point I made to him is that I do not think his ideas are ambitious enough for the scale of the moment. A wealth tax on its own is too narrow for where Britain now finds itself, leaving aside the issue of whether one would ever work. Our problems are much wider and more deeply rooted. This moment feels closer in scale to the 1970s or even the 1930s. We are living with the accumulated consequences of long delay and long Covid at once, visible in a housing market that no longer functions as a ladder, in widening regional disparities, in failing infrastructure, transport and house building, in an education system still optimised for a 20th labour market and twenty-first century fads, in an ageing society without a properly funded health and care architecture, and in a university sector colliding with artificial intelligence at precisely the moment its debt‑fuelled model looks most exposed.
The key thing that Gary and I did agree on is that we are in an economic mess which, although it is impacting the working class and the middle class differently, is now producing a strikingly similar emotional response in both. The working class feels locked out through low pay, insecure work and collapsing public services, while the middle class feels squeezed through tax, debt and housing costs that strip away the sense of progress they were promised. Different pressures, different levels of exposure, but a shared mood of frustration and betrayal. It is this convergence of anger that is reshaping British politics, and helps to explain why people are increasingly drawn to politicians who appear to speak directly to that mood – be it Nigel Farage or Zack Polanski.
I travel constantly with my work across the length and breadth of the UK, and since Covid a clear pattern has emerged. The signs of national decline are no longer confined to places that have long struggled but are now increasingly visible in areas that once felt prosperous, in parts of the South East as well as the North that for decades assumed themselves insulated from this kind of slow unravelling.
Been here before
So have we been here before? In some ways, yes. The 1970s were defined by a similar sense of disillusionment, a ‘brain drain’ and by punk as the cultural expression of nihilistic youth. By snarling “no future, no future for you”, Johnny Rotten gave voice to a generation that felt economically boxed in and politically furious. That decade also saw the rise of the National Front, intense trade union activism, second‑wave feminism, and a newly politicised middle class angered by inflation and national decline. Margaret Thatcher responded to and capitalised on that national mood.
But we are not living in the 1970s. Britain today is more tolerant, materially richer and culturally more plural than it was then. The crucial difference is that we no longer have the demographic windfall of a young population, nor mass entry of women entering the workforce nor North Sea oil to underwrite a fragile economic model. Both left and right still look to the past for blueprints. Those on the right look back to the 1980s, instinctively to deregulation and market liberalisation while those on the left reach for echoes of post‑war state planning. Neither instinct meets the moment.
And yet, within this bleakness, I do detect the beginnings of a different kind of public conversation. It feels less ideological and less performative than before and more sombre but also more honest. The country is slowly waking up to the limits of pretending to be richer than it is, to the reality that tax rises alone cannot substitute for growth, and to the recognition that Britain’s crisis is not simply fiscal, but generational and structural.
The defining question of this moment is not only whether the system feels fair but whether life here still feels possible. Answering this question means having an honest conversation about whether we still know how to build things and get things done; about whether the British state and market (because you need both) still has the muscle and capacity and patience to take the big decisions. The conversation is being spearheaded by a millennial generation hitting their 40s having grown up in an era of drift, delay and managed decline. Right now, the deepest political question is no longer left versus right, but whether anything can still be made to work at scale at all. Until that is answered, the quiet national disillusionment now surrounding each Budget will continue to harden into something more permanent and pernicious.
Dr Eliza Filby is a historian of generations and author of the Sunday Times bestseller Inheritocracy