No future: has England lost hope?

Britain faces a decade-long crisis of hope, as rising costs, stagnant opportunities and growing structural failures leave young and middle class people feeling trapped, disillusioned and wondering whether a good British future is still possible, says Eliza Filby

Through my conversations over the past few months, it has become clear to me that the emotions bubbling up in this country right now are not just anger at politicians or anxiety about taxes, but something more troubling: a loss of hope. This is not just limited to one Budget or one government, but has been growing for more than a decade (maybe two decades). The basic projects of building life in the UK – developing a business or career, starting a family, building a house – now feel increasingly difficult and, for more and more people, impossible without parental help.

Looking back, the 2010s seem full of naive and misguided optimism, whatever side you’re on. From the idealistic technologists who think life can be solved with an app, to the climate change activists committed to net zero, to the Brexiteers fixated on EU bureaucrats as the enemy, all are animated by idealistic projects that now feel strange and incongruous. In retrospect, much of this enthusiasm also served as a distraction from deeper structural problems.

The clearest test of whether a society still believes in its future is what happens to the younger generation, and here the picture is bleak. In September this year, 946,000 people aged 16-24 were without education, employment or training, while many more people remained financially dependent on their parents for far longer than previous generations. Other countries that have started to build momentum now continue to be burdened by taxes and debt. Forget a little pressure; it is an effective change to what professional life brings today.

And people know it. The clearest illustration of this malaise lies in emigration figures. Britain is now experiencing its highest long-term capital outflow since the early 1920s, as public confidence wanes.

Running to stand still

People are now sitting on their hands, this happens when a country has debts of more than £2.7 trillion and spends around £105 billion every year on interest payments before anything else can be funded. While fiscal constraints are a tool that has been used by successive governments to covertly finance this, Rachel Reeves may find herself the first Chancellor not to shy away from it. In 2030, more than 10 million people will pay higher income tax rates than in 2023 – not because these countries are prosperous but because thresholds have been frozen while incomes have risen.

We talk about the younger generation moving away but I see a different trend among my friends, where close friends are moving away not in their 20s but in their 40s with children, leaving home at the most chaotic time in their lives and leaving family and friends behind because they don’t want to raise children in the UK.

Last Friday, Gary Stevenson came to tea for a television project I contribute to, and we talked at length about his call for a wealth tax. In person, he was charming and generous, but at heart he was an activist, not an economist. His focus on wealth is understandable because, apart from immigration, it is the most visible and the source of political anger. The national debt is invisible.

Gary Stevenson comes in for tea. In person, he was charming and generous, but at heart he was an activist, not an economist

But the main thing I told him was that I didn’t think the idea was ambitious enough for the current scale. A wealth tax alone is too narrow to apply in the UK at present, leaving aside the issue of whether someone will be able to work. Our problems are much broader and deeper rooted. This moment feels closer in scale to the 1970s or even the 1930s. We are living with the accumulated consequences of long delays and long Covid simultaneously, visible in a housing market that no longer functions as a ladder, widening regional disparities, failing infrastructure, transport and housing development, an education system still optimized for the labor market of the 20th century and trends of the 21st century, an aging society without a well-funded health and service architecture, and in a university sector faced with artificial intelligence at a time when the debt-driven model looks most exposed.

The main thing Gary and I agree on is that we are in an economic mess that, while having different impacts on the working class and the middle class, is now producing very similar emotional responses in both. The working class feels isolated because of low wages, insecure jobs, and poor public services, while the middle class feels stressed because taxes, debt, and housing costs are taking away the progress they were promised. Different pressures, different levels of exposure, but the same feelings of frustration and betrayal. It is this confluence of anger that is reshaping British politics, and helps explain why the public is increasingly drawn to politicians who seem to speak directly to the scene – be it Nigel Farage or Zack Polanski.

I’m constantly traveling with my job all over the UK, and since Covid, a clear pattern has emerged. Signs of decline in the national economy are no longer only occurring in regions that have long experienced difficulties, but are now increasingly visible in regions that were once prosperous, in the Southeast and North that for decades considered themselves isolated from this slow decline.

Been here before

So have we been here before? In some ways, yes. The 1970s were marked by a similar sense of disillusionment, ‘brain drain’, and punk as an expression of nihilistic youth culture. By snarling “no future, no future for you”, Johnny Rotten gave voice to a generation that felt economically constrained and politically angry. The decade also saw the rise of the National Front, intense trade union activism, second-wave feminism, and a newly politicized middle class angry at inflation and national decline. Margaret Thatcher responded to and took advantage of this national atmosphere.

But we are not living in the 1970s. Britain today is more tolerant, materially richer and more culturally plural than it once was. The crucial difference is that we no longer have the demographic advantage of a younger generation, or the influx of large numbers of women into the workforce, or the North Sea oil that is the foundation of a fragile economic model. Both the left and the right are still looking to the past for a blueprint. The right-wing group looks back to the 1980s, instinctively pursuing deregulation and market liberalization, while the left-wing group tends to follow post-war state planning. No instinct can fulfill that moment.

However, in this gloom, I detect the beginnings of a different kind of public conversation. It feels less ideological and less performative than before and bleaker but also more honest. The country is slowly starting to realize the limits of pretending to be richer, waking up to the fact that tax rises alone cannot replace growth, and realizing that Britain’s crisis is not just fiscal, it is generational and structural.

The defining question now is not just 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 and get things done; about whether the country and the UK market (because you need both) still have the strength, capacity and patience to take big decisions. This conversation was spearheaded by millennials entering their 40s and growing up in an era of controlled shifts, delays and setbacks. Today, the deepest political question is no longer about left versus right, but whether efforts can be made on a large scale. Until this is answered, the national disillusionment that surrounds every state budget will continue to harden into something more permanent and damaging.

Dr Eliza Filby is a historian of generations and the author of the Sunday Times bestseller, Inhericracy