The Real Reason Nothing Works in Britain
Britain is currently quite broken. This is the premise of The Land Where Nothing Works, a new book by historian A.G. Hopkins. It’s also a widely accepted truth among Brits of all stripes. Once seen as a country punching far above its weight, the United Kingdom has now spent some time—to quote one of its famous authors, Terry Pratchett—sauntering vaguely downward.
To pick only a few of the facts mentioned in Hopkins’ first chapter: Middle-income families were, in 2023, 20 percent poorer than their German counterparts, and 9 percent poorer than their French ones. The figure rose to 27 percent for low-income families, in comparison with both countries. Britain has the highest degree of inequality in Europe. Its productivity growth since 2008 has been half that of the 25 richest Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries.
Britain is currently quite broken. This is the premise of The Land Where Nothing Works, a new book by historian A.G. Hopkins. It’s also a widely accepted truth among Brits of all stripes. Once seen as a country punching far above its weight, the United Kingdom has now spent some time—to quote one of its famous authors, Terry Pratchett—sauntering vaguely downward.
The Land Where Nothing Works: How Britain Lost the Plot, A.G. Hopkins, Princeton University Press, 288 pp., $29.95, April 2026
To pick only a few of the facts mentioned in Hopkins’ first chapter: Middle-income families were, in 2023, 20 percent poorer than their German counterparts, and 9 percent poorer than their French ones. The figure rose to 27 percent for low-income families, in comparison with both countries. Britain has the highest degree of inequality in Europe. Its productivity growth since 2008 has been half that of the 25 richest Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries.
Britain also has the highest rate of incarceration in Western Europe, and it’s the pothole capital of Europe. On top of it all, its recent prime ministers have hardly had an encouraging track record, from David Cameron’s botched Brexit vote to the moral vacuum of Boris Johnson.
Many historians and journalists have written books on the topic recently. The narrative goes something like this: Britain has been in slow but steady decline for around half a century, beginning just before Margaret Thatcher’s premiership in the 1980s. Thatcher’s reforms weakened the state, and the leaders that followed merely applied Band-Aids to the country’s deep wounds. After decades of muddling through, followed by the 2008 crash and a stringent austerity program in the early 2010s, Britain was hit by the twin crises of Brexit and COVID-19. Amid all this, the nation kept lying to itself about its place in the world, as it went from colonial superpower to mid-sized country off the edge of Europe.
Hopkins’ thesis hardly deviates from this assessment. As he puts it, the current malaise can mostly be explained by two trends: namely, “the historic shift from manufacturing to finance and services, and the associated transition from … the ‘compulsory globalisation’ of the imperial era to the ‘elective globalisation’ of the post-imperial world.” In short, the world changed in the 20th century, and Britain struggled to keep up.
Though its arguments may not be entirely unique, the book provides a pacy and engaging romp through British political history. It mostly picks up at the end of World War II, with Britain’s “golden age” between 1945 and 1973. In those years, “[u]nemployment was reduced to minimal levels; inflation remained low; real incomes rose.” Inequality and child poverty fell, life expectancy rose, and workers and women received more rights than ever. As Prime Minister Harold MacMillan put it in 1957, “most of our people have never had it so good.”
For a while, Britain managed to more or less coast by virtue of not having to regroup and rebuild quite as much as other countries affected by the war. But with the decolonizing process gathering pace and the 1973 oil crisis, Britain found itself in an increasing state of disrepair. The infamous 1978-79 “winter of discontent” followed, when a combination of freakishly extreme weather and waves of nationwide industrial action hobbled Britain, and eventually led to Labour losing power.
Decline only accelerated after Thatcher’s election in 1979. As Hopkins writes, GDP growth fell, unemployment and child poverty rose, inequality worsened, and the productivity gap between Britain and its European peers widened. Sure, the City of London was unleashed, but deregulation mostly helped the rich get richer. The rest is both history and more of the same.
Children wait in line for lunch at St. Mary’s RC Primary School in Battersea, south London, on Nov. 29, 2022. At 48 percent, the school has one of the highest proportions of children entitled to a taxpayer-funded lunch, as record inflation affects families. Daniel Leal/AFP via Getty Images
According to Hopkins, the situation worsened precipitously after 2008. From 2010 to 2015, the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition cut spending to the bone, hamstringing Britain as its European counterparts spent more to escape their economic malaise. “Taken as a whole,” he concludes, “the period that began with the financial crisis of 2008 and closed with the defeat of the Conservatives in 2024 qualifies to be called the Age of Misery, the worst of its kind since 1945.”
Hopkins isn’t necessarily wrong, though perhaps a tad optimistic in the belief that the misery has now ended. He’s also frequently entertaining, at one point explaining that “[i]f Brexit was a magic bullet, it was one that shot Britain in both feet.”
Still, calling Britain “the land where nothing works” is a bold claim, and it’s hard not to wonder if this really is the whole story. Plenty of other countries saw a healthy postwar political consensus devolve amid changing times, unfortunate global events, and ideologically dodgy leadership.
There is a hint, early in the book, of another underlying dynamic at play. In 1877, then-Secretary of State for India Lord Salisbury wrote to Lord Lytton, the viceroy of India, that “English policy ‘is to float lazily downstream, occasionally putting out a boat-hook to avoid collisions’.” The quote is barely remarked upon, but it arguably contains a key to understanding Britain’s particular conundrum.
Much has changed since the 19th century, but this brand of noxious optimism still emanates from British elites today. Even as evidence often points to the contrary, there is this sense among the ruling class that, somehow, things will turn out fine. It’s complacency and timidity rolled into one, a sort of gentle conservatism and unseriousness that contributes to Britain’s inertia.
Chancellor Harold Macmillan takes part in a commencement procession at the University of Oxford on June 21, 1978.John Bulmer/Popperfoto via Getty Images
Britain’s peculiar situation is more apparent in another recent release, which is nominally about a different subject entirely. In Twilight of the Dons, historian Colin Kidd concerns himself with Oxford and Cambridge academics from World War II to Thatcherism.
Though seemingly niche, the book’s relevance reaches far beyond the hallowed halls of Britain’s storied universities. After all, 45 of the country’s 58 prime ministers studied at Oxbridge, as did most of the elite in business circles, creative industries, and countless other sectors. “Outside the China of the Mandarins,” former Cambridge professor Edward Shils once wrote, “no great society has ever had a body of intellectuals so integrated with, and so congenial to, its ruling class.”
Twilight of the Dons: British Intellectuals From World War II to Thatcherism, Colin Kidd, Princeton University Press, 288 pp., $35, April 2026
As Kidd explains, Oxbridge reigned supreme from World War II until the end of the 1970s. “Dons contributed to every sphere of the war effort,” he writes. As conflict broke out, academics poured out of their ivory towers to help king and country.
The book features many examples, including that of Peter Fraser, a classicist who “parachuted into occupied Greece, where at one stage he emerged unrecognised as a British agent from Gestapo interrogation.” Another was philosopher John Austin, who ended up “heading his own Advanced Intelligence section, … which laid much of the intelligence groundwork for the D-Day landings.” By the war’s end, it was widely recognized that “donnish brainpower” had played a major part in British victory.
Because of the dons’ wartime role, the rest of the elite followed their intellectual lead in the ensuing peace time. The problem, Kidd writes, was that those academics “were—for all their insight, wit, … ingenuity and sophistication—complacently uncritical upholders of the British establishment.” Theirs was a “complacent lowercase conservatism,” and one they were able to spread across newspapers, magazines, and television.
Kidd never quite spells out the risks of such a system, but they are found across his book. There is the quote from a baron referring to “purposefully useless, somewhat dilettante erudition.” There’s the novel by a Cambridge professor explaining that, at the university, “you rarely said what you believed or believed what you heard, and all conversation was an exercise in dialectic and repartee.”
There’s a reference to “the donnish ideal [which lies] in maintaining an outwardly ironic distance from one’s own inner commitments” and the recognition that tone “was more significant than the elements of belief.” Many of these traits are hallmarks in the upbringing of the ruling class, especially at illustrious schools such as Eton College, but those are open only to a small minority. Elite universities could welcome people from a comparatively wider group, then mold them in the ways of their social betters.
Left: Margaret Thatcher, who studied chemistry at Oxford, in a bosun’s chair at the Boat Show in London in 1979. Right: London Mayor Boris Johnson, also a former Oxford student, gets stuck on a zipline in London on Aug. 1, 2012.SSPL/Getty Images; Kois Miah/Getty Images
From Oxbridge, young Brits would become not only ministers and parliamentarians. They were also bureaucrats, diplomats, and spies. Crucially, the journalists covering this set, from the BBC to broadsheet newspapers, were often cut from the same cloth. Beyond left and right, Parliament and the press, church and state, the elites shared common ground.
Eventually, the dons’ glory years came to an end. As Kidd writes, Thatcher’s reign centralized education policy and hugely increased state power over universities. Tellingly, students in the 1980s started protesting national policies when, until then, they had directed their ire at specific colleges. The bubble had burst.
This is where Twilight of the Dons ends, more or less. Clearly, the universities weren’t wholly to blame for Britain’s chronic complacency, as evidenced by Salisbury’s remark long before the postwar years. Still, the fact that what John Sparrow, the warden of Oxford’s All Souls College, described as a “hot-bed of cold feet” intellectually dominated Britain at a crucial turning point may not be a coincidence.
Kidd seems to believe Oxbridge academics’ reign has been over for some time, and that Thatcher broke something fundamental in their hold on the country. But has Britain really changed that much? Tony Blair went to Oxford, as did Cameron, Theresa May, Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak, and Keir Starmer. Although their premierships differed, they all spent their formative years in a place that still was complacent and conservative and a bit smug—and which had by then lost the real-world grounding it had gained, briefly, by virtue of having done its part during war.
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In his epilogue, Kidd argues that “Oxbridge colleges—with continuous histories which stretched back through the turmoil of the English Civil War and, in some cases, even the Black Death—gave rise among their fellows to what [historian Peter] Burke reckoned a most unusual ‘collective attitude to the past’: one which made them at once ‘more resistant’ to immediate change but also capable of tranquil optimism in their ‘long-term views’.”
In politics, however, it pays off to not only consider worst case scenarios, but govern with them in mind. If a country assumes everything will broadly keep being fine, then it will be ill-equipped to tackle slow-moving decline. Thatcher’s wrecking aside, a succession of governments has largely spent their time tinkering around the edges, applying various coats of paint while balking at the idea of redoing the foundations. Meanwhile, the rot kept spreading.
Some decisions wound up being more momentous than others—from joining the European Union to leaving it—but there is still a sense, through it all, of an intellectual unseriousness that has only grown over time. For a brief spell, it looked like Johnson, with his unearned bravado, could represent the peak of this trend, but that hope was short-lived. After all, altering the course of a country requires rigorousness, perseverance, and earnest dedication—all things that recent politicians never seemed to learn from their time at Oxbridge.
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Marie Le Conte is a freelance political journalist based in London. Her book, Haven’t You Heard? Gossip, Politics and Power, is out now. X: @youngvulgarian
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