A reflection on Britain’s long structural decline since the 2008 financial crisis, arguing that the country’s problems cannot be solved simply by replacing one leader or party. The article considers weak productivity, debt, austerity, Brexit, political fragmentation, and the wider European malaise facing France and Germany, before asking whether public patience can survive continued drift.
The Rank Organisation’s 1963 short film A New Look at Transport hailed Britain’s motorway boom as a symbol of progress. Six decades later, its optimism reads like prophecy fulfilled in reverse. What the film called “a revolution in transport” has become the slow-motion collapse of civic space: towns turned into car parks, railways gutted, and public life surrendered to the logic of the haulage lobby and the private car.