Britain is in a pitiful condition. The economy falters, weighed down by high taxes and excessive regulation. Public services no longer serve the public. And the country is coming apart — strained by mass immigration, a crumbling sense of identity, and a demographic transformation that risks making Britain unrecognizable.
None of this is an accident. Decline is the consequence of bad public policy.
Since 2015, Britain has had seven Prime Ministers. None had answers to the fundamental challenges we face. Several made things worse.
The current administration, led by Andy Burnham, promised “national renewal”. It has served up the same failed orthodoxies.
This webtool shows you the true condition of the country, and where it is heading if we carry on as before. It then sets out what an incoming government must do to turn things around — asking one question throughout: what if a new government took office now, in 2026, and actually did it?
Here is what a real change of direction looks like.
The mess we are in — the true state of Britain, in plain terms.
How thirty years of Blairite government brought us to this state.
Roads, runways, reservoirs, growth and productivity — before 1997 and since, in charts.
What Trump's second term and Mississippi prove can be done — a thread running through every step.
It is the speed of the country's decline that is so shocking. Within living memory, Britain's output per person was comparable with America's. Look at the condition of the country today.
The economy has stopped growing. Real incomes have barely risen since 2008 — the longest squeeze on living standards in two centuries, after nearly forty years of steady gains before it. High taxes, heavy regulation and expensive energy have produced two decades of stagnation. Public debt has more than tripled, from about a third of national output to very nearly the whole of it, and the state now takes some 44 percent of everything the country produces. £109 billion a year — more than the entire defense budget — goes on servicing that debt, and buys nothing.
The state costs more and delivers less. Britons carry close to the heaviest tax burden since the war, yet the services those taxes are meant to fund are visibly failing. More than six million people — over nine percent of the population — sit on an NHS waiting list. The money goes in; the results do not come out.
Society is coming apart. Immigration has changed the country faster than it can absorb: almost one in five people living in Britain was not born here, and more than 180,000 crossed the Channel in small boats in five years — a town the size of Swindon, arriving unbidden. A once high-trust nation grows disorderly and divided.
And our own culture is something to apologize for. Successive governments have promoted critical theory and anti-Western self-hatred until it has permeated our institutions; people have been sent to prison for their privately expressed opinions, and police now make more than thirty arrests a day for what people post online. Films and books no longer entertain but lecture and scold; banknotes are redesigned to remove Churchill and Austen; official reports set out to “decolonize” the English countryside. Once a source of pride, our past is now presented in a way designed to demoralize us — the country that produced Shakespeare, Newton and Brunel allowed no claim to exceptionalism, other than exceptional wickedness.
Those we elect no longer govern. Real power has passed to officials, quangos and activist judges — the Bank of England, the Climate Change Committee, Ofcom, the courts — who set the country's course whatever the voters decide. Elections change the ministers; they no longer change the direction.
None of this is an accident. It is the work of the Blairite revolution — and of every government since, Labour and Conservative alike, that has governed on the same failed assumptions.