THE economy is in the toilet. Growth has collap-sed. Our national debt is spiralling out of control. Productivity is poor. Living standards are in decline.
Confidence has slumped. And for most of us, prosperity feels like a distant dream.
I don’t know about you but when I walk around the streets of Britain these days I feel a mix of depression and embarrassment.
The streets are dirty. Public transport rarely seems to work and when it does, it’s worn down.
Crimes such as shoplifting, taking drugs and gang violence appear to have been legalised, leaving a mood of fear and anxiety hanging in the air.
Our public services are a joke. London is dead. Other major cities, such as Birmingham, where even our rubbish is not being collected, look like a disaster zone.
Illegal migrants continue to break our laws, costing taxpayers upwards of £7billion every year.
And amid all this, hardworking, tax-paying, law-abiding people feel as though they’re being taken for a ride — which they are.
The only thing I feel certain about is that while the present is already worse than the past, the future, unless we urgently and radically change course, will be even worse.
And I’m clearly not the only person who feels this way. There is a reason why wealth creators, entrepreneurs, investors and millionaires are now fleeing this country en masse, much like there is a reason why so many of us are now talking openly about wanting to leave the country for the likes of Dubai, Europe and elsewhere.
Millions of us just do not believe Britain is working any more.
And I think people are right to feel this way. Just look at the latest bombshell numbers we were given this week.
While Keir Starmer, Rachel Reeves and the Labour government promised us at the General Election last year they would fix these problems by “going for growth”;, our growth forecasts have just been slashed in half, tumbling to one per cent, while inflation looks set to run at around three per cent.
Britain, in other words, is now trapped in an utterly toxic combination of dismal growth, stubbornly persistent inflation, low productivity and a huge pile of very expensive debt.
No room for manoeuvre
Here’s just one bonkers statistic that reflects how bad things really are.
This year alone, taxpayers will pay £105BILLION, or £9billion every month, just servicing our national credit card — just paying off the interest on debt that’s a hangover from extended Covid lockdowns, the war in Ukraine and the failure of our politicians to manage our nation’s finances responsibly.
That’s more than we spend on defending our country, the Home Office and justice combined. It’s completely and utterly insane.
It’s also one big reason why Labour Chancellor Rachel Reeves now finds herself with almost no room for manoeuvre.
Having already presided over huge spending increases and tax rises in her Budget last autumn — including clobbering businesses with higher taxes and smashing what little confidence remained in our economy — this week Reeves was forced to announce further drastic spending cuts, including on welfare, to try to shore up our very shaky national finances.
Unsurprisingly, most of us are not impressed.
Just 11 per cent think Reeves is doing “a good job”;, according to pollster YouGov, while last week, astonishingly, another pollster put her approval rating at minus 37.
The ‘Meghan Markle of politics'
This not only makes Reeves the most unpopular Cabinet minister but basically puts her where Meghan Markle is in the national popularity ratings — which is saying something.
Nor do the vast majority of people think the Labour government is doing a good job. Nearly three quarters — 73 per cent — think Keir Starmer’s party is managing the economy “badly”;, while two thirds think Labour is failing to manage inflation.
Labour, in short, has completely lost the room. Voters are tuning out and turning off.
There have been other big shifts too. The share of voters who think Labour “taxes and spends too much”; has rocketed, from 28 per cent last year to 41 per cent today, while only around one in ten think it has got the balance right.
Most say they are ‘finding it difficult' or are just ‘coping'. Most of us are merely existing, not living
Matt Goodwin
And when pollster Ipsos asked people how they have felt since Labour took office, just 14 per cent said they feel “better off”;.
Most say they are “finding it difficult”; or are just “coping”;. Most of us are merely existing, not living.
But here’s the thing. It’s not just the Labour government that people are convinced does not have the answers to Britain’s growing pile of serious problems. It’s everybody.
What I see when I look out at the country is a much wider, deeper and systemic collapse of public trust and public faith in the entire system.
People simply do not believe that anybody can fix this mess — they don’t think anybody in Westminster has the answers.
There are now dangerous amounts of distrust and disillusionment with Britain’s overall direction and with our leadership in Westminster, whether Labour or Tory.
Almost nobody, for example, expects the economy to improve in the years ahead.
Not even one in five think things will get better in the future.
Like me, it seems, most people appear absolutely convinced that the future will be worse than the present, so they are buckling in and hunkering down, turning away from their leaders in Westminster and, more importantly, giving up on the idea that Britain will deliver them a good, prosperous life.
And very few think the Tories would do a better job if they were given a chance.
When one pollster asked voters if they think the Conservative Party would do better than Labour, most just shrugged and said: “Not really.”;
In fact, consistently, on everything from reducing poverty to providing jobs, from helping people get on to the housing ladder to improving living standards, from tackling the deficit to keeping prices down, the most popular answer when people are asked who would do best is neither Labour nor the Tories.
It’s “none of them”;.
‘Nobody is popular'
Once again, only small minorities back one of the two big parties to fix this disaster. Look, too, at the net ratings of every frontline politician in Westminster.
They are all sitting in “net negative”; territory, disliked by a larger number of voters than the number they are keeping on side.
Nobody is popular. Nobody is capturing the public imagination. Nobody is filling us with hope and confidence. SW1 Westminster just looks completely remote from people’s lives.
And this total sense of apathy and estrangement from the political class is not just visible on the economy but runs through people’s reactions to many other issues that are dominating the agenda too.
Whether people are asked who will lower legal immigration, stop the small boats or reduce spiralling crime, a large swathe of the country simply no longer have faith in the idea that there is somebody within the establishment, on the Left or Right, who can solve these problems.
Dire direction
Instead, there is a widespread sense out there in the country that we are all now trapped in a flimsy, disintegrating boat on stormy seas, with no captain and enormous, terrifying waves pushing us all around, battering us from above.
And this is my big concern. It’s not just about the dire direction of the economy and the failure of Rachel Reeves and Labour to fix it.
It’s something much deeper and potentially much more disruptive and damaging.
It’s an overwhelming, palpable, stifling feeling among millions of ordinary people that nobody in power really knows what they are doing any more.
Nobody knows how to get us out of this big-tax, big-spending, big-welfare, big-state, big-Net-Zero and big-immigration economy that is making us poorer and further pushing our country into managed decline.
Nobody can stop the boats. Nobody can lower immigration.
Nobody can reverse the de facto legalisation of crime, symbolised by online videos of marauding armed gangs and the fact that in London last year 70,000 smartphones were stolen.
Nobody can fix the health service. Nobody can stop the cultural rot and sense of malaise that has descended across these islands.
And nobody seems able to stop and reverse the very visible, managed decline of our once great nation.
And it’s this, I think, more than anything else, that is now pushing us all into a very dangerous place indeed.
