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Who England's past works for

February 20268 min read

A friend said over dinner last winter that England still hasn’t adjusted to who it is today and lives in the past. We were talking about the economy and it was said in passing, but I have been arguing with that sentence on and off ever since, mostly because I agreed with it so quickly. It also got me writing about the war, which is a separate argument. This is the one about money.

I am not a neutral party. I moved to England from Rotterdam at eighteen, and after a long way round through Amsterdam and San Francisco I now live in London and love it, which makes me one of the immigrants in the argument. So that was where my mind went first, because it is where the distance between who England is and who it says it is looks widest to me.

This is an ageing country that needs people to come here and work. The NHS alone would be in serious trouble without them: about one in five of its staff in England report a nationality other than British, and among doctors it is more than one in three. And yet the only respectable thing a politician can be about immigration is tough. Net migration reached a record of more than 900,000 a year in 2023, seven years after a referendum about taking back control. By the end of 2025 it had fallen to about 171,000, the latest drop coming mainly from far fewer people arriving from outside the EU to work. The Home Secretary greeted that as “restoring order and control to our borders”, and the opposition’s answer was that Labour needed to go further.

Two arguments get tangled at this point. That England needs immigrants is an economic claim. The small boats are a moral and legal question, and the people in them are entitled to safety and a fair hearing whether or not anybody needs their labour. Nobody should have to prove they are economically useful before we care whether they drown.

When I tried to explain the contradiction to myself, I reached for class. If a country keeps telling itself a story that no longer fits, it is fair to ask who the story is good for, and in England the answer seemed obvious: the people who came out of the past on top. A class like that keeps the nostalgia going because the past is where its power comes from.

I even had the history to go with it. In much of Europe new money and old power fought it out, sometimes with guillotines, while the English aristocracy simply absorbed the Industrial Revolution. Landed families married into industrial fortunes and sat on railway boards, and manufacturers bought estates, sought titles and sent their sons to the same schools. Robert Peel’s father made one of the great cotton fortunes in Lancashire, bought a Staffordshire estate along with the parliamentary seat that came with it, collected a baronetcy, and raised his son for a society he accepted he would never belong to himself. The son went to Harrow and Oxford and became a Tory prime minister. Instead of one elite replacing another, the two learned to recognise each other, and as I told it they had been running the place ever since.

It was a very satisfying theory, which should have worried me sooner. It explained everything, it flattered what I already believed, and it had the added pleasure of letting a foreigner be clever about the English. So I went hunting for the strongest counter-arguments I could find, twice, because the first round didn’t hurt enough. I don’t want to be biased into being delusional.

The theory, for a start, is about sixty years old and has been argued far better than I was arguing it. Perry Anderson’s case in the New Left Review in 1964 starts from the claim that England had “the first, most mediated, and least pure bourgeois revolution of any major European country”, and the next year E. P. Thompson spent some fifty pages of the Socialist Register explaining how wrong Anderson and Tom Nairn had got it.

The history doesn’t cooperate either. David Cannadine’s The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy follows the landed families from the 1870s, when they held the lion’s share of the land, wealth and power in the largest empire on earth, to the end of the 1930s, by which time death duties, the Parliament Act, sold estates and a generation of sons killed in the First World War had taken much of it away. Even my Peel turned out to be a poor witness, since he is the prime minister who repealed the Corn Laws in 1846, against most of his own party, and the Corn Laws were what kept the landowners’ incomes up. The last hereditary peers lost their seats in the House of Lords in April 2026, which makes it hard to keep insisting that the aristocracy is quietly running England.

What survives is a great deal of residue, although it is not really the aristocracy’s any more. There are still dukes, and the Duke of Westminster’s family still collects rent across some 300 acres of Mayfair and Belgravia. But Elitist Britain 2025 found that 24 per cent of MPs, 53 per cent of diplomats and 62 per cent of senior judges went to private schools, which about 7 per cent of the population attend, and you don’t need a duke to produce that. Private schools, Oxbridge, the professions and a good address can hand advantage down the generations perfectly well on their own, and everybody it carries along can point to the exams they passed. The machine runs on its own now, and it calls itself meritocracy.

I could have stopped there, with a smaller theory and my self-respect intact. But a theory about judges and diplomats says nothing about what I keep hearing around me: people who used to be able to afford kids and two holidays a year; teachers who made a modest living and now struggle; junior doctors using food banks. Food banks in the Trussell network gave out more than 2.6 million emergency parcels across the UK in 2025, still 45 per cent more than before the pandemic and most of them for families with children. Four million children in the UK were in relative poverty after housing costs in the year to March 2025, and seven in ten of them were in working families. A write-up I was reading while I worked through all this wrapped those people in phrases like “modest incomes” and “those just about managing”, and I pushed back on the wording. Children going to bed hungry is not modest anything.

The usual reply at this point is that people have never had it so good, because everything in the living room is cheap. That is true of the living room, and cheap electronics really have improved ordinary life. But a smartphone today is infrastructure, the thing you need in order to bank, apply for a job, deal with the government and get hold of a doctor, and the fact that you can buy one cheaply says very little about whether the household holding it can pay for heating, childcare or a roof.

The roof is the big one. In 2025 the median home in England cost 7.6 times median full-time earnings, about twice the ratio of 1997. In 1997 more than half the homes sold in London went for less than five times average earnings; by 2024 that was 3 per cent. The Competition and Markets Authority describes the supply of new homes falling well short of need for so many years that the shortfall compounds, and in early 2024 average wages after inflation were still about where they had been in 2008. What you get for the money may not be much good either: four million homes in England fail the Decent Homes Standard, including more than one private rental in five.

That left the question I had been avoiding, which is who gets paid. Brett Christophers calls the British arrangement rentier capitalism: an economy in which the serious money comes from owning something scarce, such as land, natural resources or intellectual property, and charging everyone else for the use of it. His rentiers are mostly companies, but the logic doesn’t stop at the company gate, and this is where I went looking for a few hundred families in ermine and found the neighbours. A boomer who bought a London house in 1985 for £60,000 that’s worth £800,000 now is a rentier too, and so, on a smaller scale, is a good part of the two thirds of English households who own their homes. They aren’t villains. They did what everybody told them to do, and that house is their retirement and whatever help their children are going to get with a deposit. But scarcity is what pays them, they vote, and some of them turn up at planning meetings. NIMBYism is rent-seeking by millions of ordinary voters. That takes away the person I wanted to be angry at.

So I still think my friend was right, although not in the way I first assumed. I took “lives in the past” to mean a mood, flags and pageantry and a class that profits from them, and there is some of that. But the part of the past with real force in England is a house bought for £60,000 in 1985 and still paying out, and there are millions of them.

You can test this against the best news in all these numbers. Since 2021 house prices in England and Wales have gone up 5 per cent and earnings 25 per cent, which after inflation means homes have got cheaper, and England’s ratio is the lowest it has been in a decade. Nobody campaigned for that; it came with inflation and higher interest rates. It is exactly what you would want if you wanted teachers and nurses, wherever they were born, to be able to live near the schools and hospitals they work in. Now try to picture the candidate who promises twenty more years of it to a country where two households in three will hear a promise to make them poorer.

England talks as though it could do without the people who come here to work, it has made a settled life hard to afford for them and for its own children, and as far as I can tell nobody is in charge of any of this. That is a much harder thing to be angry at than a duke. I miss the duke.

Chris Chabot, February 2026

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