A recent conversation about economics, immigration, and Britain’s post-Brexit position left one sentence lodged in my head: “England still hasn’t adjusted to who it is today and lives in the past.” It did not sound like a complaint about bunting or old buildings. It sounded like a balance-sheet problem.
Demography breaks the story
Demography is the first reality check. More retirees, fewer working-age people paying taxes and filling essential roles in healthcare, construction, hospitality, logistics. The NHS alone would collapse without immigrant workers. Immigration is one of the most direct ways to offset this; not a policy preference, an economic necessity.
And yet successive governments, Labour and Conservative alike, have treated immigration as something to be “tough on.” The framing is always about control, about reducing numbers, about “taking back our borders.” There is a massive gap between what the country relies on and what politicians feel they can say, because admitting dependence on immigration clashes with a national self-image rooted in self-sufficiency.
Policy ends up fighting reality. Restrictive immigration rhetoric while the economy screams for workers. “Global Britain” posturing while trade barriers go up with the nearest neighbours. A political class that treats honest assessment as defeatism. No mainstream politician will say plainly what is simply true: Britain is a medium-sized, service-heavy economy on the edge of Europe that depends on immigration, benefits enormously from European integration, and has a serious poverty problem. It clashes too fundamentally with who Britain thinks it is.
Industrial power joined the old class
Part of the answer sits in the revolution that did not quite become a rupture.
When the Industrial Revolution swept through Europe and beyond, it rejigged the centre of power in most nations. The captains of industry had the money, and money meant influence. In France, the revolution had already decapitated the aristocracy. In the United States, there was no hereditary class to begin with, the industrialists were the new power. In Germany, two world wars and partition wiped the slate. Japan’s Meiji Restoration consciously dismantled feudal structures to industrialise. In each case, there was a rupture. The old order was displaced, sometimes violently, and new power structures emerged based on capital, capability, or democratic legitimacy.
Britain’s industrial settlement took a stranger route. Aristocracy did not resist industrialisation; it absorbed it. Landed families married into industrial money. They sat on the boards of railway companies and mining operations. Gentry became shareholders. And the new industrialists, in turn, wanted in. They wanted titles, country estates, their sons at Eton. Rather than a new class displacing the old one, you got a merger, but on the old class’s terms. Admission to real power meant adopting aristocratic values, manners, and institutions.
Inheritance of that kind helps explain why deals still get done in private members’ clubs near Downing Street. Why a handful of schools, Eton, Harrow, Winchester, Westminster, still produce a wildly disproportionate share of prime ministers, cabinet members, judges, and newspaper editors. Why the House of Lords still exists, literally hereditary and appointed power sitting in the legislature. Most countries would find that absurd. England treats it as charming tradition.
A governing class with that inheritance has a material interest in nostalgia. If your power derives from institutions that draw their legitimacy from tradition, continuity, and inherited status, then a national reckoning with “who are we now?” is existentially threatening. Honest modernisation would mean asking why political power still flows through networks formed at boarding schools, why land ownership is so concentrated, why the honours system exists, why the City of London has its own special political status dating back centuries. Nostalgia is not only a failure of imagination; it is actively maintained by people for whom the past is the source of their power.
A complication worth acknowledging
As a single explanation, the aristocracy-absorbed-industrialisation frame is too neat, though it captures something real.
Elite continuity isn’t uniquely English. France’s grandes écoles produce its political and business elite with arguably even more rigidity than Oxbridge. The US has its own hereditary oligarchy of political dynasties, legacy admissions, and a Senate that functions as a millionaires’ club. Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party has been dominated by political families for decades.
And historians like David Cannadine have argued that the British aristocracy did lose most of its real power across the twentieth century, through death duties, the Parliament Acts, the sale of estates, and genuine democratisation. The percentage of MPs from aristocratic backgrounds has collapsed compared to the Victorian era. What remains, the clubs, the school networks, may be residual cultural signals rather than actual mechanisms of power.
More precise version: England did not just have an aristocracy problem; it developed an unusually effective class system that transcended its aristocratic origins. The public schools, Oxbridge, the professions, these became self-reproducing class mechanisms that can function without actual lords. A grammar school boy who gets into Oxford and joins a City law firm is reproducing class privilege without any aristocratic involvement. The machine runs on its own now. And that may be harder to dismantle precisely because it presents itself as meritocratic.
Rent became the operating model
Whatever the origins of the power structure, its current economic expression is clear enough. Much of the modern British economy doesn’t create new productive capacity, it extracts rents from existing activity.
Not a fringe position. Thomas Piketty’s central thesis is that when returns on capital exceed the rate of economic growth, wealth concentrates inexorably. Mariana Mazzucato’s work distinguishes between value creation and value extraction. Brett Christophers, in Rentier Capitalism, applies this specifically to the UK, arguing the economy is now dominated by rent-extracting activities: land ownership, intellectual property, financial intermediation, outsourced public services.
Once people accumulate more capital than they can spend productively, they rent it out instead. Loans, stocks, real estate, insurance, all of it is renting access to capital and extracting more capital, without that process in itself contributing to more being produced. The money grows, but nothing new is built.
Wealth also brings influence, strengthened over recent decades by the concentration of media ownership. A handful of entities dominate UK print media. The editorial influence is real; decades of research on agenda-setting shows that media is extremely effective at shaping not what people think, but what they think about. Immigration is a case study: the economic evidence on immigration’s net contribution is contested but broadly positive, yet the dominant framing for twenty years has been about pressure, threat, and small boats in the Channel. The country relies on these workers. The framing teaches fear instead.
Together, concentrated wealth, concentrated media, and a political class shaped by the same narrow institutional pipeline create a system that is remarkably effective at protecting itself. Not through conspiracy, but through aligned incentives. Keep the distinction intact: “the system tends to benefit the wealthy” is structural analysis. “The wealthy deliberately orchestrate outcomes” is conspiracy. The reality is the former, messier, less dramatic, but arguably harder to fix because there is no single villain to confront.
Poverty stopped being marginal
At the food bank, the economic data becomes visceral.
Last year, the Trussell Trust distributed roughly three million emergency food parcels, about triple the figure from a decade ago. And they are clear this represents only a fraction of the pressure. Independent food banks and community pantries have exploded alongside them. None of this existed at meaningful scale before 2010.
One in three children in the UK lives in poverty, depending on the measure. Children going to bed hungry. Parents skipping meals. And this isn’t confined to the unemployed, the majority of children in poverty live in households where at least one adult works. In-work poverty is one of the defining features of the modern UK economy. People working full-time who still can’t cover rent, food, and energy.
Junior doctors have seen their pay fall roughly 26% in real terms since 2008. Becoming a doctor used to mean financial security. Now it means using a food bank during training. Teachers are leaving the profession in record numbers. The average first-time buyer age keeps climbing. The ratio of house prices to earnings has roughly doubled since the mid-1990s.
Political discourse keeps trying to soften this with language like “modest incomes” or “those just about managing.” Language like that does real work; it makes poverty sound like mild inconvenience rather than crisis. The accurate framing is starker: a growing portion of the working population in one of the world’s wealthiest nations cannot reliably meet basic needs, and the social safety net that once prevented this has been deliberately eroded.
Deflections do not hold
When this is pointed out, a familiar set of counterarguments appears.
“But living standards have improved, you have smartphones and streaming services.” A smartphone in 2025 isn’t a luxury. It’s infrastructure. People rely on one to access banking, job applications, government services, healthcare appointments. The actual cost, maybe £800 a year for a phone contract and subscriptions, is trivial compared to the thousands per year that housing costs have increased in real terms, or the cost of childcare, which is among the highest in the developed world. You could cancel every streaming service and not make a meaningful dent in what’s actually crushing household budgets.
What actually happened was a specific trade, beginning in the 1980s and accelerating since: cheap consumer goods, enabled by globalised manufacturing, in exchange for employment security, pension quality, wage growth, and affordable housing. The cheap goods were anaesthetic. Real wages stagnated but televisions got cheaper every year, so it felt like progress. Cheap credit and cheap imports maintained the sensation of rising living standards while the structural foundations, secure employment, defined benefit pensions, accessible public services, affordable housing, eroded underneath. Nobody consciously agreed to that trade.
“Housing quality has improved since the 1970s.” On average, maybe, central heating became universal, double glazing became standard. But averages hide a brutally unequal distribution. Social housing built at scale in the post-war era was often genuinely good quality, built to Parker Morris standards with minimum space and amenity requirements. Right to Buy sold off much of that stock. It wasn’t replaced. What remained deteriorated through underinvestment. The private rental sector that filled the gap is expensive, poorly regulated, and often atrocious. Awaab Ishak, a two-year-old boy, died from exposure to black mould in a housing association flat in Rochdale in 2020. That wasn’t an isolated incident. Millions of homes fail the Decent Homes Standard. For lower-income renters, there’s a credible argument that housing quality has gone backwards.
Homeowners complicate the story
There’s one more complication that’s worth sitting with, because it prevents the analysis from becoming too comfortable.
Rent-seeking isn’t only a billionaire activity. A significant chunk of UK wealth extraction is done by ordinary homeowners who bought property before prices exploded. The boomer who bought a London house in 1985 for £60,000 and now sits on £800,000 of untaxed gains is a rentier too. Collectively, UK homeowners hold far more wealth than UK billionaires. NIMBYism, blocking new housing development to protect property values, is democratic rent-seeking by millions of voters. The problem isn’t simply “the very rich versus everyone else.” It’s also a generational and asset-class divide within the middle class, where people who feel squeezed are themselves benefiting from dynamics that squeeze those below them.
Politically inconvenient for any simple narrative. Probably closer to the truth.
Who benefits from the current rules?
Ask who benefits from the current rules, and who has the power to change them but chooses not to. “Who is doing this to us?” personalises what is systemic.
Billionaires are part of the answer, but it does not stop there. It includes a media landscape that sets the agenda. A political class formed in the same narrow institutions. Homeowners who vote to protect their asset values. A financial sector whose interests are treated as synonymous with the national interest. And an electorate that is offered a choice between parties, neither of which will say plainly what the country actually is and what it actually depends on.
Real strengths remain: world-class universities, cultural soft power, a globally significant financial centre, the English language itself. They are not enough while the country keeps misdescribing its own balance sheet.
Write the plain parts before the speech: immigration in the labour model, Europe in the trade model, housing as protected asset, class as distribution machinery.
The sentence that lodged in my head was right. England still has not adjusted to who it is.