Over dinner in February, a friend and I spent most of the evening talking about England’s ageing population, immigration and the economic distance created by Brexit. He said, “England still hasn’t adjusted to who it is today and lives in the past.” He meant the economy. We had barely discussed flags. When small boats came up, my response was, “We need immigrants, not to wish them drowned.”

I moved here from Rotterdam at eighteen and live in London now, which makes me one of the immigrants in the argument. I went home looking for evidence against his claim and revised my theory as I found it.

I checked the immigration point first. The House of Commons Library reports that about 21 per cent of NHS staff in England recorded a non-British nationality in June 2025. Among doctors the share was 36 per cent. The Library also warns that self-reported nationality is not the same as immigration status, which limits what those figures can prove.

Those figures supported the dependence on workers from elsewhere that we had discussed at dinner. They did not explain my friend’s broader claim about living in the past, so I turned to class.

The class theory

My first theory concerned the survival of England’s aristocracy. Industrial wealth changed who held money and influence, while landed families married into that money and joined railway and mining boards. New industrialists bought country estates, pursued titles and sent their sons to the same schools.

The 2025 edition of Elitist Britain shows the institutional residue more precisely. It found private-school and Oxbridge graduates still overrepresented in influential jobs. Twenty-four per cent of MPs and 53 per cent of diplomats had attended private schools; only 21 per cent of senior judges had attended comprehensive schools. The House of Lords now consists of appointed life peers and the Church of England’s Lords Spiritual. Its last hereditary seats ended in April 2026, after the original version of this essay was published.

Where the theory breaks

I asked for the strongest counterarguments twice because the first set mostly agreed with me, which was not what I had requested. Elite continuity is not uniquely English. France has the grandes écoles, wealthy Americans dominate the Senate, and political families have long held power in Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party.

David Cannadine’s account in The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy is a more direct challenge. He describes the political and economic losses of the British aristocracy during the twentieth century, including death duties, the Parliament Acts, sold estates and the fall in aristocratic representation in the Commons. I had made hereditary status carry too much of the explanation.

That evidence shifted my theory from hereditary titles to education and employment. Private schools, Oxbridge and the professions can reproduce class advantage without an aristocrat directing the process.

A painterly editorial collage of property, finance and work for England's rentier economy.
An editorial collage of property, finance and work.

Who collects rent

Once hereditary status explained less, I looked at income from ownership. I began with billionaires, but Brett Christophers’ Rentier Capitalism gave me a broader category: income collected through control of scarce assets. His UK examples include land, finance, infrastructure, intellectual property and outsourced services. Housing was the part I could compare with current household numbers.

Housing and poverty

I often speak with people who could once afford children and two holidays a year and now struggle with ordinary bills. Teachers describe a modest income no longer covering the same life. Younger people cannot find housing with room to start a family. I have not stood in a food bank queue, so these conversations remain second-hand evidence. The published numbers show the scale more reliably.

Food banks in the Trussell community distributed 2.9 million emergency parcels between April 2024 and March 2025, including more than one million for children. Government figures put 4.5 million children, 31 per cent of all children in the UK, in relative poverty after housing costs in 2023 to 2024. Almost three quarters of those children lived in a working family. The Office for National Statistics put the median English home at 7.7 times median full-time earnings in 2024, and found that the national affordability ratio had roughly doubled since 1997.

One counterargument I found pointed to cheaper electronics as evidence of higher living standards. A smartphone is now used for banking, job applications, government services and healthcare appointments. I was a teenager in the eighties and remember cheap plastic electronics entering ordinary homes. That improvement says nothing about whether a household can afford a home.

The English Housing Survey estimated that 4.0 million homes failed the Decent Homes Standard in 2024. The failure rate was highest in private rentals at 22 per cent.

The housing figures shifted my attention beyond the billionaires I had started with. Existing owners gain when scarce homes become more valuable. The price data does not tell me how those owners vote, so I cannot use it to support the broader political claim.

The NHS figures brought me back to the conversation at dinner. England already depends on staff with many nationalities. The housing and poverty figures offered stronger evidence for my friend’s economic argument than the aristocracy I had begun researching. The use of Blitz language in arguments about Brexit and immigration became an essay of its own.

I did not find evidence for the broad version of my aristocracy theory. Public schools, property and capital ownership explain more of the continuity than hereditary titles do.

Source notes

Chris Chabot · February 2026
personal essays