Niall Ferguson: The Rot In Britain—and the Remedy Lately it seems that mine is a country with a death wish. Can we avoid national suicide? By Niall Ferguson
Something is rotten in the state of Britain. It was epitomized by a recent event at the Oxford Union, the 201-year-old debating society that is such a distinctive and admirable part of Oxford life. It was at the Union that, 40 years ago, I spoke as freely (and indeed as irresponsibly) as I ever have, discovering in the process that I was not cut out for politics. It was there that I saw great debaters of the past, present, and future.
But I never saw anything like the events of November 28.
The motion for debate was in itself a provocation: “This House Believes Israel Is an Apartheid State Responsible for Genocide.” But what was truly shocking was the conduct of the president of the Union, an Egyptian student named Ebrahim Osman-Mowafy, who appears to have abused his position by openly siding with those proposing the motion and treating the opposing speakers with contempt.
According to the broadcaster, Jonathan Sacerdoti, who was arguing for Israel’s side, Osman-Mowafy canceled the traditional pre-debate group photographs, but posed alone for private photos with the anti-Israel team. During the debate, the pro-Israel speakers were repeatedly heckled by the crowd. At one point, a young woman stood up and screamed at Sacerdoti: “Liar! Fuck you, the genocidal motherfucker!”
Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of a senior Hamas leader who defected to Israel, who was arguing alongside Sacerdoti, was met with jeering derision and cries of “traitor” and “prostitute” (in Arabic). Yousef asked the audience to indicate by a show of hands how many of them would have reported prior knowledge of the October 7, 2023, atrocities to Israel. Not even a quarter of the crowd raised their hands.
For the other side, Miko Peled, an Israeli general’s son turned radical anti-Zionist, described the murders, rapes, and kidnappings of October 7 as “acts of heroism.” The Palestinian poet Mohammed El-Kurd, who has equated Zionism with genocide, began his speech by announcing that there was “no room for debate” and ended it by walking out of the chamber. The motion passed by 278 in favor to 59 against.
Reading reports of this shameful fiasco at my alma mater, I found myself wondering: Where are the Thought Police when you really need them? After all, the Oxford Union’s latest debate sounded a lot like one of those “noncrime hate incidents” that currently consume so much of the British police’s time.
Consider the case of the popular Daily Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson. A year ago, Pearson had posted a photo of Greater Manchester Police officers standing beside supporters of former Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party waving the party’s flag, referring to them as “Jew haters.” Although she had subsequently deleted the tweet, a year later, on Remembrance Sunday, she was visited at her home by Essex Police, who told her she was under investigation and invited her to a voluntary interview, apparently following a complaint that she had “stirred up racial hatred.” (There was some confusion about whether the police were investigating a crime or a “noncrime.” The police have since dropped the investigation.)
American readers may reasonably wonder if, like the Thought Police, the concept of a “noncrime hate incident” originated in George Orwell’s 1984. I am afraid not. NCHIs have their origins in an inquiry that followed the murder of a young black man, Stephen Lawrence, in 1993. The inquiry recommended that the police in future log all “racist incidents,” including those that did not reach the threshold of being criminal offenses.
The concept was then expanded in the College of Policing’s 2014 “Hate Crime Operational Guidance.” As a result of a successful legal challenge, the government introduced a new Code of Practice in June 2023, defining an NCHI as “an incident or alleged incident which involves or is alleged to involve an act by a person (‘the subject’) which is perceived by a person other than the subject to be motivated—wholly or partly—by hostility or prejudice towards persons with a particular characteristic.”
But police across the country have repeatedly acted as if NCHIs are in fact offenses—witness Merseyside Police’s infamous 2021 poster: “BEING OFFENSIVE IS AN OFFENSE.” (More Orwell.)
As Pearson has written, reflecting on the bizarre events of that morning: “We are living through an epidemic of stabbings, burglaries, and violent crime—not the noncrime variety—which is not being adequately investigated by the police, yet they had somehow found time to come to my house and intimidate me.”
Exactly right.
Essex Police—the force responsible for harassing Pearson—recorded 808 NCHIs in 2023, up from 500 in 2018, a rate of 21.5 NCHIs per 100 officers. According to Policy Exchange, the British police spent an estimated 60,000 police hours per annum on NCHIs—a remarkable statistic in view of the large proportion of very real crimes that they fail to prevent or resolve.
Even more remarkable is the fact that the police do not seem to regard chants of “jihad” at anti-Israel rallies, or screams in the faces of defenders of Israel at the Oxford Union, as NCHIs.
Consider another scandalous event from this past month: In the House of Commons on November 27, Tahir Ali, a Labour MP for Birmingham Hall Green and Moseley, asked Prime Minister Keir Starmer the following question: “November marks Islamophobia Awareness Month. Last year, the United Nations Human Rights Council adopted a resolution condemning the desecration of religious texts, including the Koran, despite opposition from the previous government. Acts of such mindless desecration only serve to fuel division and hatred within our society. Will the prime minister commit to introducing measures to prohibit the desecration of all religious texts and the prophets of the Abrahamic religions?”
Rather than explaining to Ali why laws against blasphemy were repealed in Britain as constraints on free speech, and why a truly liberal society could never countenance the kind of thing he was suggesting, Starmer replied: “I agree that desecration is awful and should be condemned across the House. We are, as I said before, committed to tackling all forms of hatred and division, including Islamophobia in all of its forms.”
Reading this exchange, you might ask: Is this a country with a death wish? Yes, actually. And perhaps literally.
Two days later, the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill passed its second reading in the House of Commons with a 55-vote majority. If enacted, the bill would make it legal for people over 18 who are terminally ill to be given assistance to end their own lives, provided they have the mental capacity to make the choice and are deemed to have expressed a clear, settled, and informed wish, free from coercion or pressure; are expected to die within six months; can satisfy two independent doctors and a High Court judge that they are eligible; and are able to administer an “approved” lethal substance prepared by a doctor.
This is not the place to resolve the moral dilemma. The case for changing the law is that there are people with terminal illnesses whose suffering no amount of palliative care can make tolerable, and those who help them end their lives should not face prosecution and imprisonment. The case against has been eloquently made by Charles Moore, the former editor of The Spectator, who argues that “if we create a society in which you are in some circumstances encouraged to kill yourself, we change the moral basis of society” and make “vulnerable people. . . more vulnerable.”
To my mind, the remarkable thing is simply that a society facing the problems that now confront the United Kingdom should devote so much time to legislation making suicide easier. It seems to me that all of our attention and strength should go into reversing what appears to be a national suicide.
What’s Behind the Malaise?
The British economy is stagnant. The International Monetary Fund thinks growth will total 0.46 percent this year. That may be overoptimistic, as the economy essentially flatlined in the third quarter. Real wage growth has been flat for 16 years. Average weekly wages are only 0.8 percent higher today than at their previous peak in 2008. Annual real wages are 6.9 percent lower for the average full-time worker than they were back then.
The comparison with the United States is stark. Productivity growth between 2019 and 2023 was 7.6 percent in the United States, compared with 1.5 percent in Britain. In 2003, UK per capita GDP was 81 percent of the U.S. equivalent. Today it’s 69 percent. No Anglosphere country has seen its share of global GDP shrink more this century than Britain, down nearly a third (−31 percent) since 2000. Subtract London from the UK economy, and the rest of the country would be as poor in terms of per capita GDP as Mississippi.
The country’s public finances are a disaster waiting to happen. The national debt (public sector net debt excluding public sector banks) is very close to 100 percent of GDP (99.4 percent) and set to rise, compared with lows of just over 20 percent in the 1990s. Since 2021, debt service costs have jumped above 10 percent of revenues and 4 percent of GDP, their highest levels since World War II. Fiscal constraints are only part of the reason Britain is on its way from being a key U.S. ally to being a geopolitical nonentity. Example: The Starmer government’s spineless decision in October to hand over the Chagos Islands, including the atoll air base of Diego Garcia, to Mauritius.
The British malaise might be more easily explained if a Labour government had been in charge for the past decade and a half. In reality, Britain had Conservative-led governments uninterruptedly from May 2010 until July 2024. The temptation for many commentators has been to blame the failures of those governments on the electorate’s decision to vote to leave the European Union in 2016. It is true that Brexit explains much of the political instability of the past eight years, which have seen no fewer than six prime ministers occupy 10 Downing Street—three in the annus horribilis of 2022.
However, an impressive analysis by Ben Southwood, Samuel Hughes, and Sam Bowman, offers a more profound answer.
Comparing Britain not with the United States but with neighboring France, they argue that at least since the global financial crisis, and arguably since the 1990s, Britain has fallen behind in three distinct areas: investment in housing, in energy, and in transport. “The most important economic fact about modern Britain,” they argue, “[is] that it is difficult to build almost anything, anywhere.” The problem, they conclude, is that no government since Margaret Thatcher’s (1979–1990) has done anything to reform a system of “planning” that imposes prohibitive costs and delays on building.
To make matters worse, chronic under-investment in infrastructure has coincided with significant population growth. The British population has grown by 13 percent since 2005, or by 19 percent since 1990. The striking thing is that nearly all that increase is due to net migration, as the total fertility rate has been below the replacement rate (2.1 live births per woman) since 1973. Indeed, according to the Office for National Statistics, the total fertility rate in England and Wales in 2023 fell to its lowest level on record: 1.44 children per woman.
The academic Matt Goodwin has become an influential critic of the increasingly liberal immigration policies of successive governments going back to the time of former prime minister Tony Blair (1997–2007). In a succession of scathing articles, Goodwin has documented the operation of the law of unintended consequences as it applies to Brexit, which many voters backed in the belief that it would reduce immigration by taking Britain out of the European Union’s system of free movement between member states.
The result has been the opposite. In the eight years since the Brexit referendum, there has been even more immigration, most of it from non-European countries. “In the year ending June 2024,” wrote Goodwin recently, “some 1.2 million people—equivalent to a city the size of Birmingham—migrated into Britain. . . . And more than 1 million of them came from outside Europe—typically from India, Nigeria, Pakistan, China, and Zimbabwe. . . . Since 2012, net migration has added 4.5 million people to the country, equivalent to four cities the size of Birmingham.” The total figure is even higher if one calculates gross migration: just under 7.4 million since Britons voted to leave the EU, and 11 million since 2012.
Unlike in the United States, the problem in Britain is not illegal immigration, as most newcomers come legally, and relatively few risk crossing the English Channel in the small boats organized by the people smugglers. Those who argue that an aging population cannot do without immigrants for economic reasons fly in the face of the evidence that most immigrants to the UK do not come on work visas. Only 18 percent of non-European nationals came on work visas. The great majority are students (29 percent), students’ dependents (8 percent), workers’ dependents (23 percent), and asylum-seekers (8 percent). Those who fear that this influx will have irreversible cultural consequences have a more compelling case. The foreign-born share of the total population of England and Wales is now one-fifth, compared with 15.6 percent for the United States. And of that foreign-born share, 70 percent were born outside Europe. The Muslim share of the British population was forecast by Pew in 2010 to rise from 6.1 percent in 2020 to 11.3 percent in 2050. The projected Muslim share in the U.S. was just 2.1 percent.
And yet it is very hard to imagine how Britain would continue to function if net migration were abruptly reduced to zero. Most British universities, which have become heavily reliant on foreign students to finance themselves, would tip over from being merely broke to being insolvent. The National Health Service, which teeters on the brink of breakdown, would cease to function. Nearly one in five employees of the NHS in England are foreign nationals. (Pretty soon, it will have to be renamed the International Health Service.)
This brings us to the heart of the British malaise. Just as the NHS is one of the largest employers in the world, with a total of 1.34 million people on its payroll, so it also treats an astonishingly large number of people. In 2023–24, there were 16.5 million attendances at Accident & Emergency departments and 4.7 million admissions, as well as 23.4 million referrals for outpatient appointments, and around 8.6 million elective admissions. In Britain, it seems, you are either working for the NHS or being treated by the NHS.
One of the less obvious unintended consequences of this system is that a very substantial number of British people have left the workforce, having been certified—by the NHS, of course—as unfit to work. The total number of people claiming benefits because of long-term ill health was 650,000 before the Covid pandemic. According to journalist Fraser Nelson, the number now exceeds 3 million and by 2028 will have risen to 4.1 million.
The explanation is twofold. First, according to a recent report by The Centre for Social Justice, the highest level of sickness benefits (an average of £23,900 a year) now exceeds the after-tax pay from a minimum wage job (£20,650). But the rise in people living on sickness benefits also reflects the increased readiness of doctors to approve applications: Since 2010, the overall approval rate for sickness benefits has more than doubled to 80 percent. Small wonder that, including all forms of benefit, one in five working-age people are now classified as economically inactive, meaning they are neither in work nor looking for a job. There are areas of my native Glasgow where nearly half the working-age population is on some form or other of welfare. That this should have happened under Conservative governments is simply astounding.
Britain is in a mess. Not all of it can be blamed on the Tories, as many of the problems I have described predate 2010. And neither party can really be blamed for the additional misery that an already rainy country has somehow become wetter. On returning to England after two decades of working in the United States, I thought I must be imagining the increased rainfall, so I checked the data. Sure enough, the decade from 2011 to 2020 was on average 9 percent wetter than the 1961 to 1990 average. And six of the UK’s 10 wettest years since 1862 have occurred since 1998: in descending order, 2000, 2020, 2012, 1998, 2008, and 2014.
The problem is that the Labour government elected on July 4 manifestly has no solutions whatsoever to the mess. Indeed, the lousy weather has merely increased their resolve to make energy even more expensive for British businesses in pursuit of a chimerical “green transition.” Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves has lost no time in announcing budgetary measures apparently calculated to depress the economy. Aside from China, no country will lose more millionaires this year than Britain. Taxes on income, which the Tories already raised, are going up even further. The imposition of value-added tax on private school fees is a naked act of class war, intended to penalize the excellence in education that is one of Britain’s last remaining assets.
Can Kemi Badenoch Be a Twenty-First-Century Thatcher?
In short, much as I have predicted regularly over the past eight years (see here, for example), Britain has collectively decided to rerun the 1970s, like one of those BBC dramas notable for the precision with which a bygone era is lovingly recreated. Is there a political way out, as finally came with the election of Thatcher in 1979? The July election gave the appearance of a landslide for Labour. It was nothing of the kind. Labour’s share of the popular vote barely shifted relative to the 2019 general election. It was tactical voting against Conservative candidates that led to that party’s worst-ever election result and Labour’s biggest majority since Blair. In particular, votes cast for candidates for the new Reform party, the heir of previous pro-Brexit splinter parties, cost the Conservatives a significant number of seats—by one estimate more than a hundred—they would otherwise have won.
The Starmer government’s popularity has plummeted in the five months since the July 4 election. But this collapse in popularity will not translate into a change of government at the next election, so long as the opposition remains divided.
The good news is that the Tories have elected a new leader, Kemi Badenoch, whose Nigerian parentage, non-Oxbridge education, and enthusiasm for the Chicago-trained economist Thomas Sowell set her apart from the party’s last five leaders—all but one white, all Oxford graduates, and none (with the unhappy exception of Liz Truss) much committed to the Thatcher legacy.
As I made clear when she was running for the Tory leadership, I’m an all-in Kemist. First, as her admiration for Sowell illustrates, she has principles. Some people complain that “she doesn’t suffer fools gladly,” has “sharp edges,” and “rubs people up the wrong way,” but these are precisely the things the party establishment said about Thatcher throughout her career—and kept saying even after she, with F.A. Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty in her handbag, had won them three consecutive elections.
Second, Badenoch is on the right side of today’s culture war, arguing that “adherents to this modern creed [critical race theory] do not think in terms of individuality and personal responsibility, freedom of association or expression and shared experiences, but separated, segregated identities of victims and oppressors.” Before they were awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics, she was quoting Daron Acemoglu and Jim Robinson’s Why Nations Fail, which makes the point that Britain’s spectacular rise in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries owed more to constitutional constraints and the rule of law than to (as she put it) “colonialism or white imperialism or privilege or whatever.”
The bad news for Badenoch—her single biggest problem—is Reform leader Nigel Farage, who casts himself as a British Donald Trump and who has aroused the interest and possibly also the financial support of Elon Musk. But Farage is a breath of stale air—the unalluring aroma of cigarettes and pints of bitter—to Badenoch’s breath of fresh air. And, in any case, Britain needs not a low-budget Trump, but a Javier Milei—the radically libertarian Argentine president.
For Britain’s problems are not those of a superpower that has grown impatient of woke identity politics and the liberal-dominated “deep state.” Britain’s problems are closer to those of Argentina, even if the inflation rate and the poverty rate are still significantly lower. It needs the kind of drastic fiscal and supply-side reforms Milei has succeeded in passing in Argentina—reforms aimed at reducing the tax and other burdens on business, and getting native-born Britons off benefits and back to work.
The reason Badenoch rather than Farage can deliver this is that, like Milei, she understands the need to connect a Thatcherite economic agenda to an inspiring cultural vision of a multiracial society united by a shared and historically rooted conception of freedom. Farage’s implicit appeal to Britain’s ethnically homogeneous past (scroll down the party’s landing page) leads to political oblivion.
There is no going back to Tolkien’s Shire. The only way forward is with a united right under a female Milei—or, if you prefer, a black Thatcher.
Niall Ferguson is a columnist for The Free Press. His latest book is Doom. Read his piece “The Treason of the Intellectuals,” and follow him on X @NFergus.
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