My reflex with British declinism is to discount it. The country’s newspapers have been announcing its end since Suez, and Allister Heath, who edits the Sunday Telegraph, announces it more often than most. He’s also the columnist who called Kwasi Kwarteng’s 2022 mini-budget the best he’d ever heard a chancellor deliver; the gilt market gave its own verdict within a week. So when his Telegraph column ran under the headline “People don’t realise how poor, backward and irrelevant Britain has become”, I went looking for the overreach.
The claim I’m defending is the headline’s, read fairly. Set against the countries Britain likes to measure itself by, it has fallen a long way since 2008, and most Britons haven’t noticed how far.
On that, he’s right. Not half right. Right.
You can’t miss a pay rise you never saw
Start with a test. What would the average British worker earn now if pay had kept growing the way it did before the financial crash?
The answer comes from the Resolution Foundation, the think tank Torsten Bell ran before he became a Labour MP. Real wages grew by about a third every decade from 1970 to 2007. Then they flatlined. By the foundation’s 2023 count, the lost growth was costing the average worker £10,700 a year. Bell’s verdict to the BBC was blunt: “This is what failure looks like.”
That’s why people don’t realise. A pay cut comes in writing; a pay rise that never happens leaves no paper trail. The payslip looks much as it did the year before. The gap only shows when you compare yourself with a nurse in Lyon or an engineer in Stuttgart, and almost nobody does.
So here’s the comparison. Leave aside the arguments about Mississippi; France will do. The foundation found the typical British household 9 per cent poorer than its French equivalent, with low-income families 27 per cent worse off. Before the crash a typical German household was about £500 a year better off than a British one. By 2023 the gap was £4,000.
Westminster spent the summer swapping Keir Starmer for Andy Burnham. The payslips didn’t notice.
Backward is the right word for a country that can’t build
Now ask what it costs Britain just to get permission to dig a tunnel.
For the Lower Thames Crossing, a road under the estuary between Kent and Essex, the planning application alone ran past 350,000 pages and cost close to £300m. Norway built the world’s longest road tunnel for less. Work on the scheme began in 2009. Ministers signed it off in 2025, by which time more than £800m had gone on planning; Louise Haigh, Labour’s transport secretary for part of that wait, called the delays shocking.
HS2 was supposed to open this year. In May her successor, Heidi Alexander, told MPs the first trains might not run until 2039, at a lower top speed than promised, with services into Euston as late as 2043. She said previous prime ministers had created the world’s most expensive slow-motion car crash. Those are the words of the minister in charge.
Energy tells the same story in a different ledger. When the government launched its industrial strategy in June 2025, its own announcement admitted that British manufacturers pay some of the highest electricity prices in the developed world. Britain had 18 oil refineries in the 1970s. After Grangemouth and Lindsey shut in 2025 it has four, and the Commons Library lists high energy and carbon costs among the pressures on the survivors.
London’s best companies have already voted on relevance
Ask where Britain’s most successful companies go when they want to grow. More and more often, the answer is New York.
Arm, the Cambridge chip designer, chose New York for its 2023 listing. Wise (founded in London by two Estonians) moved its main listing to Nasdaq this year. Flutter left the London market altogether in August, while AstraZeneca, Britain’s biggest drugmaker, added a direct New York listing in February. London used to be the place foreign companies came to raise money. Its own champions now treat it as optional.
Relevance has a harder edge, too. In 2024 John Healey, then Labour’s shadow defence secretary, attacked the Conservatives for cutting the Army to its smallest size since Napoleon. It hasn’t grown back under Labour; in April it was still below its own target. Armies cost money. So does a stock market worth listing on. Both come back to the stall that began in 2008.
Decline this self-inflicted can be reversed
Two parts of Heath’s framing I still reject.
The first is the partisanship. His columns hang most of this on the Left, and Labour has earned its share. The Conservatives, though, ran the country for fourteen of the eighteen years since the crash. They signed the big HS2 contracts and cut the Army’s target; last year their own shadow transport secretary admitted his party had made mistakes on HS2.
The second is the fatalism. Last November he put the chance of Britain going “full banana republic” at 75 per cent. I don’t buy the sum. The planning rules that made a tunnel’s paperwork dearer than Norway’s tunnel, the levies stacked onto industrial power bills: people wrote those, and people can rewrite them.
Nobody reverses a decline they haven’t noticed.
Source: Allister Heath, “People don’t realise how poor, backward and irrelevant Britain has become”, The Telegraph.