When I was young, in the 1960s, the UK was known as the “sick man of Europe”, for its prolonged economic weakness. But after Margaret Thatcher’s time as prime minister, this grim epithet no longer seemed applicable. Yet now, once again, as I go abroad — and especially in continental Europe — people ask me, with a mixture of bewilderment, pity and Schadenfreude, “What is wrong with Britain?” I do not pretend to know the answer (or answers). But I can describe the symptoms: the UK is undergoing six crises at the same time.
The first and most important crisis is economic. The starting point was the shock of the 2008 financial crisis. But, today, the most important aspect of this is the stagnation in productivity. According to the Conference Board, output per hour in the UK rose by just 3.5 per cent between 2008 and 2018. Of all significant high-income countries, only Italy’s grew less. Yet that is not because the UK’s productivity is already high. On the contrary, output per hour in the UK lags behind that of Ireland, Belgium, the US, Denmark, Netherlands, Germany, France, Switzerland, Singapore, Sweden, Austria, Australia, Finland and Canada. High employment and low unemployment are good news. But stagnant productivity means stagnant real incomes per head. This means that one group can only get better off if another does worse. This does not make for happy politics. A long period of fiscal tightening has made it unhappier.
The second crisis is over whether national identity has to be exclusive. That question soon turns into one about loyalty. Many are comfortable with multiple identities. Others insist there must only be one. One way of looking at this division is as one between “people from somewhere” and “people from anywhere”, as David Goodhart defines it in his book, The Road to Somewhere. But, once politicised, this becomes far more bitter and divisive. It has been, in Brexit.