Personal Blogs

My son has recently started a degree in politics and international relations at a prestigious university and recently had a seminar about the decline of western economies (and, potentially, democracies) in an increasingly interconnected world.

Driving him back to university after a weekend back home he asked me 'how do we stop the decline?'

It's a question that I have given a great deal of thought to in recent years and one where I think there is an answer. And the answer is fairly simple.

We have to accept the world that we live in and our place in it.

For a period of around one hundred years there is a strong argument that Britain was the world's leading nation. It was a nation boosted by the growth of empire but, more importantly, as the birthplace of the industrial revolution.

That period came to an end in the first half of the twentieth century as other nations competed with us industrially and our imperial dominions, one by one broke away. In terms of population, productivity and natural resources other nations have caught and overtaken us.

At the same time, and Britain isn't alone in this, we have become addicted to higher welfare standards, material possessions and paid holidays. So much so that that the cost of living for all has increased beyond recognition and the cost of paying for those who are not economically productive has become extortionate for those who are.  The situation is so dire that millions of younger people can no longer afford their own homes or their own children.

So the first part of the answer is simple. We must face reality.

Coincidentally, this morning's Times reports on a story about McVitie's Club biscuits. 

If you are of a certain age in the past McVitie's  would advertise their product using the tagline 'If you like a lot of chocolate on your biscuit, join our club.'

The problem is McVitie's can no longer claim their Club biscuits contain chocolate, because they don't.

The price of cocoa has increased so much that the company's formulation for their confectionary contains more palm oil and shea oil than cocoa solids and, as such, the most that they can legally be called in 'chocolate flavoured'.

In the scheme of things it is a minor issue but it is a perfect illustration of where we are in the world.

We used to have chocolate biscuits but external pressures mean that realistically we no longer can. The price of ingredients is more than we would be prepared to pay in order to make their production profitable.

So, instead of being honest and saying 'if you like a lot of palm oil and shea oil on your biscuit, join our club', manufacturers will come up with some meaningless compromise that no one believes, but enough are prepared to suspend their disbelief to allow things to muddle on.

The same is true of Britain.

We know our living standards are unaffordable, we know that other parts of the world are overtaking us.

But instead of admitting that and strategising for a different future (like Jeremy Hunt's "Can we be great again" so excellently does), enough of us listen to politicians that offer us a type of 'chocolately flavour' instead of the reality of changing our diet.

Until we realise that the inevitable conclusion is that we will end up with more and more palm oil that at some point the chocolate will no longer be recognisable we will continue down the same route. At which point it will become impossible to catch those who can actually afford the chocolate.

We can only start to address the wider issue once we acknowledge what it is.

Linked to reading for my upcoming OU module this week I decided to do something that I haven't done in well over a decade. I bought a DVD.

The disc in question is a 2013 BFI production of 'The Stuart Hall Project', a New Left intellectual and former Open University and his life story both before and after his arrival in England in the 1950s, his childhood in the Caribbean and the challenges faced in fast changing post-war Britain.

It's fair to say that if you like a Marvel blockbuster, this probably isn't your oeuvre.

But it is thought provoking.

In archive interviews Professor Hall reflects on the experiences of, in his words, 'young coloured people' of the 1950s and 60s saying that the same question faced them as it did all young people regardless of ethnicity "who are they going to be?"

He says "Young people are going into a world of their own but in a real sense they are trying to get out of someone else's world."

It struck me as particularly pertinent as this week I'll be dropping my youngest son off to start a new life at university and realised that is exactly what he and thousands of others will be doing - trying to get out of a world that parents and peers have made and in many ways messed up.

I wish them all well. 

I read an interesting fact today that in the year that I was born, 1973, the Lancashire seaside resort of Morecambe saw the value of its tourist trade measured as £46.6 million. By 1990 the same measure was £6.5 million.

Consider that in 17 years the tourist economy of Morecambe, a single seaside resort on Britain’s north west coast fell by 86 per cent.

But then consider that Morecambe is just one moderate sized seaside resort and consider the impact on larger towns: Blackpool, Brighton, Clacton.

The demographic challenges faced by the British seaside are well documented: some of the most deprived wards in the country, wide-scale unemployment, drug and alocohol dependency, poor health outcomes, shorter life expectancy and worse education opportunities for young people are all commonplace.

A visit to virtually any seaside resort in England will render all of the above problems readily visible. A quick search of walkthrough videos on YouTube will deliver dozens of hits of poverty porn for any resort you wish to query.

And the reasons behind the deterioration of our coastal resorts are readily apparent too. Towns with thousands of tourists beds no longer required them with the advent of package holidays and the wider availability of the family motor car, when day trips became so much easier - resort economy was entirely dependent on overnight stays.

Towns with empty rooms result in an oversupply of accommodation and an understandable tendency for landlords to move to cheap, long term housing in multiple occupation, commonly funded through benefits. As seaside resorts became ghost towns, what is the alternative? The poverty stricken or countless crumbling and empty properties?

I’ve just finished reading Madeleine Bunting’s thoughtful book ‘The Seaside: England’s Love Affair’, and whilst all of it is engaging the fact that I started this blog with most provoked my thoughts.

England between 1973 and 1990 in many ways is another country. There was no Ryanair, no internet, no smartphones. And, if you agree with the views of those on the populist right, England was ethnically a different country too. It was the country that that they often hark back to when talking about ‘Britishness’.

But the fact that Morecambe lost 86 per cent of its tourist economy in that period shows the England was already a country that was changing.

It wasn’t a country changing because of asylum seekers arriving in small boats, although we had refugees and economic migrants - largely resulting from the demands placed on us rebuilding a devastated post-war economy, a tide of desperate people risking their lives in rubber dinghies was not then a factor.

No, Britain was changing because its people were changing too. We no longer wanted what seaside resorts were offering. We wanted the cheaply exotic, the luxurious and not the windswept promenades and bad food experienced by former generations.

The decisions we made - consciously or not - resulted in the death of the seaside as we knew it.

The problem with the seaside, however, and with the wider challenges facing our country is that whilst bemoaning our problems we fail to consider our part in their causation, instead we look to blame others.

In this summer of 2025 there is no more recognisable scapegoat than ‘the migrants’, especially those arriving in unsafe craft of the shores of Kent. They are visible, they look different, they are easy to blame.

But in pointing our fingers at the migrants we fail to consider our own part in the challenges we face.

It is incredibly easy for the populist right to find an audience for their rhetoric. A rhetoric based in a nostalgic view of Britain that, if it ever really existed, we chose to change.

In her book Bunting argues ‘nostalgia is an unstable emotion, and can tip into resentment and blame quickly… as an emotion, it lacks accuracy.’ She is right.

Opinion polling shows a massive increase in support of political parties demostrating their anti-establishment credentials, but singularly we fail to question the real reasons for change in favour of the easy ones. Until we collectively consider the real reasons Britain is fated to deteriorate.

Part of the answer surrounds the short term nature of politics. Unrealistic promises are made and then not delivered, disatisfaction grows and more radical or extreme solutions are sought. Look no further than the aforementioned Clacton.

At a time when the electorate have returned councillors from populist parties decrying the concept of a climate emergency Bunting notes a 2022 report warned that many coastal communities ‘… might have to be relocated inland than had been previously thought; as climate breakdown accelerates sea levels are likely to rise by 35cm by 2050. That will deter investment in affected towns.’

It may be that report cited is wrong but its effective consideration is certainly not helped by a cohort of politicians focussing on the (short term) next election cycle instead of collaboratively adopting evidence based long term strategy.

Until we start to refresh the way our decisions are made, including taking a long hard look at our own role in producing the society that we live in, then the deprivation facing our seaside resorts is potentially the top of a very steep slide.