“On the UK economy, inflation, the NHS, immigration, schools, all sorts of key issues, what we see is just incredibly high levels of despondency about almost all of these things.”
Thinks surveyed 2,100 adults for its Mood of the Nation report, one of which said Britain is returning to the Victorian era standards: “We seem to be going back to those times with the increase in living costs for the basic necessities. That shouldn’t be the case for a country that’s one of the world’s biggest economies.”
These fears were echoed by Shimshon, who adds: “There has always been this narrative about the country that we are in decline, that we are punching above our weight and we are going to get found out.
“There is a feeling now that we have levelled down and this is actually who we are – that things are just a bit c–p. The basic feeling is that everything is broken.”
You don’t have to look far to find statistics detailing nationwide hardship, as the UK is currently suffering from its biggest hit to real pay on record, while rent growth in England has also hit a record high for 11 successive months.
However, by contrast, Britain’s unemployment rate is hovering at near-record lows, which raises the question, are things really as bad as they’ve ever been?
“If the question is ‘Are the economic fundamentals bad?’ Then I’m going to say that, on average, they’re not. I wouldn’t say that we are in a good place. But we have been a lot worse at different points in the past,” says Jonathan Wadsworth, professor of economics at Royal Holloway College and an associate at LSE’s Centre for Economic Performance.
“GDP is not exactly robust, but it’s not in the depths of a recession.”
However, optimism is not a measure of how good or bad things are, but whether they will improve – and experts fear this faith has been lost.
“The belief in the mechanisms for us to have a better future is really low,” says Shimshon, whose research found that the majority of people surveyed believe Britain’s best years are behind it.
Wadsworth says this has been driven by 15 years of economic stagnation.
“People look around them and see infrastructure that has not been repaired,” he says. “They are queuing to get to the doctor and the hospital.”
Yet, that is not to say Britain is suffering from a sense of social breakdown, says Shimshon, as figures show there is not a broad-based feeling that crime is getting worse.
“It’s primarily about the direction of the country and the feeling of whether or not my kids are going to be better off than me,” he says.
The cost of living crisis, immigration and housing achieved the lowest scores in terms of how people think things are in the UK at the moment.
