The 2024 General Election and events which we since have proven to be momentous.
The 300-year-old Conservative Party, previously regarded as the most successful political party in the world, was reduced to a mere 121 seats and now regularly polls less than 18% in the opinion polls. But the earthquake has not ended subsided because despite Labours huge winning majority, their government has struggled to even look like a convincing party of government and regularly trails Nigel Farage’s Reform Party by over 15 points in polling.
In the mid-seventies, the eminent Political scientist Professor Anthony King wrote a famous book, asking Why Britain is Becoming Harder to Govern, which addressed the long-term problems of Post War consensus, such as Union power and the decline of our economy. The book is forgotten now, perhaps because The Thatcher Government revitalised Britain and started a free market revolution which changed the most of the world, but 50 years on it does seem as though we face questions which politics, politicians and perhaps most Britons themselves cannot answer (1)
It’s not just the widespread contempt for politicians but a growing sense of frustration and hopelessness and on the eve of Remembrance Day a 100 year old war hero told the media that modern Britain was in such a sorry state that he didn’t feel that the sacrifices made by so many Britons in World War 2 had been worth it (2)
How and why did British society change so much in the 20th century?
The Historian, Christie Davis, argued that something he refers to as “Moral Britain” died over the course of the 20th century and that if you look at the period from 1850 to 1950, crime and, what we used to refer to as deviant behaviour, shows a U-shaped pattern
“The people of 1900 or indeed 1925 or 1955 were living at the bottom of a U-curve of deviant behaviour and it is this reversal, of what must have seemed to be an established and beneficial social trend, that would have made the death of old Britain both unpredictable and shocking”. (The Strange Death of Moral Britain, Christie Davis 2004) (3)
In recent decades we have grown used to the idea of rising crime, high levels of very violent crime such as mugging (a post 1970’s phenomenon according to Duncan Fallowell, writing in this novel A History of Facelifting *) (4) the county lines gang phenomenon and continual calls for more police on the streets, so it is startling to read of a period of comparatively recent British history where crime levels were negligible.
In a book by David Fraser entitled, ‘Licenced to Kill. Britain’s Surrender to Violence’, published in 2006, the author writes about the dramatic rise in offending over recent decades and he reveals that, at the time of writing (2006) that “there are now 15 times more acts of wounding and endangering life than there were in 1950.” (5) The year 1950 was of course the cut-off point for the hundred-year period in which we saw crime and deviance fall. What has changed in little more than 70 years?
The conservative sociologist, Patricia Morgan, offers one of the best explanations.
…much of the descent (into a less civilised and more unruly society), “owes much to the child-centred parenting and education adopted at a time of high birth rates and young, too young, parents resulted in a brat plague.” (6) (Blind Alleys, Patricia Morgan, The Salisbury Review, Spring 2005 p.52)
The social transmission processes, which had been central to a Christian society based upon instilling personal responsibility, were rapidly sidelined by new attitudes which led to a decline and even the prohibition of proper upbringing.
Christian morality was replaced by social engineering, but instead of the anticipated secular Nirvana, a ‘volcano’ of social problems started to erupt.
“…. within a short period, a time a new society took shape, (characterised by) …More mental illness, addiction and violent crime, arrived instead of the Christian moral order.” (Ibid)
“In the aftermath of the Seebohm report in 1968, small welfare units dealing with truants, home helps and hospital patients became much larger generic social work departments. In tandem with a restructured comprehensive education system this paraded as science in the service of the community and the experts in living would mount an onslaught on the difficulties of families…. These tools of social engineering were a vehicle for the advancement of the ideology of professional social work.
When collectivist notions were first mooted in 1892 the sociologist Herbert Spencer predicted that society would come to be dominated by unaccountable cliques spending its resources as they advance their own interests” (Ibid)
But the new Fabian inspired class of social service and educational professionals, which took control over social transmission processes that were formerly governed solely by the family. were never able to replace a society where most children were socialised perfectly well by their parents.
The Brat Plague which Morgan referred to seems to have produced successive generations of poorly socialised children and in December 2025 a report by the Early Years Charity Kindred 2 based on a survey of 1000 UK teachers claimed that a quarter of school starters (primary school) are not toilet trained (7)
The American social theorist Charlies Murray, argued in the 1990’s that Britain had undergone transformative social change and that developed an Underclass of people who were characterised by three deviant characteristics: Namely high levels of family breakdown and single parenting, abstention from the workforce and involvement in criminality. Britain had followed the United States, with this phenomenon and the irony was that the country regarded as the most civilised nation in the world between the mid 18th century and the 1st three quarters of the 20th century had now become just another high crime industrialised nation.
Murray refers to the staggering crime figures for the second part of the 20th Century, which show that, Violent crime rose by a factor of 15 between 1950 and year 2000. Some commentators argue that crime figures have dropped since the high levels of the 2000s but this is disputed by people arguing that crime is so out of control that there is little point in reporting nowadays and the dropping crime visible in the figures please negligible compared to the dramatic rise in crime of the last century.
This problem has, of course, been exacerbated by the phenomenon of integration deficits where we have seen larger scale and rapid immigration from cultures very different to ours. A further essay will focus more on how the integration deficits exacerbated the socialisation deficits.
In Britain, in the post-war period, Labour has, for 8 decades, pursued a policy of encouraging immigration. They have, in latter decades, become synonymous with the idea of a multi-cultural-society and, more recently, the ideology which has come to be known as ‘Woke’.
As the Conservative Politician, RAB Butler, famously observed in the early 50’s, The 1948 Commonwealth Act opened Britain’s borders to a quarter of the entire planet.
We have schooled ourselves into not asking these questions for fears of being called ‘racist’, but this is just part of the primitive set of taboos which I argue the Left have developed to take more control of society.
The writer and commentator, Rafe Heydel Mankoo gave a talk in 2023 and showed that our country has absorbed more immigration in the 26 years since Blair’s Labour Government were elected in 1997 than in the preceding 2000 years.
The social and cultural engineering is creating a transformed society, and I think even at this early stage it is possible to sketch out the social groups which are taking in shape in what looks a permanently divided Britain.
‘Social Engineer Class’ Defined by little in the way of philosophy, other than the continued growth of government and by an almost phobic hatred of Conservatism. These are supporters of multiculturalism and of the governments post war social engineering.
This is a group of people who may have formerly been easily characterised as indigenous British conservatives now bitterly split between support for the existing Conservative Party and the new further right party of Reform.
Reform contains many ex-conservative voters and ex conservative politicians, and they have developed what I think is a simplistic view of recent British political history in which the people had been let down by a ‘uniparty’ composed of Labour and the Conservatives. I think this view is mistaken because, up until the post Blair years the conservative party consistently stood for conservative values, free market economics and has opposed labour’s plans to create a new country with immigration consistently since 1948. The Puritans also have a Messianic faith in Nigel Farage, who has managed to reinvent himself as potential saviour of British politics even though he has done more than anybody else to create the conditions for Britons poorly conceived parting of company with the European Union. This is a subject I will return to.
Commercial immigrants are defined by the fact that they have come to the UK for a better life, with a clear purpose to run a business, professional, or simply to work as hard as possible in order to have a better life than they would have had in what they would probably call their homeland.
Much of Britain’s high streets are populated by shop and restaurant hospitality owners who have come from countries like Turkey, Albania, and these entrepreneurial migrants like man from Afghanistan, who runs a local cab company, near me are the successors to the army of shop-keepers who arrived from the Asian sub-continent in the post-war years of commonwealth immigration.
This is the more controversial description, and the intention is to show that some immigrant cultures have more difficulty integrating or prefer to keep a separate identity.
The above analysis, or grouping, is of course not a deterministic model for putting people in boxes, but rather a way of looking at how social change, particularly with regards to both immigration and the rise of an interventionist state has created different interest groups.
It’s easy to see how a more Balkanized or divided society is taking shape in Britain. I think the task of centre right or centre left political thinkers going forward is how best to minimise such divisions and to look for new ways of uniting people.
I propose that we foster the Enterprise Culture and the popular capitalism which have been forgotten ideas since the passing of Margaret Thatcher and replacing the interventionist state with a reimagining of Co-operatives and Friendly Societies.
Forty years ago, when we were led by politicians who genuinely delivered an economic miracle was because we celebrated entrepreneurs. Margaret Thatcher spoke to the journalist Brian Walden about entrepreneurs in glowing terms as ‘special people’ and it is genuinely shocking that not a single politician speaks this way anymore.
Currently business schools are postgraduate, and people do not attend until they’re in their 20s, and we already have schools called themselves Academies focussing on areas like performing arts or sports. But we need to create more new successful businesses to create the wealth which will finance a society with 80 million people, we should be encouraging ‘business schools’ where young people can develop a fascination for commerce, much earlier in life.
We won’t catch up with dynamic economies like Singapore, Hong Kong, or South Korea if we continue with an overly academic and passive learning culture. Young people will be empowered to take control of their lives, and I believe that the best way of redistributing wealth is to teach young people from poorer backgrounds how to make money.
Currently we expect to hundreds of billions of pounds in defaulted student loans.
We could encourage some students to turn the student loan into a business loan. They would need to find a mentor, someone to help them set up a business, but it could be mutually beneficial. If the student agrees to work on an apprentice basis, the company taking the student would pay part of loan.
The is no vague aspiration. The philosophy is that young people in Britain spent a great deal of time in formal education in an environment where they are listening and waiting for prizes in terms of qualifications and eventual university.
We want to break the pattern.
Two key objectives would be to teach children the basics of running an agency. If we think of two growth industries now, both social work and psychotherapy, these services are partly run by the state but growing much more quickly in the private sector. Local authorities will be looking for agency social workers and millions of British people including Insurance Companies are looking for psychotherapist provided by agencies.
Schools could teach the basics of how to run a service where you obtain purchase invoices from a self-employed clinician and sell that service on, at a profit, to
another client.
Because Britain is the home of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, we should be developing and selling all sorts of mental health services for economies and countries all over the world. Dwarfed, by hugely oversubscribed, but monolithic NHS mental health services. psychotherapy in the UK is a cottage industry but could be a huge export industry.
It has become a cliche to note that stress is a modern disease of the middle class as opposed to something linked to heavy manual work but if this is the case then think about the potential market in India where there is a middle class of 250 million people!
We should also teach all children sales skills because salespeople transform companies which might otherwise be struggling. Business development is an under-rated skill in Britain, but this shows how much we lag countries with an ‘enterprise culture’, such as the South-East Asian Tigers
In the 1980’s Margaret Thatcher’s ‘enterprise allowance scheme’ helped over 300,000 people become self-employed and was also responsible for encouraging working-class people to become successful in the creative industries. The scheme paid an allowance to unemployed people who had a certain amount of savings and a business plan and helped to bring about The Riverside Theatre in Newcastle and successful companies such as Super Dry and Creation records.
The scheme paid successful applicants an allowance to help them set up the business. We should bring about a new version of this policy, funded not by taxation, but by philanthropy and public subscriptions.