THE GREAT BRITISH UNRAVELLING AND THE HOWL IN MY GUT

Image by Knelstrom Media

By Martin Foskett / Dispatches / Knelstrom Media

London, UK - ​It hit me somewhere between the Tesco freezer aisle and the suspiciously cheerful bloke trying to flog me a "cost-efficient" energy tariff at nine in the morning. Britain, the scrappy, tea-fuelled, rain-soaked island I grew up believing was a dependable old beast, now feels like a flustered aunt rummaging through her handbag for a purse that's already been nicked. You can feel it in the bones of the place, a deep, grinding, nationwide wince. Everything costs more, so much more, and everyone is pretending it's normal, like we've all just collectively agreed to ignore the smell of burning coming from under the floorboards.

The whole country's skint, jittery, and looking vaguely betrayed, like someone's swapped out our national DNA for a supermarket budget version. Prices are rising faster than a caffeinated pigeon. Wages are shrinking like a wool jumper in a boiling wash. Mortgage costs are ballooning like a clown's performance gone wrong. And the pint, the sacred British pint, now six quid outside London. Six quid! That's not beer anymore; that's a luxury item. They might as well sell it in velvet pouches.
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But the worst of it isn't even the numbers. It's the feeling. The slow, suffocating, creeping dread that something profoundly fundamental has slipped.

And the biggest joke? No one, not a single soul in the halls of Westminster or the padded boardrooms of policy-punditland, seems to have the faintest idea what to do.

Except, of course, the obvious.

Not the easy solution. The honest one. The painful, spiky, gut-punching truth we dodge like a wasp at a picnic.
We must cut taxes. Brutally shrink the state. Rip out the bloated pipes, clanking radiators and wheezing valves of the giant bureaucratic boiler that's been overheating for twenty years. Then rebuild something leaner, braver, lighter. A Britain that breathes again.

It'll hurt. It'll feel like performing emergency surgery with a blunt spoon. But there's no avoiding it. We are deep in the mire, sweetheart, and the mud is rising.

The fact is, this country is now squeezing its citizens with the highest tax burden since the war. Not the fun war, the one with ration books and cold bedrooms where people knitted socks out of leftover prayers. And for what? For the joy of watching our own purchasing power evaporate like steam from a puddle? Millions are working harder than any generation before and yet becoming poorer every month.

Inflation is the silent vandal in the night, smashing the windows of every household across the land. The cruellest tax of all. The thieves don't even need masks anymore; they're printed on the banknotes themselves.

Should we be surprised that prices exploded? Really? Honestly? We locked down the entire economy, printed money like deranged Victorian factory barons, severed supply chains with the delicacy of a toddler wielding kitchen scissors, hiked taxes on work, investment, entrepreneurship, then stared in baffled astonishment when the whole system coughed up a lung.

Quantitative easing. It sounds clever. Academic. The sort of phrase tossed around by a man who wears elbow patches professionally. But all it means is money-printing. A polite euphemism, like calling a house fire "unintended thermal restructuring." We drowned the system in cash, then panicked when the value of everything sank. I'd laugh if my weekly shop weren't now personally financed by regret.

Inflation is a cancer. It eats your wages first, then your savings, then the bits of hope you left in the cupboard. You don't fight inflation with more taxes. You don't suffocate the productive economy while fattening the unproductive state. You fight inflation by cutting the state itself.

The bloat. The bulk. The mountain of ministries, quangos, committees, boards, advisory panels, strategic working groups, councils, sub-councils, meta-councils. The whole British administrative Gothic cathedral of well-meaning inefficiency.

That's where the cost-of-living crisis hides.

The debt is now so large, so monstrous, so downright operatic, that we're spending more on interest payments than on defence. Defence! The thing the state is actually supposed to do. One hundred and eleven billion quid in debt interest next year, eight per cent of public spending, three-point-seven per cent of national income, and rising faster than my blood pressure.

Imagine your family finances looked like that. You'd be bankrupt before you'd finished boiling the kettle.
And Britain is not special enough to escape arithmetic.

A pound taken by the state is a pound removed from the productive world, the businesses, the builders, the grafters, the dreamers, the people who actually generate the wealth. The state then redistributes with all the dexterity of a man juggling chainsaws in boxing gloves.

So here's the simple, steak-and-chips truth:
Cut taxes on work.

Lower income tax. Raise thresholds so ordinary folk can breathe again. Drop National Insurance like a bag of bricks. Reward hard work. Let people keep the fruits of their graft instead of feeding it into a bureaucratic compost heap.

Cut taxes on business.

Slash the corporation tax. Reduce business rates. Ease dividend thresholds so the small-timers aren't strangled before they grow legs. Cut employer NI so businesses can actually hire without feeling like they've stepped on a financial landmine. Turn Britain into the easiest, slickest, most competitively lubricated place in Europe to do business, a humming machine of enterprise instead of a paperwork swamp.

And do the unthinkable.

Cut the size of the state.

Properly. Not a polite trimming. A disciplined, surgical reduction. A return to the idea that the state is the support system of the nation, not its gravitational centre. A smaller, sharper, more focused system that does fewer things but does them well, protects borders, upholds the rule of law, defends the public, and supports the vulnerable genuinely in need.

The point is not cruelty. It's clarity.

We must target support where it actually belongs, the people who cannot work or contribute because life, fate, misfortune, or health has tripped them up. Those people deserve the full strength of society behind them. But the system, as it stands, is so tangled and overstretched that it fails those very people, while drowning everyone else in red tape.

This is the humane case for reform. The moral one, even.

Then, resilience. Real resilience. The kind that doesn't involve printing more money or writing tearful manifestos about how unfortunate everything is.

Energy independence. Stop importing power like a nervous Victorian supplicant. Drill. Explore. Use what we have. Lower the cost of energy, and you lower the cost of everything. This isn't ideology, it's physics.

Food security. Grow more. Produce more at home. Local supply chains are cheaper, and cheaper supply chains mean more affordable food. Again, basic logic.

Skills. Skilled British workers are trained for highly productive jobs. Apprenticeships that actually lead somewhere. Businesses rewarded for investing in people, not punished for daring to succeed.

Crime must be dealt with like a nation that cares about itself. Crime drives up insurance, drains confidence, and gnaws away at the foundations of economic life. You cannot build prosperity in a place where people are afraid to invest, hire, or even leave the lights on.

And the big one, live within our means. Earn more than we spend. Pay down the debt. Stop treating national budgets like magic money parties with no tomorrow.

That is how you lower the cost of living. That is how you rebuild the economy. That is how you make people richer in real, tangible, sturdy terms.

Not by punishing success. Not by kneecapping the enterprise. Not by clinging to a state swollen beyond its purpose.

There is no cavalry coming. No miracle policy. No wizard economist waiting in a cupboard with a wand of quantitative sorcery.

There is only the truth, the complex, unfriendly, ultimately liberating truth:
We must shrink the state. We must free the workforce. We must unleash enterprise. We must rebuild ourselves.
It will take grit. Courage. Big national stomach muscles. But we've done more complicated things; we built an empire with less paperwork.

So brace yourself, Britain. The path is steep, stony, and splintered. But at the top is something we haven't seen in years.

A country that works.

And it's worth every step.

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