Sometimes the Answer is Closer to Home than it Appears

When people try to explain Britain’s current difficulties, be they perceived or real, they tend to reach for short timelines. The last thirty years are blamed: immigration, austerity, globalisation, Brexit. Each matter of course, but none explain the deeper fracture. To really understand what is happening in Britain today, my view is that we need to look back a thousand years, not thirty.

Britain’s inheritance is unusual. From Magna Carta through parish vestries, village moots, and the jury system, the English way was built on the principle that liberty was preserved not by decree but by mutual responsibility. Order was driven through community consensus, think the Peasant’s Revolt, rather than a top-down state presence.

This to me explains why Britain’s police, when it was eventually established in the 19th century (almost 200 years after the French for example) were deliberately unarmed. They were not a gendarmerie imposed upon the people, but citizens in uniform—an extension of local community trust. Even today, the sight of firearms on a British policeman feels alien, a breach of something that’s profoundly Anglo in spirit.

This sits atop a further point that I think relevant, and one often forgotten today. That Britain is and never a nation-state in the continental sense. Its people always carried layered identities. One could be Yorkshire-English, Catholic-Irish, Anglo-Scot, Welsh Briton and any number of other connotations. Religion, class, county, and crown all intersected. A Briton was never simply British; he or she was always something-hyphen-something else.

This made Britain distinctive. France sought to impose one language and one bureaucracy. Germany sought unity through centralised federalism. Japan even today sustains a highly defined sense of “Japaneseness.” Britain instead held together as a patchwork, balanced by the Crown at the top and local communities at the bottom. The middle layer—local institutions, industries, and associations pulled all that together.

The industrial revolution deepened this pattern. Factories, coal mines, steelworks, and shipyards became the backbone of the nation. Around them clustered chapels, trade unions, football clubs, brass bands, pubs, and political associations. These institutions formed the “middle layer” that mediated between individual and state. Until very recently in Britain most people had very little interaction with government compared to continental compatriots.

These structures weren’t idyllic. There was exploitation, exclusion, and the simmering class conflict. But they provided a ballast that gave people overlapping loyalties: one could be a miner, a Methodist, a Labour man, a Yorkshireman, and an Englishman, all at once. It was through these overlapping identities that Britain’s patchwork coherence was maintained and thrived. Giving no single piece of that identity too much weight on the one hand but not giving it all to the state on the other.

So, from the end of feudalism through to the mid 20^th century this fabric wove through the nation in a way that gave everyone a home. Local communities were tight, in culture, language and behaviour and the state was a long way off. By the mid-20th century, however, that was weakening. De-industrialisation had not yet bitten fully, but suburbanisation, consumerism, and secularisation were starting to weaken those communal bonds. At the same time, the welfare state was created which in many ways was amazing of course.

It was an extraordinary national achievement—universal health care, pensions, unemployment support, housing. Yet it carried a paradox. By centralising what had once been managed by parishes, chapels, or neighbours, the welfare state diminished the moral prestige of local self-help. Charity and mutual aid came to seem redundant, even patronising. Responsibility was outsourced upwards and centrally, away from community and into Whitehall.

Consider the difference between a chapel whip-round for an out-of-work neighbour in 1930 and a benefits cheque in 1970. The latter more reliable for sure, but without soft benefits, the former embedded the giver and the recipient in a moral community. The welfare state hollowed out the very levers of cohesion that had made Britain’s hyphenated identity work as long as it did.

And I see this as an integral part of the current issue. it was into this Britain—already unsettled, losing its anchors, moving away from the core tenets that made Britain (for good and ill) the greatest power in the world for centuries — that post-war immigration arrived. Caribbean workers on buses, South Asian families in textile mills, African nurses in the NHS: all came to contribute. But they entered a society in transition, where the institutions that had once absorbed difference were fraying.

Factories that had once employed entire towns were beginning to close. Unions that might have fought for new members were themselves under siege as the country followed a peak capitalist model of profit over community – tyring to be more like America than Norway in how it raises and spends money and taxes. Churches that might have provided cultural meeting points were emptying. The welfare state offered services, but not belonging. And at the same time as community was being up-sourced to London, communities were fraying as the same centralisation was happening in the job market.

The Windrush generation, for example, were often housed in declining inner-city areas where industry was vanishing. South Asian workers were recruited into textile mills that would soon collapse. Immigrants were plugged into fragments of an old order that was already disintegrating.

The UK has always been an island of immigrants going back to the Beaker Folk 5000n years ago. The fact that it is seen as new is perverse. But what has changed is that there is no longer then same fabric to immerse in to. I often say there is nobody more English than an Indian man that came to the UK in the 1950’s. As at that time being ‘British’ had the guard rails in place, held together by the church fete, the local mill, the trade union or the country club. Anyone that came later, when England had started to become a top down not bottom-up society had little to assimilate in to. So, it is not the fault of those newer immigrants for maintaining their own culture in the face of a far diminished domestic one.

This is the deeper and perhaps actual problem. Britain’s model of cohesion had relied on a kind of unconscious governance: people simply “knew” the rules because those rules were embedded in culture. It was instinctive and reinforced through these many villages, town, local, regional and eventually state layers. But as they all eroded other than the state those unspoken rules eroded, even between native people. The common bonds have frayed; it is easy to blame outsiders but really this change has happened from within.

You can see it in small things: the queue, where people stand patiently without needing fences or guards; the cricket field, where “fair play” matters as much as winning; the pub, where strangers could share a table without elaborate rituals; jury duty, where twelve citizens could be trusted to judge peers. The unarmed Bobby was simply the public face of a deeper social order.

This works in certain variations and in certain times but highly diverse societies cannot rely on unconscious governance. Diversity can and very much does enrich, but it requires deliberate structures to mediate difference. You cannot assume self-restraint will function automatically when people bring different languages, faiths, and norms. Right and wrong is a social agreement not a universal norm.  To imagine otherwise is, in truth, kind of mad.  In diverse contexts, cohesion has to be consciously cultivated and cannot be relied upon to just be.

And Britain, unlike say Japan, never had a clear sense of national essence to fall back on. Japan’s remarkable capacity for social order rests on a deeply ingrained, explicit view of “Japaneseness,” reinforced across generations. That allows behaviour to be unconsciously governed: people queue in silence, maintain harmony, follow shared rituals, because those norms are embedded in identity.

Britain, by contrast, was always hyphenated. Its cohesion was not about one national essence, but about balancing local and national, crown and community. Once that middle layer of institutions eroded, Britain was left with neither the homogeneity of Japan nor the corporatist structures of continental Europe. It has started to blame outsiders but this is to me very clearly a domestic issue magnified by immigration.

There is a very distinctive anglo fragility at play here. The comparison with continental Europe is instructive. France relies on a centralised republican state. Germany rebuilt itself after 1945 with corporatist and federal institutions. Britain depended on the subtle balance between monarchy at the top and lived community at the bottom.

That balance worked so long as the middle layer held. But as industry, parish, and chapel receded, the structure thinned. The British state found itself dealing with problems it was never designed to manage alone, while individuals lost the institutions that gave these hyphenated identities meaning.

This is why I believe that today’s debates cannot be reduced to immigration, policing, or welfare in isolation. They are symptoms, not causes. Britain’s unease lies in the erosion of a thousand-year-old settlement, where liberty and cohesion were sustained by layers of identity and responsibility that created a collective consciousness.

The task to me is not to retreat into nostalgia or scapegoat those who have joined the British story. It is to rebuild the middle layer of society in new forms. That may mean revitalising local associations and civic networks, strengthening schools and voluntary organisations as places of belonging, investing in cultural institutions that bring people together across difference, or even creating digital equivalents that carry the weight once borne by chapels and unions and it certainly requires a rethinking of the welfare state so that the country starts to see itself more like a country focused on the future and less like a charity focused on the past.

Without this, we will continue to misread the symptom as the cause. With it, we may rediscover something profoundly Anglo, and profoundly human: that freedom and solidarity are sustained not by the state alone, nor by the individual alone, but by the lived, hyphenated spaces of trust that lie between them.

This doesn't detract from the fair and valid critisisms of recent UK Government policy and the genuine issues facing Britain today as it grapples with these real and tangible issues. I am just arguging that understanding this issue through a longer arc with some more introspection is essential for there to be solutions instead of blame; where these changes in the fabric of society can be seen as something that came from the inside rather than from the outside. For solutions to be real, lasting, and not built on the sacrifice of others, the problem must first be defined clearly and honestly; otherwise, any response will serve only as a temporary stent, propping up populist rhetoric rather than resolving the issue