Britain is a European country. Net migration surged in Britain after Brexit, despite the stated aim of the policy to curb immigration. Net migration has been well above long-term trends since 2021.
British politics is heading towards a four-way split, with Labour, the Conservatives, Reform UK and the Liberal Democrats all polling at roughly 20–25%. By late 2025 the combined polling share of the populist-right Reform UK and the populist-left Green parties exceeded that of Labour and the Conservatives, the duopoly that has dominated British politics for over a century. Britain's first-past-the-post electoral system was built for two dominant parties and struggles to handle three or four parties polling similarly. When politics becomes a game of creeping towards 20-something rather than 40-something, tactical voting becomes close to impossible and cynical strategies such as celebrity candidates become more viable. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has argued that British politics is broken but has not put electoral reform on his agenda.
In 2007 Britain's income per person was 20% lower than America's; by 2026 it was over 30% lower.
The fertility rate in England and Wales stood at 1.8 in 2016. By 2024 it had dropped to 1.4, bringing England and Wales close to the EU average and into a central European medium-fertility clique alongside Austria, Germany and Hungary. Scotland has come to resemble the low-fertility countries of southern Europe. In 2024 fully 49% of 24-year-olds were living in the family home, up from 36% a decade earlier. The IMF projects GDP growth of 1.3% in 2026 for both Britain and the euro zone.
Britain is the only democracy in Europe to use first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting. Under FPTP, each person casts one ballot and the candidate with the highest tally in each of the 650 constituencies wins. The system works best with two dominant parties; when it collides with multiparty competition, small shifts in vote shares produce huge shifts in seat counts. At the 2024 general election Labour won 63% of the seats with just 34% of the vote—the most skewed result in history. Labour and the Conservatives won a combined 57% of the vote, their lowest combined share since 1910. Since 1900, the "effective number" of parties in Parliament (a measure of substantial representation) has ranged between two and three, yet the effective number of parties by votes cast jumped to 4.8 at the 2024 election. Since 1945, 19 MPs have won elections with less than 30% of the vote; ten of them were elected in 2024. In 2024 the Liberal Democrats won 72 MPs on 12% of the vote thanks to ruthless targeting, while Reform UK won just five MPs on 14%. MPs voted by a narrow majority for electoral reform in 2024, but the government has not given the bill the parliamentary time needed to become law.
Some 5m people entered university between 2012 and 2023 under Britain's current student-loans system, which acts as an age-based tax: graduates repay 9% of earnings above a threshold, or 15% for those with postgraduate loans. A graduate with a master's degree earning £30,000 faces a marginal tax rate of 43%, compared with 20% for someone over 66 in the same job, who is exempt from National Insurance. Earning more is of limited help: as a borrower's salary rises, the interest rate on the debt also rises, up to 6.2%. The student-loan book stands at about £267bn. Repayment thresholds were frozen in the November 2025 budget.
The backlog of cases in Britain's criminal courts stands at nearly 80,000 and is predicted to reach 105,000 by 2029. Victims and defendants can wait as long as four years for a trial, by which point evidence may have deteriorated and witnesses dropped out. The backlog spiralled because of disruption during covid-19, chronic underfunding and poor court productivity.
Business rates, the tax on commercial property, yield around £24bn a year (0.8% of GDP). When a commercial property is vacated the landlord becomes liable for its taxes. A cottage industry of advisers exists to minimise business rates, including schemes involving sham agricultural use or claims of "places of worship" status. Westminster City Council rakes in £2bn a year from business rates, but 95% is sent to the Treasury, which disburses it around the country. A 5,000-square-foot office in central London might owe £12,000 ($16,000) a month. Landlords can claim 90 days of empty-property relief; the government extended the eligibility period to 13 weeks.
Britain is exceedingly fiscally centralised: about 95% of tax is raised by central government. English cities have long hoped for the power to levy local taxes such as a hotel-stays tax (as cities in other countries, including Scotland, can), but no government has granted it. London accounted for 31% of public capital spending on transport in England in 2023-24, though more than half of all English bus journeys occur there. The Treasury's Green Book, the guide to evaluating public projects, was amended in 2025 to solicit "place-based business cases" allowing regions to argue that clusters of projects bring benefits greater than the sum of their parts.
The Labour government has embarked on the biggest reform of local government in England since the 1970s. Many district councils (which handle rubbish and local planning) and county councils (social care, education and highways) are being abolished and replaced by large unitary authorities that handle everything. Big cities like London and Manchester are already organised roughly this way. In response, an unusual number of towns—from wealthy Guildford and St Albans to deprived Clacton-on-Sea—are creating new parish and town councils. Formally these entities are puny, managing parks, allotments and Christmas lights, but they must be consulted on planning and can create neighbourhood plans specifying where homes may be built. Unlike higher-level authorities, town and parish councils face no referendum requirement to raise taxes by more than 5% a year. Precepts raised by such councils totalled £856m ($1.2bn) in 2024-25, a rise of 60% in real terms since 2010-11.
England and Wales have 43 independent local police forces, which Shabana Mahmood has proposed merging into roughly 13 regional ones—the biggest structural police reform in almost two centuries. A new National Police Service will centralise procurement, standardise IT and assume responsibility for serious and organised crime. Scotland consolidated its eight forces into one in 2013. Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway and Scotland have all consolidated their police forces over the past 20 years; a degradation of local policing tends to follow, as officers are drawn into more specialist roles.
NHS day-to-day health and social-care spending has reached 8% of GDP, up from 4% in the 1990s. Under the June 2025 spending review, real-terms spending rises 2.7% per year over three years, compared with near-flat spending elsewhere.
The NHS employs some 1.4m people—about 2% of the population—with headcount up 25% since 2019. Yet on any measure productivity is below pre-pandemic levels. More than a quarter of patients in England spend over four hours in A&E, roughly twice the 2019 level. Nearly one in ten emergency admissions—some 550,000 people—waited more than 12 hours on a trolley in 2025, a 67-fold increase since 2019; the Royal College of Emergency Medicine estimates that trolley waits contributed to almost 5,000 avoidable deaths in the summer of 2025. In January 2026 nearly 40% of those on waiting lists—2.8m people—had been languishing for more than 18 weeks, up from 570,000 in January 2019. The share of nurses with less than one year of experience has doubled since 2015.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has faced real-terms budget cuts. In 2025 the British government launched an investigation into the ONS after it found errors in numbers underpinning its GDP calculations; investors no longer trust its monthly jobs report. The response rate to Britain's labour-force survey, which is used to inform interest-rate decisions, has fallen from about 70% in the late 1990s to 20%. Surveys on cost of living, crime and health have also declined. Francis Galton's 1874 survey of "English Men of Science" is credited with giving questionnaires their scientific air. The ONS has paused some work measuring family incomes and pared back well-being statistics.
College-educated Britons work from home an average of 1.8 days per week, among the highest rates globally, behind only Canada (1.9 days).
One in five pupils in England has special educational needs and disabilities (SEND). The 2014 Children and Families Act created an all-or-nothing system: it enshrined "parent power", granting legal rights to support via education, health and care plans (EHCPs), but money follows the pupil while other support was cut. Spending on SEND nearly doubled to £11.6bn. Children with EHCPs doubled to over 500,000 (one in 20 pupils). Private special schools grew from 10,000 to 30,000 children; some charge over £85,000 per pupil per year. Two-thirds of middle-class parents spend money on EHCP applications; they are almost twice as likely to secure special-school places as working-class parents. Children referred for NHS diagnosis in 2022–24 waited an average of two years, with some areas facing ten-year waits.
Portsmouth pioneered an alternative model in 2022, in which schools' SEND co-ordinators draw up "neurodiversity profiles" for struggling pupils rather than referring them automatically to the NHS for medical diagnosis. The programme covers one in six primary schools in the city and is being tested in Bristol, Cornwall, Kent and Manchester.
Mistaken releases from prisons surged to 262 in 2024–25, more than double the previous year and nearly five times the 15-year average. Overcrowding leads to higher prisoner churn and places increased burden on inexperienced staff.
Mainland China is Britain's fifth-largest trading partner, accounting for 5.5% of total trade—modest compared with America (18%) and the EU (46%).
Britain wrangled one of the best deals from Donald Trump's reciprocal tariffs, receiving a capped tariff rate of 10% with big carve-outs. British firms can sell 100,000 cars a year at the 10% rate, and secured cuts to levies on car parts and steel. Britain was also permitted to sell large quantities of untariffed beef to Americans. In return, it widened access to its market but avoided many of the obligations imposed on other partners.
Bus networks in England outside London have been privately run since 1986. Commercial operators decide fares, routes and timetables. As a result, thousands of routes have been cut and the number of passenger trips fell by more than half between 1986 and 2024. London, by contrast, kept buses publicly owned and journeys increased by 60% over the same period. In 2023 Greater Manchester's mayor, Andy Burnham, began to bring bus routes and fares back under public control; the number of journeys climbed by 14% in the first year. Liverpool plans to follow suit from 2026.
A national bus-fare cap ensures that no single bus journey costs more than £3 ($4). The scheme was originally announced as a £2 cap in 2023 by the Conservative government and was intended to last three months. Labour has kept extending it, now promising to maintain it until at least 2027, with the cap set at £3 since January 2025.
London remains the world's leading financial centre outside America. Employment in financial services stands at 1.1m (unchanged since 2017), with more jobs now in the Square Mile itself, where high-paying positions are concentrated. Financial services contribute £224bn annually to the economy (8% of GDP), with net exports of £93bn—more than any other country. The City benefits from its historical networks, its geographic position midway between Asia and America, and a lack of serious European competition. JPMorgan, Citigroup, Jane Street and Citadel are all expanding in London, and major acquisitions by American and Canadian firms show renewed confidence.
Labour's government has simplified stockmarket-listing rules, nudged pension funds toward riskier assets, dropped a bank-profits levy and approved cross-border acquisitions.
Britain is the sole country outside America with the expertise to make, and improve, jet engines capable of powering the largest planes. Aircraft parts are Britain's fifth-most-valuable goods export. Rolls-Royce, a British jet-engine maker, had to be bailed out in 1971 after it overspent developing a new jet engine. The Whittle Laboratory at Cambridge, founded in 1973 by Frank Whittle, a British jet-engine pioneer, refines jet engines and is considered world-class; a new state-of-the-art replacement lab opened in October 2025, costing £58m.
The Office for Budget Responsibility, Britain's fiscal watchdog, estimates that Brexit has reduced Britain's GDP by 4% compared with its size had it not happened. A study by the US-based National Bureau of Economic Research concluded that the hit was bigger still, at 6-8% of GDP per person. Britain's GDP per person grew 3.9% between 2016 and 2024—less than in France and Italy, but more than in Germany and Canada.
Business investment grew by 6% annually between 2011 and 2016. The Brexit vote ended that revival: investment flatlined for the next six years. Two separate estimates attribute a 10% shortfall in business investment by 2022 to Brexit alone, reflecting the prolonged uncertainty that deterred investors.
Britain is the world's second-largest services exporter after America. Services exports are up by about a quarter since 2019 in real terms, but a study estimated they are 4-5% lower than they would have been without Brexit. London remains the world's second-largest financial centre, after New York; Britain's share of global turnover in foreign exchange and interest-rate-derivative trading is higher than it was in 2016.
Britain's share of global manufacturing exports fell by more than half between 2000 and 2022, owing to high labour costs, increasing foreign competition and high energy bills. After Brexit removed single-market access, goods exports fell to nearly 15% below pre-pandemic levels; the decline occurred for exports to both the EU and the rest of the world, as higher input costs from the EU compounded Britain's long-standing disadvantages.
Frontier Economics, a consultancy, estimates that joining a customs union could increase Britain's GDP by over 2% in the long run.
At the first post-Brexit EU-UK summit on May 19th 2025, held at Lancaster House in London, Keir Starmer, Ursula von der Leyen and António Costa agreed a "reset" of relations. Britain signed a defence-and-security agreement allowing it to take part in the EU's planned €150bn ($169bn) defence fund, paying its own share. Britain agreed to align with most EU food standards, facilitating trade in food and fish and reducing border checks between Great Britain and Northern Ireland (already subject to EU standards under the 2023 Windsor Framework negotiated by Rishi Sunak). The existing fisheries agreement was extended for 12 years, to 2038, with catch quotas frozen. The two sides agreed to link their carbon-adjustment mechanisms and aim for a joint electricity market.
A youth-mobility agreement will make it easier for young people to move, study and work across borders. Britain agreed to rejoin the Erasmus system of student exchanges in 2027, at a discounted one-year cost of around £570m ($763m). Britons will be allowed to use border e-gates at most EU airports. The two sides agreed to co-operate on fighting organised crime through Europol. Sir Keir estimated the deal would boost GDP by around £9bn (0.3%) by 2040.
Nick Thomas-Symonds, the minister in charge of EU relations, says the earliest an agreement on sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) rules will take effect is 2027. A British bid to join a new European defence fund known as SAFE was derailed in November 2025 by arguments over money; a French-inspired demand for up to €6bn ($7bn) was described by Lord Ricketts, chairman of the Lords Europe committee, as "bonkers".
An Economist poll with More in Common found that 52% of respondents now say the decision to leave the EU was wrong, against 32% who think it was right. If a referendum were held today, 47% would vote to rejoin, compared with 32% preferring to stay out. Some 42% think Brexit could have worked well but was badly done by politicians. At least one cabinet minister, Wes Streeting, has openly floated the idea of joining a customs union.
Sir Keir maintained red lines of no single market, no customs union and no free movement of people. The EU takes over 40% of British exports, twice as much as America and 20 times as much as India. Most voters now think the vote to leave was a mistake, and a majority even within Nigel Farage's Reform UK favour closer relations with Brussels. The deal initiates a process of continuous negotiation, overseen by annual summits—comparable to Switzerland, which has been negotiating deals with the EU almost continuously for 30 years. Norway is starting a new debate about joining the EU. Sir Julian King was the last British European commissioner before Brexit.
Including pharmaceuticals, the chemicals industry accounts for 15% of British exports and 17.5% of R&D; over 60% of its exports go to the EU. After Brexit, Britain left the EU's REACH system of chemicals regulation, based on the European Chemicals Agency in Helsinki. A replacement, UK REACH, was set up but employs just 40 staff, against almost 600 at its EU counterpart, and has a budget of £10m a year—a tenth of what the EU spends. Total output volume in the industry fell by 35–40% between January 2021 and mid-2025. Companies face reregistering more than 22,000 chemicals at an estimated total cost of over £2bn. Some foreign firms may not bother, which could mean the British market loses certain chemicals, including some types of paint. Switzerland is proposing to align unilaterally with almost all EU REACH rules, saving its industry the hassle of re-registration—a model some in the British chemicals industry favour.
The EU's REACH system has become a global standard: Japan, South Korea, Turkey and even China use it as a basis for their own chemicals-regulation systems, a phenomenon known as the "Brussels effect". The Product Regulation and Metrology Act, recently approved, gives British ministers the power to align with EU regulations without separate parliamentary approval. Northern Ireland, still part of the EU single market, is not included in UK REACH.
Poles accounted for more than half of the people who moved to Britain from eastern Europe after the EU enlargement of 2004. Many initially took low-paid work in agriculture, hospitality and construction. By 2014 payroll data showed Poles earned 15% less than native Britons; by 2025 the median wages of employed Poles had risen slightly above those of Britons, likely reflecting language acquisition, professional advancement and the departure of lower-earning migrants. The 2021 census counted 743,000 Polish-born people in England and Wales. The number of Poles on British payrolls has declined by almost a quarter since 2017. Since Brexit, Poles require work permits on the same terms as non-EU nationals; just 1,200 were issued in 2024.
Land ownership in Scotland is among the most concentrated in the rich world: 0.025% of the population owns 67% of rural private land (in England, 1% owns half). Scotland fully abolished feudalism only in 2004 (England did so in 1660). Under feudalism, land was granted to clan chiefs and lords in return for loyalty; tenants could be forced off it. In the 19th century the Highland Clearances displaced tens of thousands so that lairds could make room for sheep farming. When sheep prices collapsed in the 1880s, estates were converted to deerstalking and grouse moors. Today Scotland's largest landowner is Anders Povlsen, a Dane, with over 80,000 hectares; the Buccleuch Estates are second and Gresham House, a global asset manager, third. Only 3% of rural private land is in community ownership. A bill introduced to the Scottish Parliament in 2024 aims to help communities buy land and gives ministers authority to break up large estates at point of sale, though critics say the thresholds are too high to affect many holdings.
London has some 3,500 hectares of brownfield (underused, previously developed) land, enough space for more than 400,000 homes. The sites are clustered along canals and rivers that were once industrial arteries. The city has a target of around 80,000 new homes a year. Developers face requirements that up to half of homes be affordable, height restrictions, minimum room sizes and, from 2026, mandatory second staircases in buildings over seven storeys. A biodiversity-net-gain rule requires developers to prove existing biodiversity levels will increase by 10% and be maintained for 30 years—a particular burden on brownfield sites, which can develop rich "mosaic habitats" while derelict.
The Equality Act of 2010 is Britain's main anti-discrimination law. On April 16th 2025 the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that, for the purposes of the act, "woman" means a biological woman and "man" a biological man. The ruling ended years of legal uncertainty over whether a gender-recognition certificate (held by around 8,500 people) could change a person's legal sex under the act. Services and spaces that exclude men, such as women's bathrooms, can therefore also exclude transgender women. The court found that interpreting "sex" to include "certificated sex" made the act incoherent, particularly for pregnancy provisions and lesbian rights. Trans people retain protections under "gender reassignment", which remains a separate protected characteristic. Polling found 59% of Britons agreed with the ruling.
On May 6th 2025 Britain and India agreed a trade deal—Britain's biggest since Brexit and the most ambitious agreement India has ever struck. India reduced tariffs on 90% of products; tariffs on whisky and gin fell from 150% to 75%, and on cars from 100% to 10% (subject to a quota). Britain reduced tariffs on Indian clothes, shoes and food. The deal is expected to boost annual trade by £25.5bn over 15 years. Britain is also seeking deals with the UAE, Switzerland and the EU.
Oil and gas were discovered in the North Sea in 1969. North Sea revenues peaked at 3% of GDP in the mid-1980s; without them, the swingeing tax cuts at the core of the Thatcher revolution might never have happened. At its peak, Aberdeen boasted Britain's highest concentration of millionaires. Since the turn of the century, oil production has fallen almost continuously. In the past decade the North Sea workforce has shrunk from 450,000 to 200,000. The oil-and-gas sector still employs one in three working adults in the Aberdeen region, compared with one in 220 across Britain. Oil and gas account for three-quarters of Britain's energy use.
At 78%, Britain's effective tax rate on North Sea profits is among the highest in the world. In 2025 no new exploration licences were approved for the first time since drilling began. By contrast Norway, which shares access to North Sea reserves, approved 40 new projects and produces the equivalent of 4m barrels a day—four times more than Britain. Britain's oilfields need global prices at nearly $40 a barrel just to break even, more than double Norway's threshold. Rystad Energy, a consultancy, estimates Britain's recoverable reserves at just 9bn barrels, less than half Norway's. A large refinery at Grangemouth closed in September 2025; a plant in Mossmorran followed in February 2026.
GB Energy, a new state-owned energy firm headquartered in Aberdeen, was announced with promises of £8.3bn over five years and 1,000 jobs, but eight months after its creation it had no office or chief executive and only £100m of funding for two years. The 1,000 jobs are now expected to take two decades to materialise.
Norway provided nearly 70% of Britain's gas imports in 2025. According to Wood Mackenzie, there were 16.9 gigawatts of offshore wind power in British waters by the end of 2025, second globally only to China.
Some 17GW of floating wind projects are planned for Scottish waters within 100 nautical miles of Aberdeen's coast. The St Fergus gas terminal will house the Acorn carbon capture and storage project.
Britain's fishing industry had a turnover in 2023 of £892m, according to the Office for National Statistics—smaller than the locks-and-hinges, condiments-and-seasonings, or carpets-and-rugs industries. About 70% of British fish exports go to the EU. Under the May 2025 UK-EU deal, EU fishing boats will operate in British waters until 2038 with catch quotas frozen. Mackerel in the north-east Atlantic is being over-exploited because of a dispute involving Britain, the EU, the Faroe Islands, Norway, Iceland and Greenland.
Visa fees have become a money-spinner. It can cost almost £6,000 ($8,020) up front to bring in a scientist, according to the Royal Society; other visas cost as much as £12,500. Such fees have jumped by 79% in real terms since 2019 and now bring in nearly £3bn a year (0.1% of GDP).
London is a net exporter of people to the rest of Britain: in the year to June 2024, 128,000 more domestic migrants departed than arrived. Without international migration, which boosted the capital's population by 163,000, it would have shrunk. Of the ten local authorities in England and Wales where immigrants are most likely to have higher-education qualifications, nine are in the capital. Foreign students pay 58% of tuition fees in London, compared with 39% nationally. The government has proposed a 6% levy on international student tuition fees.
London has 33 local authorities. The average "band D" council tax in the capital is £1,982 ($2,660), compared with £2,280 in England as a whole. Business rates in some parts of central London are rising sharply: in Farringdon, they are set to jump from £316 per square foot to £437.
London produces a quarter of Britain's national output and remains the world's second-largest financial centre, after New York. Output per worker there is lower in real terms than it was in 2008. London's lost productivity growth accounted for 42% of Britain's nationwide slowdown between 2007 and 2019. When London grows, it pays more taxes to subsidise everyone else and generates demand for regional businesses. A poll for The Economist found that only 17% of Britons think Britain would be better off if London were richer.
Violent crime has been falling in London for years. The homicide rate is at its lowest since comparable records began; residents of Miami are almost six times more likely to be killed. Renting a flat gobbles up more of a typical income in London than in Paris or Tokyo. London's competitors are not Manchester and Leeds, but New York and Tokyo.
Since 2020 Britain's non-EU foreign workforce has grown to 3.2m—more than double its pre-pandemic size. In 2022 the average migrant on a skilled-worker visa contributed a net £16,300 to the public purse, compared with £800 for the average Briton. More than half of all skilled-worker visas issued since 2021 have gone to medical professionals, nurses and care workers. Just under two-thirds of the scientific staff at the Francis Crick Institute, one of Europe's biggest biomedical labs, are from overseas.
The Construction Industry Training Board estimates Britain will need more than 250,000 new workers by 2028 to build homes, fix the grid or construct roads and bridges. Overseas workers make up less than 15% of the hospitality workforce, down from 25% before covid, and hospitality vacancies have soared to 84,000. Manufacturing companies were already struggling to fill more than 50,000 vacancies for welders, toolmakers and other trades.
For the past quarter of a century the City of London Corporation has conducted a traffic survey with more than a hundred observers stationed around central London. The latest exercise, conducted in autumn 2024, found the number of cyclists was up 57% compared with two years earlier. In central London, bikes have overtaken cars to become the most common vehicle.
London introduced docked hire bikes in 2010 and electric bikes for hire in 2011, but usage took off with the introduction of Lime's Gen4 bike in 2022. Lime, a Californian company, operates some 30,000 bikes across 480 square kilometres and 17 London boroughs. Forest, a British competitor, operates in 14 boroughs. Rental-electric bike use increased four-fold in two years. All rental-electric bikes have a top speed of 25kph. At around £7 ($9.40) an hour, Lime is quite pricey; Voi, a Swedish operator, launched a lower-priced scheme in west London in May 2025. Around ten bikes fit into each car space.
Of the 107,000 asylum-seekers being housed by the government at the end of March 2025, 32,000 were staying in hotels. In July 2025 there were 210 hotels in use, just three fewer than a year earlier. Hotels housed 35% of asylum-seekers but accounted for 76% of accommodation costs. The Labour government has pledged to end the use of hotels for asylum-seekers by 2029. Small-boat migrants, the most visible source of new claimants, increased by 50% over the preceding year to 45,000 and are likely to reach an all-time annual high. In August 2025 a High Court judge granted an interim injunction to Epping Forest District Council against a hotel housing asylum-seekers, ruling that doing so constituted a "material change of use" requiring planning permission. Reform UK said it would seek similar legal action against hotels across the ten councils it controls.
Since 2002 asylum-seekers in Britain have been all-but-banned from working while their cases are considered. After 12 months they may apply only for jobs on the "immigration salary list", a catalogue of 25 professions including archaeologists and stud grooms but excluding most occupations, among them teachers and physicians. Other countries impose shorter waiting periods (six months in France and America) or none at all (Canada). Support payments stand at £49.18 ($67) a week; asylum-seekers housed and fed in hotels receive £9.95. Between 2000 and 2024 those payments were cut by 37% in real terms. Employment rates for asylum-seekers and refugees are 19 percentage points lower than for the UK-born population (56% v 75%), according to the Migration Observatory. A pan-European study from 2020 found that banning asylum-seekers from working upon arrival reduces the probability that they will work in the future by 15%. Analysis by NIESR suggests that each asylum-seeker in work saves the government £20,000 a year. A poll by More in Common for The Economist found that 39% of Britons favoured giving asylum-seekers a right to work after six months or less, but 46% thought the ban should be at least 12 months.
After Brexit Britain lost access to the Eurodac fingerprint database, which shows whether an asylum-seeker has previously applied in another European country, and left the Dublin Protocol, which enables European countries to push migrants back. Some asylum-seekers who failed to gain asylum elsewhere in Europe try to reach Britain because leaving the Dublin system means their slate is wiped clean. In the year to June 2025 Britain received 111,000 asylum applications, a record since at least 2001.
Yvette Cooper, as home secretary, negotiated a "one in, one out" arrangement with France, under which some channel crossers are sent back in exchange for Britain letting in the same number to apply for asylum.
Food-and-drink prices in Britain rose by 37% in the five years to late 2025, outstripping most other goods. In the past year food inflation ran at 5.3%, more than in France (1.8%), Germany (2.7%) and Spain (2.8%). A pint of milk cost around 44p throughout the 2010s; it has since jumped by 50%. Supermarkets are highly competitive, with the big chains all operating on margins of 2-4%. Lidl and Aldi, German discounters, have spent years making even lower margins to build market share. According to Clive Black of Shore Capital, a broker, much of the latest burst of food inflation stems from government tax increases on workers, which labour-intensive supermarkets and suppliers are passing on to customers.
The average Briton ate 209 eggs in 2025, 45 more than in 2005. Supply has not kept up: bird flu shrank England's laying flock by 10% since 2021, and the cost of chicken feed and electricity sent prices flying—eggs have become 36% dearer in real terms. Since 2021 egg imports have doubled; about one in nine eggs on British shelves now comes from abroad, most of them from Ukraine. After Russia's invasion, Britain and the EU removed tariffs and quotas on Ukrainian agricultural imports. The EU reimposed barriers; only Britain has kept egg trade tariff-free until 2028. A record 200m Ukrainian eggs arrived in 2025. Many imported eggs are Class B—oddly shaped or thin-shelled—and go straight into biscuits, sauces and restaurants. Two of Ukraine's largest producers use battery cages, a system banned in Britain since 2012; no law prevents restaurants from using them and consumers have no way of knowing the origin of the eggs in their food.
For much of the 2010s net migration (immigration minus emigration) was between 200,000 and 300,000 a year. Covid-19 cut it to almost nothing. It then surged, reaching 900,000 in the year to June 2023. After leaving the EU in 2020 Britain created an immigration system that treated people from every country the same. Salary thresholds for work visas were set at modest levels; health and care workers were welcomed; foreign students were invited to work after graduating.
On May 12th 2025 Keir Starmer unveiled a new immigration policy, arguing that Britain had conducted "a one-nation experiment in open borders". Care workers will no longer receive work visas. Companies that want to hire foreigners must convince a new Labour Market Evidence Group that they are straining to train natives—and pay a higher levy. Most graduates will receive work visas for 18 months rather than two years. People who want to join their spouses will have to speak basic English. The wait for settlement and citizenship will rise from five years to ten, though exceptions will be made. Foreign students have shored up universities' finances, allowing them to get by even as domestic tuition fees have fallen in real terms; those who work in Britain after graduating earn almost exactly as much as recent British university graduates. Migrants from outside Europe start by earning less than Britons but soon catch up.
Britain's speech laws are rooted in two outdated statutes: the Malicious Communications Act of 1988 and the Communications Act of 2003. The former focused on indecent, offensive, threatening or false information. The latter made it a crime to be "grossly offensive" on any "public electronic communications network"—a clause originally written to prevent pests harassing telephone operators is now used to sift WhatsApp chats. In English law there is no concept of a private conversation online.
Under these laws British police arrest more than 30 people a day for online posts, double the rate in 2017. In 2010 the Metropolitan Police created a team of 24 officers to monitor unlawful social-media activity, the first of its kind; by 2025 every force in the country has such a team. A 2022 law widened the scope of public-order offences. The Free Speech Union, a not-for-profit, has begun challenging and successfully overturning some convictions. America's First Amendment provides by far the strongest free-speech protections in the world; European countries codified such a right only in the mid-20th century, and even then with clear limits.
In 1870 Britain had some 115,000 pubs. By 2024 that number had fallen to 45,000, a new low. Rising costs, changing tastes and the covid-19 pandemic have accelerated closures. The average price of a pint has risen from £0.46 in 1979 (£2.30 in today's prices) to £5.17. J D Wetherspoon, with 794 pubs and record sales of £2.12bn in 2025, is one of only three chains with revenues over £2bn. In the Middle Ages alehouses were so abundant that one Anglo-Saxon king sought to limit the number per village. The pub is among Britain's most successful cultural exports, with British-style boozers found from New York to Mumbai.
Britain's Jewish population numbers just over 350,000 (0.5% of the population), according to the Institute for Jewish Policy Research. There are around 650 Jewish communal buildings in Britain, including synagogues, schools and care homes. The Community Security Trust (CST) co-ordinates the protection of Jewish life, training volunteers to serve as guards and hiring professional security companies, funded in part by an annual £18m ($24m) government grant. On October 2nd 2025, two Jews were killed in an attack on a synagogue in Manchester during Yom Kippur. More than 1,500 antisemitic hate incidents were reported in the first half of 2025, a three-fold increase in a decade. In 2024 Britain recorded 201 violent antisemitic attacks, the highest in Europe, followed by Germany with 148 and France with 106. In America antisemitic incidents reached over 9,000 in 2024, the highest level in the 46-year history of tracking such data.
Nearly two-thirds of arrests linked to the Islamic State terror group in Europe in 2024 involved teenagers. In Britain one in five terror suspects is now under 18.
Over 25 years the annual number of Britons seeking hospital treatment for violence-related injuries has fallen from 450,000 to 150,000. Some 65% of the decline over the past decade is due to men aged 18-30 getting into fewer scrapes; the share of 16- to 24-year-olds who say they do not drink has risen from 18% to 28% in 11 years.
Jonathan Shepherd, founder of Cardiff University's Violence Research Group, pioneered the use of hospital-attendance data rather than police statistics to map violent behaviour. His research led to toughened glass becoming mandatory in bars and pubs. Cardiff has the highest density of licensed drinking places in Britain. South Wales Police found that employing better data, at a cost of £200,000 a year, led to a 42% drop in violent injuries in Cardiff, saving £3m in health and criminal-justice costs. The technique, known as the "Cardiff model", has since been employed in 16 American cities. The number of people treated in hospitals for knife assaults has flatlined at about 4,000 incidents a year over the past decade.
Britain ratified the 2003 UN convention on safeguarding "intangible cultural heritage" only in 2024. It has no UNESCO intangible-heritage entries—unlike France (which lists baguette "know how" and perfume-making) or China (44 entries). The government is compiling a national inventory of living culture; cheese rolling, Morris dancing, pantomime and sea shanties are likely to feature. Traditions can then be nominated for UNESCO listing, though the government has said it has no plans to seek UNESCO listings soon, fearing that choosing, say, Notting Hill Carnival over Hogmanay could strain the union between England and Scotland.
Cheese rolling takes place on Cooper's Hill in Gloucestershire, where contestants chase a seven-pound Double Gloucester down a slope as steep as a ski run. The earliest recorded mention dates to the 1820s.
The Bank of England announced in 2026 that it will put wildlife on its next set of banknotes. The current notes feature humans but they tend to be divisive: Winston Churchill, the face of the £5, has been castigated for racial views; Jane Austen, on the £10, has been connected to slavery. Over 70% of Britons describe themselves as animal-lovers; more donate to animal-welfare charities each year than to any other cause. The hedgehog is regularly voted Britons' favourite mammal; its population in rural areas fell by over half between 2000 and 2022.
Harley Street, London's famous medical district, accounts for 40% of the capital's private-health-care market by revenue and 10% of Britain's. It is almost entirely owned by the Howard de Walden Estate, which controls around 850 properties in Marylebone. Mark Kildea is the estate's chief executive. Tenants include the Cleveland Clinic, the Mayo Clinic and Fortius, Europe's largest orthopaedics group. In 2023-24 plastic surgery made up only 7% of private stays in the district; cancer treatment accounted for 27%, digestive health 25% and orthopaedics 9%.
In April 2025 the estate opened Hale House, an innovation hub for health-tech startups and life-sciences pioneers. Re:Cognition Health, a clinic in the district, leads trials for lecanemab, an Alzheimer's drug. In an office where Lionel Logue once helped King George VI overcome his stutter—featured in the film "The King's Speech"—patients can now get same-day scans.
The devolution settlement of 1998 created a Scottish parliament at Holyrood. The Scottish National Party (SNP) has run the devolved government since 2007. John Swinney is the first minister and Kate Forbes is the deputy first minister. Labour won 37 of 57 Scottish seats in the 2024 general election. Alex Salmond, the former first minister who led the SNP to its first independence referendum in 2014, died in 2024, aged 69.
Keir Starmer's government has pursued a "reset" in relations with the SNP, promising not grand constitutional reform but to make the existing settlement work better. The strategy has pushed talk of independence down the agenda, though voters remain split on the question. The SNP and Labour are in direct electoral competition as both claim the mantle of the natural party of industrial Scotland.
The SNP has long traded on a Scottish cultural exceptionalism, claiming Scotland is more progressive and more reasonable than England. Data from the World Values Survey in 2022 show no statistically significant difference between England and Scotland on either social attitudes or economic left-right views, according to Paolo Morini of King's College London. Scots are more supportive of immigration than the English but the majority who think it too high has grown fast. Scots are no more supportive of trans rights, and just as sceptical of net-zero targets. Reform UK polls second in Scotland, on 25%, puncturing the narrative of Scottish exceptionalism. Up to a third of those who supported independence went on to back Brexit.
Britain has been exceedingly bad at building tram infrastructure. Tram developers are responsible for moving utility pipes and must pay almost the entire cost of doing so, hugely pushing up construction costs. British tram lines cost more than twice as much per kilometre as Dutch ones and more than three times as much as German ones, according to Ben Hopkinson of Britain Remade.
Coventry, a city of 345,000, had a tram network in the early 20th century; the tracks were damaged by heavy bombing in the second world war. In 2025 the city trialled a shallow-scrape method: instead of digging a trench at least half a metre deep, contractors scraped away about 30cm of road surface, positioned thin slabs of ultra-high-performance concrete and attached 15cm-deep rails. A 220-metre demonstration track was built in four weeks. The council owns much of the technology and could license it.
A litre of unleaded petrol cost £1.32 ($1.75) in May 2025, the lowest since July 2021, down from a peak of £1.92 in July 2022 after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Adjusted for inflation, filling up was cheaper than at any point since 2003. Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, has maintained a Conservative policy of refusing to increase fuel duty with inflation.
Successive governments have frozen fuel duty since 2011, with a further 5p cut following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The cumulative giveaways have cost taxpayers £120bn. Fuel taxes in Britain are high—53p per litre for fuel duty plus 20% VAT—making petrol roughly twice the price of America's, but also less responsive to gyrations in global oil markets. Because taxes account for so much of the pump price, the real cost of fuel in the three months before the Iran war of 2026 was lower than at any time since March 2002. Average fleet-wide fuel efficiency has improved by two-thirds over the past three decades. Electric vehicles account for 6% of the fleet; charged at home, an EV costs around £5–8 to drive 100 miles. The real value of car expenditure (excluding fuel) has fallen by 20% since 2000. The Treasury has committed to adding the 5p back in September 2026 and reinstating the escalator that indexes fuel duty to inflation.
Great Yarmouth, a seaside town in Norfolk with fewer than 70,000 inhabitants, epitomises the politics of "levelling-up", the label Boris Johnson's government used for plans to spend on worse-off parts of Britain. The town voted to leave the EU by more than 70% in 2016. It received roughly £85m in post-Brexit regeneration projects plus a £120m bridge, yet still turfed out the Conservatives at the 2024 general election in favour of Reform UK.
Britain's armed forces have been described as "hollowed-out, overstretched and under-equipped" by successive defence secretaries from both parties. On June 2nd 2025 the government published a 140-page strategic defence review (SDR), written by three outside figures led by Lord George Robertson, a former British defence secretary and NATO secretary-general. All 62 recommendations were accepted.
The SDR's central conclusion is that British forces must move to "warfighting readiness". It warns that "emerging technologies are already changing the character of warfare more profoundly than at any point in human history" and notes that for defence projects worth over £20m, awarding a contract takes an average of 6.5 years. It recommends that 10% of the procurement budget be earmarked for novel technologies. America is likely to shift military forces from Europe to Asia.
The RAF must relearn how to fight from a wider range of sites, dispersing its munitions, spare parts and fuel—reversing post-cold-war consolidation at ever fewer bases. The Royal Navy will accelerate a "hybrid" carrier air wing, with drones flying alongside piloted F-35 fighter jets. The army will adopt a 20-40-40 mix of equipment: crewed platforms making up only 20% of kit, reusable uncrewed platforms 40%, and "consumables" such as shells, missiles and single-use strike drones 40%. The review concludes that tanks still matter, not least because they protect troops on an increasingly transparent battlefield.
Key commitments include buying "up to" a dozen SSN-AUKUS attack submarines (up from the current Astute-class fleet of seven), considering F-35A jets (which are cheaper, fly farther and can carry nuclear bombs, unlike the current carrier-capable F-35Bs), and opening discussions with America and NATO on joining the alliance's nuclear sharing, in which European air forces practise delivering American B61 bombs. Britain is also to develop offensive anti-satellite weapons.
The government will invest £1.5bn in at least six new munitions factories, though internal estimates suggest £8bn would be needed to replenish ammunition stockpiles for a high-intensity war. A new Defence Uncrewed Systems Centre is to be established by February 2026, and the review promises a "digital targeting web" by 2027 to knit together sensors, weapons and commanders. The upper echelons of defence have been reshuffled to empower the chief of defence staff and create a national armaments director.
The RAF last possessed tactical nuclear weapons in 1998, when the WE.177 bombs were dismantled. America has since upgraded RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk to accommodate B61 tactical nuclear gravity bombs. A sovereign British nuclear cruise missile would take 24 years and cost £8bn–10bn; the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston is already stretched developing Trident warheads.
Since the Falklands war of 1982 Britain has blocked sales of military equipment with British components to Argentina, even by third countries. The stated policy is to block sales that could "enhance Argentine military capability". In 2020 it blocked the sale of South Korean fighter jets with some British parts. Defence dialogue between the two countries has restarted under Javier Milei, with America pushing Britain to loosen the restrictions so that Argentina buys Western rather than Chinese equipment.
Britain and France announced in mid-2025 that their nuclear forces would be "co-ordinated" for the first time—a significant step for France, which has historically kept its nuclear posture strictly national. The move is part of broader Anglo-French planning for a post-American security umbrella in Europe.
Britain deployed an armoured division (about 26,000-28,000 troops) as the main formation fighting alongside Americans against Iraq in 1991 and 2003. As of 2026 it would struggle to send even an armoured brigade (3,000-5,000 troops). Air-defence and artillery batteries are woefully short. The aircraft carriers have had problems with their propeller shafts and are both tied up for maintenance; Donald Trump recently derided them as "toys". Britain ended its permanent naval presence in the Gulf earlier in 2026. Just two of seven frigates and one of five active attack submarines are thought to be deployed. The air force's F-35s lack long-range weapons. Equipment programmes are underfunded by £28bn ($38bn), even before new requirements from the SDR are added. The SDR's co-author George Robertson has denounced "corrosive complacency" over the failure to publish a promised ten-year defence-investment plan.
Britain commands around 137,000 regular troops, its smallest number in 181 years. The country outsources military recruitment to a private firm; some applicants have waited for four years. Around 60% of applicants are turned down, often for minor medical conditions such as childhood acne, eczema or a broken leg. In the 12 months to October 1st 2025 the British armed forces increased in size for the first time since 2021, albeit only by a few hundred people; applications increased by 44%. Record numbers of officers have been leaving the British army, and the number of pilots has dropped to "crisis" levels, according to RUSI, a think-tank. Among the reasons cited for the outflow are the difficulties faced by officers in having a normal family life, since many have to change posts every 18-24 months.
Defence spending stands at 2.3% of GDP, with a target of 2.5% by 2027 and an "ambition" of 3% in the next parliament. The Treasury has privately estimated that fully meeting commitments to the AUKUS submarine deal, the Global Combat Air Programme and nuclear-related projects would require 3-3.5% of GDP. The SDR acknowledges the EU is of "increasing significance" in defence but does not hint at any rupture with America.
Viticulture is Britain's fastest-growing agricultural sector. Vineyard acreage has expanded more than four-fold since 2000: over 1,000 vineyards covered more than 4,000 hectares in 2023, spread across Kent, Sussex, Hampshire and beyond. Britain is the world's second-largest wine importer by value and volume.
Chapel Down is the country's largest producer. Champagne houses including Taittinger and Vranken-Pommery Monopole have invested in English soil. In 2023 English wine hit a record 21.6m bottles (mostly sparkling), up 77% over 2022, but a poor 2024 harvest yielded only 6m–7m bottles. English wine remains less than 0.1% of world output. At an average of £32 for sparkling, it sits between prosecco (£13) and champagne (£51). Vineyards drew 1.5m visitors in 2023, up 55%.
Water in England was privatised in 1989 and is regulated by Ofwat, which must approve firms' investment plans and the bill rises that fund them. Ofwat long prioritised keeping bills low over funding investment, leading to decades of underinvestment. In 2024 there were 75 "serious" pollution incidents—likely to kill fish or harm bathers—up from 47 the year before, according to the Environment Agency. Ofwat is now letting companies raise bills by 36% plus inflation to fund £104bn in investment; five firms have appealed to the Competition and Markets Authority, arguing bills need to rise further.
Many water companies loaded up on debt to juice slow-but-steady returns after privatisation. Thames Water has over 80% of debt relative to its assets (Ofwat recommends 55%; the industry average is about 70%). Ofwat has also flagged Southern Water and South East Water as worryingly fragile.
On July 21st 2025 Sir Jon Cunliffe, a former deputy governor of the Bank of England, presented a 464-page report on the structure and oversight of the water industry. More than 90% of respondents to his commission's survey rated the regulatory framework as poor or very poor. His 88 recommendations include scrapping Ofwat; Steve Reed, the environment secretary, accepted the proposal at once. A new body will replace Ofwat and absorb the Environment Agency's water duties and the Drinking Water Inspectorate. Sir Jon proposes a shift from industry-wide benchmarking to individual company oversight, minimum capital requirements akin to those of banks, a formal "turnaround" regime for struggling companies, and a "National Water Strategy" with a rolling 25-year view. Below the national level he proposes eight regional planning bodies in England based on river catchments. Scotland's and Northern Ireland's water industries are nationalised; Welsh Water is a not-for-profit firm. Sir Dieter Helm, an economist at Oxford, has called the sector "pretty close to uninvestible" given political and regulatory risk.
Homicides in England and Wales have dropped to their lowest level in more than 50 years. An estimated 20m crimes were committed in England and Wales in 1995, an all-time high. That figure fell for almost three decades, reaching less than 5m in 2023—a decline researchers attribute mainly to better security technology. Yet the proportion of crimes solved has also plummeted: the share of offences resulting in a charge or summons was 13.4% in 2015 and 7.6% in 2025. Britain's police solve only 5% of crimes overall (and 2% of vehicle thefts). Almost 90% of Brits see crime as a "big problem" facing the country; since 2020 the proportion expressing "no confidence" in the police has almost doubled. Reported sexual offences have more than tripled in the past two decades to almost 200,000, mostly because more victims come forward; the charge rate is just 4.2%. Vehicle theft fell to a low of 70,000 in 2013 but has since risen by 75% to 130,000 a year, driven by organised groups using electronic gadgets to target high-end cars; the rise has fed a 45% real-terms increase in car insurance premiums (in the EU premiums have risen only in line with inflation). More than 70,000 phones were reported stolen in London in the year to mid-2025; Britain accounts for almost 40% of phone thefts in Europe, according to SquareTrade, an insurance company. Shoplifting has more than doubled in the past two years. Police experienced steep budget cuts between 2010 and 2018.
Britain has become a leading exporter of stolen goods. Most stolen vehicles end up on container ships; the top destination is west Africa. Between 2021 and 2024 almost four in ten stolen cars intercepted at Britain's ports were heading for the Democratic Republic of Congo, which seems to act as an entry point to a wider African market; one in five was heading for the United Arab Emirates. Stolen phones, once exported, most often turn up in China, at Huaqiangbei market in Shenzhen, the world's largest electronics market. British farms have been targeted by gangs since Russia's invasion of Ukraine led to sanctions; their tractors and GPS kits usually head east, to Russia or eastern Europe. In 2023 the value of claims for stolen GPS kits rose by 137%. Encrypted communications have enabled criminal gangs to establish global supply chains; many drug gangs in Britain are shifting into stolen-goods exports, which they see as lower-risk. Felixstowe, Britain's busiest container port, handles some 11,000 containers a day; a single police officer is assigned to finding stolen cars among them.
The share of England's population that is white British fell from 74% in 2021 to 72% in 2024. The number of parliamentary constituencies that are majority-minority (where the white British population is less than half) grew from 69 in 2021 to 77 in 2024. Cities' contribution to the national increase in diversity is nearly half what it was in the late 2000s, as immigrants increasingly settle in suburbs and satellite towns rather than inner-city areas. Between 2021 and 2024 all but 17 of England's 543 constituencies became more diverse; places that were previously homogeneous changed most. A slight majority of constituencies became more ethnically segregated over the same period.
Constituencies that have diversified fastest have seen attitudes to immigration harden the most. Of the 318 constituencies that Reform UK would probably win according to The Economist's election model, 143 are among England's 200 most segregated places.
91.8% of Scots identified as White Scottish/British at the 2011 census; by 2022 that had fallen to 87.1%. The share of Scots identifying as "wholly or mostly Scottish" reached a record high of 60%, according to the most recent social-attitudes survey. Polling from October 2025 found that 20% of Reform UK voters in Scotland backed the SNP in 2019, and 45% said they had voted SNP at some point. Reform's Scottish leader has not ruled out a second referendum on independence.
An estimated 30,000 adults and children were infected with diseases ranging from hepatitis C to HIV through contaminated blood products. Compensation of £12bn is being paid—more than other countries offered for comparable scandals.
On July 29th 2024 Axel Rudakubana, a 17-year-old born in Cardiff, murdered three young girls in Southport and tried to kill many others. False rumours that the killer was a Muslim asylum-seeker triggered riots across many cities and towns, including Belfast, London, Sunderland, Tamworth and Stoke-on-Trent. Rioters attacked mosques and hotels containing asylum-seekers. A study by John Drury of the University of Sussex found that of 94 people arrested in Stoke-on-Trent, 80 had been arrested before in relation to a total of 1,127 offences; almost one-fifth of those arrested were under 18. Police arrested more than 1,800 people and secured rapid convictions, aided by body-worn cameras and ubiquitous CCTV. A poll by More In Common found that 73% of Britons expected further race riots. One in four Britons is from an ethnic minority. Previous episodes of racial violence occurred in 1919, 1958 and 1981.
Under Rachel Reeves, Labour's chancellor, the government has struggled to balance fiscal prudence with its political base. Scrapping the universal winter-fuel allowance saved £1.1bn a year (0.04% of GDP) but proved deeply unpopular; the government later reversed course, restoring it for all but the richest pensioners. The two-child benefit cap, which kept 300,000 children in poverty, was abolished in the November 2025 budget at a cost of £3bn a year. Ms Reeves reduced disability benefits by £5bn in the spring of 2025, then reversed course in the autumn, spending £7bn in 2029-30 restoring disability benefits and winter-fuel payments. The British government collects £1.3trn in tax revenues. By ruling out increases to income tax and VAT, Ms Reeves has focused on steep rises to less lucrative taxes: an inheritance tax on farms raises barely £2bn.
Across two budgets (October 2024 and November 2025) Ms Reeves raised taxes by almost £70bn (2% of GDP) and pledged about £80bn of extra spending. Private schools have been taxed. Railways are being nationalised. The government has pledged £4bn a year on council housing and handed £23bn over two years to the NHS with few strings attached. The minimum wage has reached £26,400 a year for a 40-hour week. Spending is forecast at 44.3% of GDP in 2029-30, and taxes at 38.2%—the highest since the 1940s. Only 12% of Britons trust the government to put country before party most or all of the time, down from 47% in 1987.
A quarter of care providers in England still keep paper records, yet necessity is spurring innovation. Cera, a home-care company founded by Ben Maruthappu, claims to have created Europe's largest home-care data set—over 200bn data points—to train AI that predicts patients' needs. Its app uses algorithms to predict fall risk and claims to have cut falls by a fifth; a peer-reviewed study in 2022 found it had reduced hospitalisations by 52%. In March 2025 the NHS said it would roll out Cera's AI tool nationwide. Falls cost the NHS around £2bn a year and are the most common cause of accidental death among the elderly.
An NHS pilot using acoustic-monitoring devices in a nursing home found falls decreased by 66% and staff made 61% fewer checks in person over a year-long trial. Cavendish Park, a care home in Worcestershire, was the first in Europe to integrate Amazon Alexa devices adapted for care homes into its infrastructure.
Manchester Town Hall, a neo-Gothic civic building opened in 1877, closed for renovation in 2018 after becoming unsafe. The project budget has risen from £305m to £429m, with completion expected in August 2026. Unlike some cities that have converted civic buildings into hotels, Manchester is preserving it as a working town hall.
Northern Ireland remains the least ethnically diverse part of the British Isles. During the Troubles few outsiders settled there; after the 1998 Good Friday Agreement brought peace, migration increased. Changes in the population that happened gradually elsewhere are happening suddenly: in some Ballymena primary schools, more than half of pupils are children of migrants. Wrightbus, a bus manufacturer, is Ballymena's most successful company and a significant employer of foreign workers.
Britain's grooming-gangs scandal—the long-ignored group-based sexual abuse of children—has been a stain on the country for decades. A succession of probes stretching back over a decade includes two long public inquiries, one completed in 2015 into gangs in Rotherham, another in 2022 into child-sexual exploitation more broadly. In June 2025 Louise Casey, a cross-bench peer, published the first audit focused solely on grooming gangs nationally. It found that grooming gangs have been identified in dozens of towns and cities. In Rotherham alone, 1,100 victims were identified.
The audit found that authorities failed to see "girls as girls" and "shied away from" investigating crimes committed by minorities—in many cases men of Asian or Muslim (especially Pakistani) heritage. Police often treated victims as "wayward teenagers"; some were criminalised as child prostitutes. A Home Office report from 2020, which claimed offender ethnicity was in line with the general population, was strongly criticised: new data from three police forces showed suspects were disproportionately of Asian heritage. There is no evidence that Asian men are more likely to commit sexual abuse in general, but perpetrators appeared to become disinhibited as a group and to target white girls in part because they were from another community.
Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, announced that the National Crime Agency would take over hundreds of cold cases. She also called a public inquiry, reversing an earlier refusal. Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader, had pushed for the inquiry.
Farming is barely relevant even to the rural economy: in Mid Suffolk, a district of 110,000 people in east England, just 3% of employed people work in agriculture, forestry or fishing. Manufacturing is twice as important. In the past five years, English farming subsidies have changed utterly: payments that used to be made per hectare almost regardless of what farmers did are being slashed and replaced by money for environmental goods such as flowers, hedgerows and bird-feeding crops.
Solar-power production has become a crucial source of income for English farmers. Fully 27% of all English farms earned income directly from solar power in 2023–24. Ground-mounted solar panels cover between 0.06% and 0.07% of Britain's land surface, according to a Lancaster University study, but they are more common in the rural south and spreading quickly.
Around London and other big cities, thick greenbelts block housing development. In cities, tax changes, mortgage rules and the Grenfell Tower fire of 2017 have weakened demand for high-rise flats. Rapid homebuilding is often found in rural districts: in the year to March 2024 Mid Suffolk built over 1,000 homes—more than Newcastle upon Tyne, which is almost three times as populous.
Britain's Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), also known as SIS, is a human-intelligence (HUMINT) service headquartered in Vauxhall, south London. It did not officially exist until 1994. Its main job is to inform policymakers by recruiting and running agents; it also has a mandate for disruptive action against threats. At its heart are case officers, many of whom work out of embassies posing as diplomats; others travel abroad under aliases with no diplomatic immunity. Raw intelligence is fed into the Joint Intelligence Organisation, which combines it with other data to produce "all source" reports for the prime minister and others. MI6 is part of the National Cyber Force, which conducts offensive cyber operations. Unlike the CIA, which has often been led by outsiders, MI6 has not been led by someone from outside the service in at least 50 years. The single intelligence account sets budgets for Britain's three main spy agencies (MI6, MI5 and GCHQ).
Britain is part of the Five Eyes intelligence pact, alongside America, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Intelligence cut-offs have been surprisingly common within Five Eyes but are much rarer within the tight-knit Anglo-American partnership. Some intelligence is marked UKEO, or "UK Eyes Only". In the 1970s Henry Kissinger, as national security adviser, ordered a punitive cut-off of some intelligence from Britain, causing satellite images to dry up briefly, but it was resisted by American spies and proved perfunctory. In November 2025 Britain suspended intelligence-sharing with America on drug-trafficking in the Caribbean, after America began sinking boats the administration said were used for smuggling. British officials were worried that America might use British intelligence, such as intercepts showing the location of boats, to commit war crimes. Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for Defence of Democracies, a hawkish American think-tank, provocatively suggested America should give up on Five Eyes in favour of a new pact with Israel, Poland, Ukraine, the United Arab Emirates, Japan and South Korea.
In June 2025 Blaise Metreweli was appointed the 18th chief, the first woman to hold the role; she took over on October 1st. Three out of MI6's four director-generals are women. The June 2025 spending review allocated an extra £600m ($813m) to the intelligence agencies. MI6's top priority is now China, whose spy agencies dwarf British ones and increasingly match them for skill.
The Midlands stretches from the Welsh border to the Lincolnshire coast, from the northern edge of the Cotswolds to the Peak District. It covers one-fifth of England's land, contains 11m people and has Britain's second-biggest city, Birmingham. It is politically crucial: win the Midlands in a general election and you have almost certainly won the United Kingdom.
The East and West Midlands come second and third from bottom when ranking GDP per person in the nine regions of England; only the North East fares worse. The East Midlands receives less public capital investment per person than any other part of the United Kingdom. The eastern branch of the HS2 railway, which would have run through the region, was cancelled in 2021. Richard Parker is the mayor of the West Midlands.
The Midlands' greatest literary daughter, George Eliot, is almost ignored: her childhood home has become a Beefeater chain restaurant.
In 2024 the NHS replaced its merit-based system for assigning newly qualified doctors to hospitals with a computer-generated lottery. The previous system ranked applicants partly through a "situational judgment test"; critics said those from ethnic minorities often did worse. The new system tries to maximise the number of applicants getting their first choice but encourages gaming: applicants who report their true preferences are more likely to miss out, since popular locations fill up first.
In 2010 the Medicines Discovery Institute (MDI) was launched in Cardiff with £14m from the Wellcome Trust and Medical Research Council to turn neuroscience discoveries into medicines. Major British institutions including Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial College London and University College London had courted the MDI, but Cardiff University and the Welsh government offered strategic alignment with their world-class psychiatry genetics and brain-imaging centres. In June 2025 the MDI spun out its first biotech firm, Draig Therapeutics, specialising in precision neuroscience for treating depression, with £107m of mostly venture-capital funding. Patrick Vallance, Britain's science minister, is now responsible for ensuring such firms thrive.
Britain's non-domicile ("non-dom") tax regime dated back to 1799, when rich Britons accumulated fortunes across the empire. It allowed the ultra-rich to avoid taxes on offshore assets. As of April 2023 Britain had around 74,000 non-doms. In April 2025 the Labour government abolished the regime entirely, including protections that offshore property trusts had afforded the rich. Previously exempt offshore assets became subject to the same 40% inheritance-tax levy that ordinary wealthy Britons must pay; polling by Oxford Economics found this was the key motivator for 83% of non-doms considering relocation.
A replacement scheme, the Foreign Income and Gains (FIG) regime, offers new arrivals a four-year UK tax holiday on foreign income and capital gains before worldwide levies kick in. The Office for Budget Responsibility predicted that scrapping the non-dom status would raise £33.8bn for the Treasury over five years. The Centre for Economics and Business Research predicted negligible revenue if even a quarter of non-doms left in the first year. Italy's €200,000 flat tax and America's $5m "gold card" residency scheme have drawn some departing non-doms.
As of mid-2025, Britain is stuck in its longest period of economic stagnation since the 1930s. The debt-to-GDP ratio stands at 96%. The cost of servicing government debt as a share of GDP is the highest since 1987. Britain has seven times the population density of the average rich country and an acute housing shortage in its most productive region around London.
Britain has the most entrenched inflation of any major rich country. In the year to the second quarter of 2025 core prices (excluding food and energy) rose by 4.3%. Three-quarters of the items in a Briton's consumer basket have risen in price by more than 2%—unusually high "inflation dispersion". The Anglophone world in general has struggled: from 2022 to 2024 the governments of English-speaking countries increased their budget deficits by an average of 2% of GDP, while those elsewhere contracted. Large-scale immigration in recent years may have added to short-run price pressures, especially in housing.
Britain's welfare bill stands at around 11% of GDP. The non-pensioner benefits bill is 4.8% of GDP (£145bn), roughly in line with the 30-year average. Beneath that surface, spending not tied to health (such as unemployment and housing benefits) has fallen from 3.5% of GDP in 2005-06 to 2.7% in 2025-26, offset by a steep rise in disability and incapacity benefits to 2.1% of GDP (£64bn)—almost double the share two decades ago. One in ten working-age adults in England and Wales claims at least one disability-related benefit—4m people, up by 1.2m (40%) since 2019. Britain is an outlier; similar European countries have seen disability caseloads stagnate or fall. Around one in seven working-age Britons reports having a long-term mental or behavioural disorder, up by 50% over the past decade; 44% of disability claims cite such illnesses as their main condition, up from 25% in 2002. Personal Independence Payments (PIP), the main disability benefit, are not means-tested.
Britain's unemployment benefits are among the stingiest in the rich world: a single person gets less than 13% of the average wage. Yet those on the maximum health-related benefits can quadruple their income. Such a feast-or-famine choice drives people towards sickness claims. Britain spends about 6% of GDP supporting pensioners, up by over a third this century. Tax revenue is on course to rise to 38% of GDP, a historical high for Britain, though still lowish by European standards. The basic rate of income tax has not increased since 1975.
Britain produces about 4m tonnes of steel a year. Nearly half goes to the EU, which accounts for as much as 80% of British steel exports. Donald Trump imposed 25% tariffs on British steel exports to America. In October 2025 the EU proposed cutting its tariff-free quota of steel imports by half and imposing a 50% tariff on the rest—what the director of UK Steel, a trade body, called "the biggest crisis the UK steel industry has ever faced". Norway is shielded from such tariffs as part of the European Economic Area; post-Brexit Britain is not.
Western steelmakers face a triple whammy of subsidised Chinese competition, high energy costs and the need to invest heavily in green production methods. Britain's last blast furnaces are in Scunthorpe, kept open by emergency legislation. Port Talbot, in Wales, is another major steel-producing area. After Brexit took effect at the end of 2020, Britain's goods exports have grown less than those of any other economy in the G7 club of rich countries, according to the Centre for European Reform.
Britain's industrial electricity costs have soared in recent years, clobbering energy-intensive firms in sectors such as steel, glass and ceramics. The price of electricity is nearly always set by expensive gas, and bills have been raised further by charges and levies used to support the deployment of renewables. From 2027 the government will introduce exemptions reducing bills by up to a quarter for around 7,000 businesses.
Formula One was launched at Silverstone in 1950. Seven of the ten F1 teams in 2025 are based within 100km of the circuit. The motorsport cluster employs 50,000 people across more than 4,000 companies and generated revenues of £16bn in 2023.
The gap in exam attainment between pupils in London and the rest of England continues to widen: the average GCSE grade in the capital was 6% above the English average in 2019 and has since stretched to 10%. The attainment gap at 16 between white children in England on free school meals (from low-income families) and all others rose by four percentage points in the five years from 2018-19. Disadvantaged ethnic Chinese children at 16 are 39 months ahead of their white British peers. Fully 23% of white British children were persistently absent from school in the latest year, compared with 4% for ethnic Chinese. The Education Policy Institute finds that the rising attainment gap since 2019 among disadvantaged children can be entirely explained by increased absenteeism.
England's big cities have seen a quiet revolution in school results. In 2005 just 27% of GCSE takers in Manchester's state schools cleared the standard benchmark; by the mid-2020s poor pupils in Manchester outperform their peers nationally. Birmingham and London are further ahead still. Simon Burgess, an economist at the University of Bristol, showed in 2014 that the success of London's secondary-school pupils could be explained by ethnic-minority composition. In a follow-up study, he found that whereas native English-speaking children performed better in maths when offered financial rewards, English learners did not—they were already motivated. The "London effect", as it became known, is now spreading to secondary cities as they grow more ethnically diverse: between the 2011 and 2021 censuses the share of foreign-born people in Birmingham and Manchester grew faster than in London. Slough, west of the capital, has a larger share of immigrants than any other English town or city; its poor teenagers did better in GCSEs than counterparts almost anywhere.
Mel Ainscow, an educationalist, has driven school-to-school collaboration across Greater Manchester since the late 2000s. Star Academies, a particularly successful schools trust led by Sir Hamid Patel, has opened 21 "free" schools (free from local-authority control) across England, finding it easier to locate sites in cities than in smaller towns.
In the six years since covid-19 struck, Britons bought around 1m wood-burning stoves; one in 14 households now owns one. Demand was driven by a spike in gas prices following Russia's invasion of Ukraine and by a growing appreciation of the fragility of power grids. Wood fires account for around 20% of Britain's emissions of harmful PM2.5 particulates, similar to road transport. Sales of wood burners in 2025 were roughly half their 2022 peak.
Britain once led the world in precision timekeeping—its inventions included the marine chronometer—but it never dominated mass production of wristwatches, and by the 1970s the last large factory had closed. The Alliance of British Watch and Clock Makers, founded in 2020, counts over 100 member brands, four-fifths of which started after 2010. Its 2025 survey put combined annual sales at roughly £200m, up from £125m in 2021, though still less than 0.5% of global watch sales. Most firms design at home but manufacture abroad. Christopher Ward, Britain's largest watch brand by revenue, is Anglo-Swiss: its headquarters are in Britain but it produces in Switzerland. Studio Underd0g assembled 14,600 mechanical watches in 2025, making it Britain's largest assembler of mechanical watches. Around 83% of British-made watches have mechanical movements.
The BBC has broadcast the Shipping Forecast for 100 years, interrupted only by war or pandemic. "Forecast" was a word invented by Robert FitzRoy, a Victorian naval officer, who collected past weather data from ships' logbooks and barometer readings relayed by telegraph. His weather charts provided a "synopsis", after the synoptic gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke. The forecast moves clockwise around the sea areas of the British Isles, conveying wind strength, sea state, weather and visibility in supremely concise form: seas range from "smooth" (wave heights below 0.5 metres) to "phenomenal" (above 14 metres). Technology has made spoken bulletins increasingly redundant—ships now download data directly—and in 2024 the BBC cut four daily bulletins to two (three at weekends). The BBC intends eventually to phase out longwave broadcasts altogether but knows that ending the Shipping Forecast would cause national outrage.
Britain hit 40°C for the first time in 2022. In some scenarios it could reach 45°C, according to the Met Office. Building regulations limit air-conditioning in new homes. The government offers subsidies of £7,500 to replace a gas boiler with an electric heat pump, but only if it produces solely heat; a system that heats in winter and cools in summer receives nothing. In England, local authorities are not allowed to levy tourist taxes—unlike cities in many other countries, including Scotland.
The Widows', Orphans' and Old-Age Contributory Pensions Act came into force in January 1926. Workers and employers began making weekly payments, which gave people the right to receive pensions at the age of 65. Although impoverished people aged 70 and over had been receiving means-tested money for almost two decades, the 1926 act gave pensions to ordinary old people and built the contributory system that Britain still uses today. Before the act, most people toiled as long as they possibly could; the new entitlement drew a sharp line between working-age people and pensioners.
The "triple lock", maintained by governments of all colours since 2011, guarantees state pensions rise each year by whichever is highest: consumer prices, average earnings, or 2.5%. It has already cost around three times what was first expected. The state pension is currently £12,000 ($16,100) a year; by 2070 it is projected to be worth about £30,000 in today's money, according to the Centre for British Progress, a think-tank. The state-pension bill stands at about 5% of GDP; the Office for Budget Responsibility projects it will reach 7.7% by the early 2070s. Of the additional 2.7 percentage points, 1.6 come from ageing—the average 65-year-old is expected to live to 91, up from 86 today—and a similar amount from the triple lock itself.
The state pension age is rising to 67 in 2028, eventually to 69. Some 86% of employees had private pension pots in 2023, up from roughly half in 2012, owing to auto-enrolment in company pension schemes. By the 2040s an estimated 17% of pensioners may be renting, up from 6% today, unable to afford a mortgage.
Private-sector defined-benefit (DB) pension schemes hold over £600bn ($815bn), or 52% of their assets, in gilts. Defined-contribution (DC) schemes, which are replacing them, hold just 7% of their assets in gilts, preferring equities—a shift that may weaken demand for government bonds over time.
Brand Finance, a consultancy, ranks Britain's "brand" third globally, behind America and China. Anholt-Ipsos placed Britain's "nation-brand" fifth out of 50 countries surveyed. Among 18- to 34-year-olds, a British Council survey ranked Britain as the third-most-attractive country in the G20. Britain is one of only three net exporters of music in the world (the others are America and Sweden).
British legal-services exports rose to £9bn ($11.5bn) in 2024, from £6.3bn in 2020. London remains the preferred seat for international arbitration, according to a 2025 survey by Queen Mary University and White & Case.
Around 86% of the £5.6bn spent on British-made productions in 2024 came from abroad. Pinewood Studios, west of London, is set to become the world's biggest studio lot, with 51 stages. The BBC remains the world's most trusted international news brand, according to a 2025 survey across 18 countries by Tapestry Research.
American investors pumped £11bn into British equities in 2025, more than in any other overseas market, according to Schroders. Helsing, an Anglo-German defence startup, says most of Europe's best AI researchers are in Britain.
Over the past decade Britain's services exports grew by roughly 45% in real terms, while the wider economy grew only 11%. Services-export volumes to America are up 70% compared with 2016. "Other business services" (consultants, lawyers, PR, accountants) plus finance and insurance account for two-thirds of the rise since the Brexit referendum. Goods exports are over 10% lower in real terms over the same period, owing to post-Brexit trade barriers.
As recently as 2014, average weekly earnings in Britain were near-equivalent in dollar terms to America's. By 2025 American wages were 30% higher, making British labour cheap by international standards. JPMorgan Chase moved some digital operations to a big new office in Glasgow, where coders sit cost-wise midway between cheaper American outposts and India. Goldman Sachs set up in Birmingham in 2021 after commissioning a Europe-wide search for a mid-priced city with a deep talent pool. London supplies just under half of Britain's services exports.
Research by Anna Stansbury of MIT found that the graduate wage premium has dropped in every region of Britain except London.
The pound was first overtaken by the dollar as the leading international reserve currency a century ago; it now accounts for less than 5% of central banks' foreign-exchange reserves. London boasts one of the world's oldest stock exchanges and a gilt market that helped decide the outcome of the Napoleonic wars.
Britain offers 30 hours of free child care a week to parents who bring in less than £100,000 ($130,000) after tax, during school term.
British financial assets carry a valuation discount relative to peers, partly traceable to the Liz Truss crisis of autumn 2022. Around then, the sector-adjusted valuation gap between British and American equities rose from 10–15% to 25%. A pattern of stocks, bonds and sterling all losing value on the same day—behaviour more typical of emerging markets—became more frequent after the Truss era.
Ownership of British stocks shifted from mainly domestic to mainly foreign in the 1990s and 2000s. Gilts offer higher yields than any of Britain's economic peers, with a notably higher term premium than in America, the euro area or Japan.
Well-educated British workers are cheap by international standards. Feeble wage growth and the clobbering sterling took after the Brexit referendum has made them cost-competitive, especially in services such as consulting, IT, law and human resources. JPMorgan Chase says the cost of its technologists in Glasgow is closer to that in India than in Texas. AQR, a quant manager, has pegged expected future returns from British stocks and bonds as the highest of any rich country. Larry Fink, the boss of BlackRock, called Britain "undervalued" in April 2025. Britain's solid AI industry, its niches in banking, life sciences and culture, and its services exports offer possible foundations for growth.
Britain's planning system constrains growth even for prestigious institutions. The All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, host of the Wimbledon championships, bought the freehold of a neighbouring golf course in 1993 and drew up plans to more than double its grounds, with 38 new tennis courts and an 8,000-seat stadium. The Mayor of London's office approved the expansion in September 2024, but a residents' group challenged it through judicial review. Wimbledon is the only Grand Slam that holds its qualifying matches off-site, two miles away in Roehampton, and its third and fourth courts are smaller than those of rival Grand Slams.
The British government employs about 120 special advisers (political appointees who assist ministers). David Miliband, who wrote Labour's 1997 manifesto, went on to become an MP, foreign secretary and leadership contender. The cult sitcom "The Inbetweeners", broadcast 2008–2010, gave Westminster the enduring epithet "briefcase wanker" for policy-focused aides.
On July 17th 2025 Keir Starmer and Friedrich Merz signed a wide-ranging Anglo-German "friendship" treaty—Germany's first major bilateral agreement since its Elysée Treaty with France in 1963. Officials believe the pact cements a "strategic triangle" between Britain, France and Germany. The treaty covers defence, the economy and migration. Defence provisions include joint development of a new long-range strike missile and a mutual-assistance clause committing one side to assist the other in the event of an attack, complementing NATO's Article 5. British and German arms-makers tend to be complementary. Germany is Britain's second-largest trading partner. Economic provisions include science and technology partnerships, increasing the number of power cables in the North Sea, and a proposed Berlin–London high-speed railway line. Germany promised to clamp down on the trade in small boats used to smuggle migrants across the Channel; Britain agreed to restore educational exchanges, allowing German teachers to bring pupils on visits without visas.
The number of licensed sexual entertainment venues in England and Wales has dropped from around 350 in the early 2000s to about 150 by 2025. Many local authorities operate "nil cap" licensing policies, meaning no new licences can be issued. In Germany and the Netherlands sex-related industries are nationally regulated; in Britain control is devolved to local councils.
Four in ten British universities are running deficits as of 2025. Tuition fees for English students were frozen for years; in August 2025 the government allowed a rise of a few percent for the first time in eight years. Only Luxembourg and America bring in more money per student enrolled, counting all sources of funding. Average tuition fees in England are the highest in the world. Bachelor's students in England graduate with debts of around £45,000 per borrower ($60,000), compared with about $29,000 in America. Tuition fees were tripled in 2012; between 2014 and 2018 universities spent as much on capital projects as Britain spent staging the 2012 London Olympics. Non-academics make up about half the university workforce; the number of "managers" and "professionals" swelled by 60% between 2006 and 2018. British universities have some 14 students for every teacher, compared with 18 on average in rich countries and around 20 in Australia. Britain boasts the lowest student drop-out rates in the rich world. Fewer than 20% of students live with their parents, compared with around 40% in Ireland and 50% in Spain. A "lifelong-learning entitlement" will start in 2027.
Britain produces 3.4% of the world's academic papers but 6.1% of those in the top 1% of citations; the only country that does better by this metric is Singapore. In June 2025 the government unveiled the Global Talent Fund, a £54m ($72m) scheme to support 11 "world-class" researchers to relocate to Britain with their teams, with funding for five years. Total UK commitments to attract researchers, including Royal Society schemes, amount to around £115m. Moving a family of four to Britain for five years can cost over £20,000 in visa fees and NHS surcharges alone.
The backlog in the crown court, where the most serious criminal offences are tried, stands at 77,000 cases. Covid-19 is partly to blame: the backlog soared as physical courts shut during the pandemic. The number of cases entering the system has risen, a result of Boris Johnson's 2019 pledge to hire 20,000 new police officers. Legal aid was cut sharply in the 2010s; criminal-law barristers completing publicly funded work fell by 10% between 2016–17 and 2021–22, and duty solicitors at police stations fell by 26% between 2017 and 2023. Trials are rescheduled 25% of the time, compared with 15% in 2015. The average length of hearings has risen by 12% since 2019. A review launched in December 2024 and chaired by Sir Brian Leveson recommended that more defendants be tried by a judge or a judge and two magistrates, rather than by jury.
Operation Rubific was a secret government programme to relocate Afghans put at risk by a data breach. In February 2022 a marine handling applications for ARAP, Britain's Afghan refugee scheme, inadvertently emailed a spreadsheet containing nearly 19,000 applicants—most still in Afghanistan, including former special forces known as the Triples. Extracts appeared on Facebook. A super-injunction was imposed, rendering the programme a state secret; journalists who reported on its existence faced jail. By May 2025 more than 16,000 people affected by the breach had been moved to Britain, with councils quietly paid to buy new houses for them. On July 15th 2025 Sir Martin Chamberlain, a High Court judge, cancelled the super-injunction, saying it had become "futile, counterproductive and a serious interference with free expression." The government says the programme will cost £850m. Some 457 British troops died in 20 years of war in Afghanistan before the allied withdrawal.
British household electricity bills are 20% above the average for major European economies; industrial bills are 90% higher. The gap with America is even larger. Britain's problems began with natural-gas price spikes after Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Having pushed coal off the grid in the 2010s, gas almost always sets the electricity price (in France, nuclear usually sets it; in Germany, often coal). Clean-power costs hitting bills include new pylons and wires for a more complex distributed grid, "balancing costs" to smooth renewables volatility, and the Renewables Obligation (a subsidy scheme scrapped mid-2010s but with payments running into the late 2030s), which makes up over a tenth of the average bill. Since 2019, green subsidies and network costs have contributed about two-thirds as much to real-terms bill rises as wholesale electricity prices.
Offshore wind has stopped getting cheaper; turbines are as tall as skyscrapers and function more like civil-engineering projects than modular factory products. Britain procures offshore wind through "contracts for difference" (CfDs): the government promises a fixed price (rising with inflation) for 15 years (soon 20). The 2023 CfD auction attracted no bidders after the price ceiling was set too low. No big country is as rich as Britain while using so little energy per head. Extra baseload (nuclear or battery storage) is not expected until the late 2030s. Polling by More in Common for The Economist found that energy bills are the single most important measure voters will use to decide whether to re-elect Labour.
Same-sex marriage became law in England and Wales in 2013. A record 7,800 same-sex weddings were held in England and Wales in 2022; that year, one in every 31 weddings was between same-sex people. Women accounted for 58% of same-sex marriages between 2014 and 2022, and 68% of same-sex divorces between 2015 and 2023. In London and Manchester, most same-sex weddings join men; the London borough of Westminster hosts more gay men's weddings than any other local authority. Outside big cities, the majority of same-sex weddings are between women (in Devon in 2022: 137 women's marriages versus 46 men's). Average ages at marriage: opposite-sex couples unite a 35-year-old man and a 33-year-old woman; women marry women at 34; men marry men at 38. Three-quarters of Britons now support gay marriage.
Britain's "tilt" to the Indo-Pacific was first mooted in 2021 under the Conservative government, aimed at deepening defence, trade and foreign-policy partnerships in Australasia, partly in response to China's assertiveness. Labour initially dismissed the tilt as boosterish folly but stayed the course after taking office. In July 2025 John Healey and David Lammy signed a 50-year bilateral treaty with Australia cementing the AUKUS arrangement, estimated to contribute £20bn in exports over 25 years and support 21,000 British jobs. Britain is also building a next-generation warplane with Japan.
Britain has long been a European outlier on residential lettings: landlords were lightly regulated and tenants more exposed to rent increases and repossession. On May 1st 2026 a rule that allowed many English landlords to reclaim their properties without giving a reason ("no-fault eviction") was abolished, and tenants gained the right to appeal against rent rises. The Netherlands made indefinite tenancies the default in 2024. Ireland is severely restricting the ability of large landlords to recover their properties. With the partial exception of Scotland, Britain has avoided the extreme rent caps pursued in France and Germany.
Britain's rules on hiring and firing are among the loosest in the OECD. Deliveroo, Britain's best-known delivery firm (being bought by DoorDash for £2.9bn), has become a symbol of this flexible labour market. In 2023 Britain's Supreme Court accepted that Deliveroo riders are "self-employed suppliers" rather than workers, partly because their contracts contained a "virtually unfettered" substitution clause. The Employment Rights Act, which cleared Parliament on December 18th 2025, shifts Britain to the middle of the OECD pack on trade-union law. It makes it far easier for unions to recruit, bargain and strike, moving the law on critical parts of union activity to roughly where it stood in the late 1970s.
The Home Office has observed that migrants expect a job in the app economy; delivery firms have been cajoled into using facial-recognition technology to ensure riders have the right to work. Under a new law, delivery firms will be responsible for the immigration status of subcontractors. A government consultation due in autumn 2025 will review the legal definition of workers; if the tests are tweaked, the Supreme Court ruling on which Deliveroo relies could be unwound.
Britain's life-sciences industry is worth £108bn ($145bn) and employs more than 300,000 people. Britain's share of global pharmaceutical R&D is in decline. The number of phase III clinical trials plunged by two-fifths between 2017 and 2021, dropping the country from fourth to tenth in the world; by mid-2025 it stood at eighth, behind countries like Spain (third) and Italy (seventh). Since 2010 Britain has fallen from the fifth-largest exporter of pharma products to ninth. Britain's academics account for more than a tenth of global citations in medical science, surpassed only by America and China.
To be deemed cost-effective by NICE, a drug must provide an additional quality-adjusted life year (QALY) for no more than £30,000, yet the Treasury pegs the value of a QALY at £70,000, fuelling accusations that the regulator undervalues new drugs. The Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry estimates that keeping current NHS rebate rates would result in £11bn of lost R&D by 2033. America's trade deal with Britain requires it to "improve the overall environment for pharmaceutical companies" in exchange for preferential tariff rates.
Britain is home to four of the world's top universities. Cambridge sits at the centre of the densest innovation cluster on Earth, according to the World Intellectual Property Organisation. This century Britain has created some 178 unicorns—more than France, Germany and Switzerland combined. Its venture-capital market is Europe's largest.
Rolls-Royce is a leading producer of jet engines for wide-bodied planes and is developing "UltraFan" geared turbofan technology to re-enter the market for single-aisle aircraft. Space Forge, a Welsh startup backed by NATO's innovation fund, hopes to become the first company to manufacture semiconductors in orbit. In 2010 two Manchester scientists won the Nobel prize in chemistry for discovering graphene.
Wayve, an autonomous-driving startup headquartered in King's Cross, raised over $1bn from Japan's SoftBank and others—the largest-ever investment in a European AI firm. From its headquarters 15 autonomous Ford Mustangs are venturing onto London's roads. Palantir employs a quarter of its staff in London. Revolut is one of the world's largest challenger banks. Too often, however, Britain serves as a launchpad for world-class companies that are then bought or leave.
Britain is a global gaming superpower. Strip out the Cayman Islands (a British overseas territory) and it is the third-largest exporter of video games, behind only America and Japan. The industry generates annual revenues of £4.3bn ($5.8bn)—more than the film (excluding streaming) and music industries combined (£3.4bn). Exports grew from $3.4bn in 2016 to $8.8bn in 2021. The sector employs about 30,000 developers, artists and composers. Gross value-added per video-games worker is almost double the British average.
In the early 1980s cheap, programmable home computers gave rise to a generation of bedroom coders, in contrast with the console-driven markets of America and Japan. Abertay University in Dundee launched the world's first computer-game degree in 1997. Almost four-fifths of video-game developers work outside London; hubs have emerged in Dundee, Leamington Spa, Slough and Teesside.
The "Grand Theft Auto" series began in Dundee and is still made by a team in Edinburgh. "Tomb Raider", a billion-dollar franchise with its own Netflix series, began as a sketch in Derby. Games Workshop, the creator of "Warhammer", became a FTSE 100 company in 2024 partly through licensing its intellectual property to gaming developers. Tripledot Studios, a London-based mobile-games firm, bought the mobile-games arm of AppLovin, an American tech firm, for $800m. Smaller British studios are often snapped up by foreign buyers: Tencent bought Sumo Group, a developer based in Sheffield, in 2022.
Human papillomavirus (HPV) causes about 3,500 cases of cervical cancer in Britain each year and 900 deaths. The HPV vaccine is given to children aged 12 to 15. Take-up in girls was around 90% in the years up to 2017 but has since fallen to 74%. In boys, who have been offered the jab for five years, the rate has fallen to 69%. In some areas, such as Luton and Leicester, fewer than half of children are vaccinated. A study from Scotland in 2024 found no cases of cancer-causing HPV among women who received the vaccine a decade earlier. The NHS wants to eliminate cervical cancer by 2040 but says it needs to achieve a 90% vaccination rate by 2030.
The Knowledge of London is a 160-year-old test required of all black-cab drivers, involving memorisation of more than 6,000 streets and points of interest within a six-mile radius of Charing Cross, plus the most direct route between them. The guild itself is 371 years old. The number of black-cab drivers has fallen from about 25,000 in 2017 to barely 16,500, owing to ride-hailing competition and tighter environmental standards. Yet 1,166 people were studying the Knowledge in 2025, up from a low of 759 in 2022. The new cohort is more ethnically mixed than existing drivers and many are former Uber drivers seeking higher wages.
Around 1900 Britain built 60% of all the world's ships; by 2025 the figure was less than 1%. After decades of atrophy, naval shipyards are experiencing a revival. The Royal Navy's surface fleet is expected to grow to 24 frigates and destroyers by the mid-2030s. In August 2025 Norway signed a £10bn contract with BAE Systems for five Type 26 frigates -- Britain's highest-value warship export deal ever. The government's 2022 shipbuilding strategy includes an order pipeline of 150 naval and civilian ships over 30 years. Only two firms still make warships: BAE Systems and Babcock. On current spending trends the pipeline could face a £5.9bn funding shortfall, warns the National Audit Office.
Only 19% of Britons consider themselves religious, according to a YouGov poll published in 2022, but nearly 30% describe themselves as spiritual. Mainstream churches—Anglicans, Catholics and Methodists—have seen a 21% decline in adherence over the past decade, leaving them with a combined total of 2.7m members. Eastern Orthodox Christians number around 430,000, a 5% rise over the same period, boosted by immigration from Cyprus, Russia and, most recently, Romania. Pentecostalism is the other notable patch of Christian expansion, attracting many Africans and Brazilians. The (mainly Greek) Orthodox Archdiocese in London runs a conversion course that has led to more than 200 baptisms.
In olden times Britain was known for its sacred routes. Canterbury Cathedral became a popular pilgrimage destination after Henry II prompted the murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket. The Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham ranked among the medieval world's four most-visited holy sites, alongside Rome, Jerusalem and Santiago de Compostela. Henry VIII outlawed pilgrimages in 1538 as part of his suppression of Catholicism. The tradition is now enjoying a revival. The British Pilgrimage Trust, a charity created in 2014, promotes 250 paths across the country. Canterbury Cathedral has hired a pilgrim officer to welcome walkers. A YouGov survey found that one in five British adults is considering making a pilgrimage, and that over 2m have already done so in Britain.
Britain's stockpile of nuclear waste is among the highest in western Europe, second only to France. By the end of this century it will have almost enough to fill Wembley Stadium. The most hazardous waste is largely stored in ponds and containers at Sellafield, a decrepit facility in Cumbria, which is supposed to offer only a temporary solution. A cross-party report concluded that the site's crumbling infrastructure poses an "intolerable risk" to safety. The government is seeking a community willing to host a geological disposal facility (GDF)—a kilometre-deep mausoleum—but the Treasury has declared lifetime costs of £20bn–53bn unaffordable. Finland has already built its GDF; construction has begun in Sweden and France. Two councils in Cumbria remain in the running for Britain's site.
Annual rates of return on ten-year British bonds (gilt yields) reached 4.8% in September 2025, the highest across the G7. By late March 2026, amid the Iran war energy crisis, Britain had to pay nearly 5% to borrow for ten years—about half a percentage point more than during the height of the panic under Liz Truss in 2022. Debt-interest payments have more than doubled in five years; in 2025–26 the Treasury will spend £111bn ($150bn) on interest—more than the education budget. The Bank of England has held interest rates at 4%, double the level set by the European Central Bank. Unlike the Fed and the ECB, which are running down their bond stocks by not replacing bonds as they mature, the Bank of England is actively selling off the gilts it bought between 2009 and 2021. Domestic pension funds have shrunk their gilt holdings as final-salary schemes wind down, leaving fickle overseas investors as the biggest owners of gilts. The Office for Budget Responsibility estimates that the decline in pension-fund ownership will eventually add about 0.8 percentage points to gilt yields.
From October 2025 Britain introduced the most sweeping junk-food marketing ban in the world. Foods and drinks designated as high in saturated fat, salt and sugar (HFSS) can no longer be advertised online or before 9pm on television. Big supermarkets are banned from selling HFSS products using volume-based promotions such as "buy one, get one free". Since 2022 big supermarkets have also been banned from placing HFSS items near entrances, checkouts and aisle-ends. More than 20% of food-and-drink purchases in British supermarkets are HFSS; online, 60% of food-and-drink ads had been for HFSS items. Data from three big supermarket chains showed the share of packaged HFSS products in total sales fell by about 7% after the 2022 placement restrictions, though freshly baked goods (exempt because they are not pre-packaged) filled the gaps.
The National Travel Survey shows that people in England are travelling less far than two decades ago, reversing a trend of growing distances that David Metz of University College London traces back two centuries to the introduction of passenger railways. The average man travelled 8,245 miles in 2002 and 6,549 miles in 2024—a drop of 21%. Almost the entire fall was caused by a decline in driving. Women travelled 5,633 miles in 2024, 9% fewer than in 2002. Men's travel for work has fallen by 45%, as the tax authorities cracked down on company cars, video-conferencing replaced routine sales trips, and employers nudged workers onto public transport. In 2024 Britain's motorways contained fewer cars on any weekday from Monday to Thursday than on Saturdays or Sundays. The average new car is driven 8,460 miles a year, down from 9,648 in 2015, according to the RAC Foundation.
Beneath a hill in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, lie minerals that developers say may be worth more than $20bn, mostly gold and silver but also antimony, bismuth, cobalt, copper and tellurium. Adrian Boyce, a geochemist at the University of Glasgow, calls Curraghinalt "far and away the biggest" gold deposit ever found in the United Kingdom. One vein, V75, contains 234 grams of gold per tonne of rock; typically as little as a gram or half a gram a tonne is considered worth the effort. The site sits in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.
Dalradian Gold, an American-owned company whose ultimate owner is Orion Resource Partners, has spent £250m on the project since starting exploratory work in 2009. Planning permission was expected to take two years but had not been granted after eight, stalled by environmental opposition, disquiet from the local council and bungling by Northern Ireland's devolved government. A plan to use cyanide for processing gold was ditched after a ferocious backlash.
The British government's critical-minerals strategy, published in 2022, recognises the economy's reliance on minerals typically mined in far-off lands and promises to support domestic production. But in Northern Ireland the central government has no power to act: mining is devolved to the power-sharing government in Belfast, which has in turn devolved planning powers to local councils. The fragmentation of authority has created multiple points of failure and a structural impediment to rapid decision-making.
Most European countries issue identity cards linked to digital-identity systems. Britain is an outlier: it has no universal digital-identity system, though it succeeded in introducing identity cards during the first and second world wars. In September 2025 Keir Starmer announced that by the summer of 2029 everyone must use digital identity to prove they are allowed to work. The government said the police would not demand to see digital IDs. Existing government applications—the NHS app, a "government gateway" for tax returns, e-visas for migrants, a system called One Login—look like components of a European-style system, but the government has not decided how much the state should do itself versus relying on private digital-verification-services firms.
The household-saving rate—the share of disposable income not spent on consumption—was 10.7% in the second quarter of 2025, still lower than the euro zone's rate (15.4%) and Britain's covid-19 peak, but well above the 2000–19 average of 7.3%. Only a fifth of respondents to a Bank of England survey cited higher interest rates as the main reason for saving more; 37% pointed to a desire to rebuild wealth after the inflation surge and to rising risk-aversion following Brexit, the pandemic and the subsequent bout of inflation. The government estimates that more than 40% of adults are not saving enough for an "adequate" pension.
The Online Safety Act was passed in 2023 and has been slowly phased in. It gives platforms a legal duty of care to protect users, especially children: removing illegal content, shielding children from legal-but-harmful material such as posts related to suicide, implementing age verification for pornography, and offering users tools to filter what they see. Ofcom, the regulator, can impose fines of up to 10% of global revenue for non-compliance but in practice has behaved more like a financial regulator, working with companies to nudge them towards compliance. The act was impelled by the case of Molly Russell, a 14-year-old who killed herself in 2017 after viewing thousands of websites and videos relating to self-harm and suicide. Academic Lorna Woods developed the model: forcing the person who controls the space to remove obvious risk factors, as in workplace health and safety. Other countries, from Canada to New Zealand, have drawn on Britain's approach; from December 2025 Australia will ban under-16s from social-media sites. Since July 2025 pornography websites have required age verification; Pornhub says its British traffic is down by 77%. In October 2025 Ofcom fined 4chan £20,000 ($26,000) for failing to produce a risk assessment. Reform UK has called the law "borderline dystopian" and promised to repeal it; Nigel Farage compared Britain to North Korea at a special-committee session on Capitol Hill in September 2025. Critics worry that restricting content could push children towards darker corners of the web via VPNs. Defenders, including Jeffrey Howard of University College London, argue that producing identification to access content online is a reasonable burden, comparable to buying alcohol.
Britain ratified the European Convention on Human Rights in 1951, the first country to do so, promising to uphold 14 rights including freedom from torture and degrading treatment (Article 3) and respect for private and family life (Article 8). The 1998 Human Rights Act enshrined the convention into domestic law. If an asylum claimant exhausts options in British courts, he or she can appeal to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. In practice Strasbourg blocks few deportations: since 1980 the court has overruled Britain in a deportation or extradition case only 13 times. But the ECHR's impact is felt as much in Home Office decision-making as in court outcomes, as officials try to anticipate who might win on appeal. In 2014 a Conservative-led coalition government passed legislation instructing judges to consider specific factors—such as a person's ability to speak English—when deciding whether to remove someone. Successful challenges by foreign offenders due to be expelled fell from 337 in 2012–13 to 92 in 2015–16. In November 2025 Shabana Mahmood announced plans to draft legislation tightening how British courts apply the ECHR, placing more emphasis on the public interest when weighing removal and narrowing the circumstances in which people can make Article 8 "family-life" claims. Reform UK and the Conservatives favour leaving the ECHR altogether.
On November 17th 2025 Shabana Mahmood outlined sweeping changes to Britain's asylum system. The state would drop its legal obligation to support destitute asylum-seekers. Most people who had previously received refugee status for five years and could apply for citizenship soon after would instead be granted asylum for 30 months, renewable but reviewable if their home country became safer; some would have to wait 20 years for citizenship. Polls by Ipsos show more Britons describe immigration as an important national issue than anything else. The public focuses on asylum-seekers, whose applications reached a record 108,000 in 2024; the roughly 40,000 a year crossing the English Channel in dinghies loom larger in people's minds than much bigger groups such as workers and students.
Net migration reached 321,000 in the year to June 2016—the highest figure for at least half a century and a key factor in the Brexit vote. In February 2020 Priti Patel, then home secretary, unveiled a new immigration system treating Europeans like everyone else and lowering salary thresholds for work visas. The Home Office estimated the policy would cut European immigration by 80,000-90,000 a year while migration from the rest of the world would rise by 30,000. European migration fell more sharply than expected, but the number arriving from outside Europe exploded: overall net migration reached 944,000 in the year to March 2023. Only 9% of the public think leaving the EU suppressed immigration; 50% think it boosted it, according to a poll by The Economist and More in Common.
In Britain natives and foreign-born people have almost identical employment rates, and migrant employees earn more. The OECD's PISA education tests show that the children of migrants fare well in Britain; indeed, migrants' children in Britain score higher in both maths and reading than native Danes in Denmark. Britain drew immigration from its current and former colonies: although Commonwealth migrants suffered appalling racism, they clung to the view that they were fully British, and eventually ground almost all white Britons into agreeing.
From 2028 drivers of electric vehicles will be subject to road pricing: three pence per mile for fully electric cars and half that for plug-in hybrids. A driver putting in 8,000 miles a year, as is normal, will pay £240; petrol and diesel vehicles cost their drivers some £480 a year in fuel duty, so electric vehicles remain more attractive. Forecourt taxes raised £24.4bn in 2024-25, but the Office for Budget Responsibility expects revenues to collapse from 0.7% of GDP to just 0.1% by 2050-51 as petrol vehicles disappear. The new scheme fills about a quarter of that shortfall. Drivers will declare their mileage and settle the balance at the end of the year, checked against MOT records, as in New Zealand. Polling by Stonehaven, a consultancy, found 71% of the public think electric-car drivers should pay some tax, with only 14% saying they should pay none.
Around three-quarters of national-newspaper circulation in Britain is controlled by the Daily Mail and General Trust (DMGT), owned by Lord Rothermere, or Rupert Murdoch's News UK. The 170-year-old Telegraph had lacked a permanent owner since its parent company fell into receivership in 2023. RedBird IMI, a joint venture between an American private-equity firm and International Media Investments (with ties to the UAE's ruling family), took temporary ownership but provoked a newsroom revolt. The Conservative government passed a law barring foreign governments from owning British newspapers, in effect forcing RedBird IMI to sell. In November 2025 Lord Rothermere bid £500m for the paper, but Axel Springer, a German media group, outbid him with an all-cash offer of £575m. The Telegraph has 1.1m subscribers. Chris Evans is its editor-in-chief.
According to Ofcom, 71% of Britons now get their news online, compared with only 22% in print. In the digital world, a combined Daily Mail and Telegraph would have less than a quarter of the BBC's reach, based on minutes spent online.
Over 1m Africans live in Britain. African migrants have come historically to work as doctors and other professionals, but are increasingly joined by Africans seeking more menial jobs previously dominated by migrants from Asia or eastern Europe. Nigerians were the most common foreign nationals working in British care homes in 2023; tens of thousands of Zimbabweans and Ghanaians have also been recruited for such positions. Children of African migrants perform above the average in exams in England. British-Nigerians are increasingly prominent in public life, including Maro Itoje (England's rugby captain) and Kemi Badenoch (leader of the Conservative Party).
For two centuries London's docks were the "hungry mouth" of the British empire. By 1981 all the docks had shut, leaving a deindustrialised canvas. The London Docklands Development Corporation, created under Margaret Thatcher, allowed builders to bypass normal planning rules; an enterprise zone let businesses pay fewer taxes. The state's main role was to get out of the way. The Big Bang of 1986, which broke the cartel of the London Stock Exchange, drew banks from America, France and Germany to the area. Rupert Murdoch's move to Wapping in the same year broke the print unions.
Canary Wharf, the 130-acre heart of Docklands, was predominantly funded by the private sector. Olympia & York, its main developer, went bust; other investors stepped in, and the state bore little of the loss. The single small area now generates about £40bn in gross value added a year, as much as Birmingham, Britain's second city. Six of Britain's ten tallest buildings sit in Docklands, of which five were completed after 2020; four are residential, including the 75-storey Landmark Pinnacle, Britain's tallest residential building. About 3,500 people live on the Canary Wharf estate, a number likely to double in the next few years. Visits to Canary Wharf have risen by 50% since the pandemic to about 75m a year. London City Airport, a few stops east on the Docklands Light Railway, is the only one of London's airports planned and paid for by the private sector alone.
An index by the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University ranked British administrators sixth out of 120 countries in 2024. Yet backlogs in hospital care, criminal trials and driving tests have become entrenched since the covid-19 pandemic. A botched procurement process gave the army an armoured vehicle that was late, expensive and makes soldiers vomit. Margaret Thatcher created "executive agencies" to run services like passports and patents, reckoning that a new cadre of business-minded managers would be more efficient than the Whitehall old guard. New Labour under Tony Blair saw decentralisation as synonymous with modernisation. David Cameron came to power in 2010 with ideas of localism and volunteerism. Across parties there is now a consensus that the prime minister's ability to direct activity across the state has become too weak—a curious agreement between Labour, the Conservatives and Reform UK.
Car production fell to 717,000 in 2025, the fewest since 1956—down by well over half since 2016, when Britons voted to leave the European Union. Car production has fallen in most other European countries too, but nowhere near as dramatically. Since 2016 car plants in Swindon, Luton and Bridgend have all closed. High electricity prices, rising labour costs and growing Chinese competition are contributory factors, but carmakers also point to post-Brexit uncertainty for damaging this strongly export-oriented industry: EU countries take over half of British car exports.
From January 1st 2027 EVs will qualify for tariff-free cross-Channel trade only if 55% of their value originates in the EU or Britain, and 70% of their battery pack must also originate in Europe. Because most batteries are made in Asia, that target seems near-impossible to meet. Unless both sides agree to extend a derogation, the outcome will be 10% tariffs on EVs traded over the Channel.
Cars account for 12.6% of all British manufactured-goods exports. The EU is discussing a "Made in Europe" strategy; Rachel Reeves has argued that any such strategy should include Britain, but in Brussels and national capitals many retort that for them Europe means the EU 27 alone. A customs union with the EU would resolve the rules-of-origin problem but would mean handing trade policy to the EU and scrapping recent deals with Australia, India and New Zealand. An alternative—joining the Pan-Euro-Mediterranean (PEM) convention—has so far attracted little EU interest.
Britain's class-based voting pattern, which dominated politics for most of the 20th century, broke down in the 2010s as cultural issues rose in salience after the 2016 Brexit referendum. Age and education replaced class as the key demographic dividers. A survey of 8,921 Britons by More in Common in December 2025 found that politics is now divided along two dimensions: the young, the higher-educated, women and ethnic minorities lean left; older, less-educated, whiter and more male voters lean right. Within these blocs, voters are divided by affluence: Labour and the Conservatives lead among those who say they are "very comfortable"; the Greens and Reform UK win two-thirds of voters who often go without food or heating.
Between 2007 and 2024 the median salaries of postgraduates declined by 17% in real terms and those of undergraduates by 12%; non-graduates' salaries declined by only 3%. Unemployment among 18- to 24-year-olds is at its highest level since 2015 (barring a moment during lockdown in 2020). Economists have found that lifetime levels of GDP growth have a significant impact on individuals' political outlook: today's 75-year-olds witnessed average annual GDP growth of 2.4% in their lifetimes, compared with 1.4% for a 20-year-old.
No other country matches Britain's rich heritage of hedgerows, some dating to the Bronze Age—one in West Penwith may be over 4,000 years old. Most were planted in the 18th century, when landowners enclosed the commons. At their peak, Britain had around 1m kilometres of hedgerows, but since the 1950s over half have vanished, many removed to make bigger fields for crops. In 1997 removing them without permission became a criminal offence.
Since leaving the EU, the government has pledged to create or restore 72,500km of hedgerows in England over the next 25 years—enough to extend the network by almost a fifth. Three-quarters of England's farming budget, £1.8bn, is now paid to farmers for delivering "public goods"—planting wildflowers, improving soil health and tending hedges—through the Environmental Land Management (ELM) scheme, up from £800m two years earlier. Farmers were paid £70m for hedgerow tending in 2024, up from £26m the year before. Since 2023 farmers have planted some 1,800km of new hedgerow and committed to plant 9,000km more over the next three years. A further 100,000km of existing hedgerow is covered under maintenance schemes.
Hedgerows store an average of 40 tonnes more carbon per hectare than grassland, according to a 2025 study by the University of Leeds. An ecologist, Rob Wolton, counted over 2,000 different species in a single 90-metre hedge on his farm over two years.
In the summer of 2025, youth unemployment in Britain overtook the EU average for the first time this millennium. The rate climbed from 9% in 2022 to 16% by early 2026. Nearly 1m people aged 16–24 are not in education, employment or training (NEETs). Over 40% of employed 16- to 24-year-olds work in retail and hospitality, against just 16% of over-25s, making them especially exposed to downturns in consumer spending.
The national minimum wage for a 21-year-old reached £12.71 an hour in April 2026, up from £8.20 in April 2020. A 21-year-old working three days a week on minimum wage costs an employer £17,500 a year in April 2026, over £4,000 more than in April 2020 in real terms. Nearly three-fifths of NEETs are economically inactive rather than seeking work. The share of inactive NEETs citing ill health has nearly tripled over the past two decades; almost half now report a disability, with mental-health conditions and learning difficulties to the fore. Over half of apprenticeship starts are now by people aged above 25. Pat McFadden, the work and pensions secretary, announced plans in March 2026 to pay employers a £3,000 bung to hire young people who have been on benefits for six months.
Among rich countries Britain appears particularly vulnerable to industrial-scale illegal dumping. England's worst-affected area, according to the Environment Agency (EA), is Cumbria and Lancashire, where some 2.3m tonnes has been dumped over the past decade—and only a quarter of waste crime is reported, the EA estimates. In the ten years to 2024 the average size of illegal waste sites investigated by the EA increased by 50%. In 2025 the EA discovered 749 new illegal waste sites, nearly double what it found in 2024.
Landfill tax, charged on every tonne of waste disposed of legally, has risen (inflation-adjusted) from £14.18 per tonne in 1996 to £126.15—one of the highest rates in Europe. Britain now recycles around 45% of its household waste, up from 5% in 1996, but the high tax makes illegal dumps exceedingly profitable. One study found that 60% of businesses offering waste handling appear to be unlicensed. The maximum prison sentence for serious environmental crimes in Britain is five years, compared with ten in France and Germany.
A House of Lords committee heard in 2026 that waste crime has been overtaken by organised-crime groups otherwise involved in dealing drugs, firearms and humans.
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