The State of Britain

My fellow Anthropists, colleagues and friends, it's both a pleasure and a privilege to speak with you today at Anthropy, surrounded by visionaries and leaders dedicated to reshaping Britain, and our world, for the better. 

And there’s no better place for us to gather than here in Cornwall at the Eden Project, a powerful symbol of environmental optimism and innovation, which opened this month 24 years ago, at a time when Britons looked optimistically to the future, a lot more than they do today, and when nostalgia for the past was lower.

John asked me to open by reflecting briefly on how the UK is performing today, on its own terms and also in comparison with the rest of the world. This isn’t always an especially positive ask! But perhaps that’s why a gathering like Anthropy is so vital.

The ongoing challenge we face is “the loss of the future.” It’s not unique to Britain - it’s visible across the West – but it is stark. At the beginning of the century only 12% expected their children to end up poorer than them. That figure has now risen to 45% - that is a huge psychological shift.

Briefly on Britain’s performance – the report card has “must try harder” written all over it. This is not just in our quest for economic growth, but also many of the societal challenges on which future growth will be built.

Ours is becoming a country of contrasts, like the US:

• We generate a share of global innovation far greater than would be expected considering our population, yet we have an underpowered corporate sector with some of our best firms leaving.
• We are home for some of the richest, healthiest people in the world; yet our poorest people rank below those in countries such as Slovakia, whom we might once have considered our economic inferiors. We have become a country of the haves, the have nots and “have yachts.” The beautiful town where I am staying has been turned into expensive holiday lets, while the original inhabitants live on council estate over the hill away from the sea.
• Despite a world leading health and life sciences sector, far too many are ailing and our progress on treating health conditions continues to lag other wealthy nations. The NHS is broken according to the government.
• And now with a new inhabitant of the White House, and an inhabitant of the Kremlin who seems keen on restoring the USSR borders to Russia, we are discovering that freedom is not free. As well as all our previous problems we now need to consider defence seriously. Concern about it has shot up in the last month in our monthly Issues Index.

With all our societal and demographic changes talking of the “average Briton” becomes increasingly untenable as we risk becoming a mosaic of vastly different, and self-contained, life experiences.

A key question therefore is how did we get here, from a more optimistic country at the time the Eden Project opened?

As an historian by training, my first instinct is to think about developments over the longer term, or – as I am now CEO of a French-headquartered company – the longue durée.

Looking at the world today, the most striking thing about the world today is that it is in chaos – but that this is to be expected, because as the founder of Ipsos, Didier Truchot puts it “revolution is always chaotic.” Whether it really is more chaotic than the late 1960s or early 1970s, or even 1980s is debatable, but certainly it feels like the world of the last thirty or so years has fundamentally changed. At Ipsos we’ve long talked about the 2020s being a restless or twitchy decade, but a 50-year view is that the changes we see in the world today are not just restless, but revolutionary.

That’s an extremely powerful sentiment. Data from our Ipsos Global Trends series shows that three quarters of Britons think the world today is changing too fast. People are uncomfortable, and there will be no “return to normal” – because much of what was normal over the last half-century has gone. A rules based international order, strong welfare states, rising living standards, are all things of the past.

The democratic super-cycle of 2024 is another evidence point: the key message from over 1.6 billion ballots was that incumbency has become a curse. The new Labour government is rapidly discovering this. In 2024 almost all governments around the world lost ground, and in many countries the voters threw their lot in with populists of left or right promising radical change and disruption.

We also see it in the macro forces reshaping the world we are all living in. Our society is ageing, extreme weather events are on the rise from climate change, and technology is imposing rapid change on our societies.

Politically, cumulative pressures on budgets mean governments stepping back – from climate action, but also from welfare, and cutting spending. We saw this most recently in the sight of a Labour government tightening welfare payments and cutting international development aid, primarily to fund defence spending.

And at a social level, Britons are becoming a truly 21st-century population, with 21st century needs. More diverse, with greater value assigned to mental health, we are also in some senses a post-literate society, as we shift from text to video and become chronically online: Data from our Ipsos Iris platform tells us that 15-24 year old Britons spend an average of 122 hours and 57 minutes on social media a month – that’s just over 5 solid days, or an entire working week. Our young are now lonelier and more stressed than we were at their age, and nearly one million are not working or in education.

These forces are creating a new set of needs that the public have of business, charities, and government. And to succeed, these must be met with new models. Applying the thinking of the late twentieth century – or even the early twenty-first century – risks framing solutions around an outdated image of a twentieth century populace.

This risks further alienation of politicians and business leaders from the public they seek to serve already, three quarters feel that traditional parties and politicians don’t care about people like them. This opens the way for political and economic entrepreneurs to disrupt the democratic rules and market-based system that has been built over the post-war era, and of which Ipsos and many of us here have long been beneficiaries. Our politics is now so volatile, anything could happen in 2029. Do not mock Reform. Nigel Farage could be our Prime Minister – it is certainly possible.

If this sounds stark – it is because it is stark. The world has been relatively kind to us over the past few decades – but in this new era that room for error has been eliminated.

But – and here is the optimism I promised you all - this is freeing for those willing to grasp the opportunities.

• Public trust, and trust in many professions, is on the rise. In what I am sure is good news for many in the room, our Veracity Index tells us that trust in business leaders rose by six points last year. And trust in the average person – social trust - is up nine points.
• We remain hopeful about our own life chances: while just a fifth of Britons are optimistic for the world, over six in ten feel positive about themselves and their family.
• The rapid pace of scientific innovation continues to produce solutions to problems that were previously intractable – seven in ten say we need modern technology to solve today’s issues.

This can be hard to say in a country as nostalgic as Britain: over six in ten say they would like the UK to be the way it used to be, the highest score in 30 years. But now is the time for future-facing mindsets and solutions that can shape what we look like as a society.

If we can, together, agree what those new modern solutions are, then we might be successful in our collective pursuit of growth, productivity, environmental and societal balance, international harmony, and well-being.

This is precisely why gatherings like Anthropy are invaluable. We know many of the solutions to our problems: we need to invest in infrastructure, in our energy network, in transport systems, in affordable housing, and in skills. The challenge is that to succeed in the changes we know we need; everyone will need to make some compromises. Many of you here each have a scheme or idea you are promoting, to improve Britain. Many of you want other people to do what you want. But in the end for Britain to succeed, we will all need to accept compromises. Democracy never gives everyone exactly what they want – compromises are part and parcel of it – but even in today’s world, most people still believe in it – as Churchill said – it is “the worst system, except for all the others”.

Finally, to change Britain we need enthusiasts – there are thousands of you here today: by harnessing innovation, fostering inclusivity, championing diplomacy, and upholding truth, we can gradually redefine Britain – not only what it means to be a British citizen, but also our role on the global stage. I’m hopeful that over the next few days we will develop some of those ideas.

Thank you.

Ben Page is CEO of Ipsos and he made this speech at Anthropy in March 2025