Introduction: England Didn’t Just “End Up” Here
Look around England today and it is hard to shake the feeling that something fundamental has gone wrong. People working full‑time can’t afford a decent home. Food banks exist in almost every town. The NHS runs “corridor care” as if that is normal, and public services feel permanently on the brink. None of this happened by accident.
This isn’t about hating migrants, or pretending the 1970s were perfect. It is about something sharper: how the British establishment – politicians, senior civil servants, big finance and big business – has treated England like a spreadsheet, not a country. In this post, the focus is on how that mindset has brought England to its knees, and why ordinary English people and many migrants are both caught in the same failing model.
England Then and Now: From Security to Permanent Stress
In the decades after 1945, most English families saw life improve. Council houses gave millions a decent, stable home. The NHS expanded. Secure work in industry and public services underpinned communities. Whatever the problems, there was a sense that the country was, broadly, being built up for ordinary people.
Fast‑forward to today and the foundations feel cracked. Instead of security, there is permanent stress:
- Housing is so expensive that even dual‑income households struggle to buy, and social housing waiting lists stretch for years.
- Work has become more insecure, with too many low‑paid, low‑power jobs and fewer ladders into skilled, well‑paid trades.
- Public services are stretched to breaking point, from GPs and hospitals to courts and local councils.
The key point: this isn’t just “the modern world”. It flows from a series of decisions about housing, industry, services and migration taken from the late 1970s onwards – decisions that prioritised short‑term numbers over long‑term stability.
From Citizens to “Units”: The Spreadsheet Mindset
One of the most damaging shifts has been how the establishment talks and thinks about people. English men and women stopped being seen as citizens to build for and became “taxpayers”, “consumers” and “labour market participants”. At that point, it becomes easy to manage people like data.
Instead of asking, “Can a family on an average wage build a decent life here?”, the question became, “Are the macro indicators okay?” If GDP is up a bit, if employment is high on paper, if markets are happy, the system is declared a success – even when:
- Young couples can’t get a mortgage without crippling debt.
- Parents choose between heating and food.
- Food banks are normalised.
- The NHS has record waiting lists and patients on trolleys in corridors.
The spreadsheet says “growth”; the street says “decline”. When those two realities clash, the British establishment has consistently trusted the spreadsheet and dismissed the street.
Cheap Labour Instead of Decent Wages and Training
Nowhere is the establishment’s mindset clearer than in how it has used migration and cheap labour. Again, this is not about blaming migrants. It is about who set the rules.
Rather than:
- training and paying enough English workers to staff the NHS, care, construction, hospitality and other vital sectors,
- investing in apprenticeships and long‑term careers,
successive governments and many employers chose the easy route:
- keep wages and conditions low,
- rely on a constant flow of workers from abroad to fill shortages,
- claim “skills gaps” instead of admitting pay and conditions were the real problem.
The result?
- English workers in many sectors see pay, status and security eroded.
- Migrant workers are pulled into tough, often under‑paid jobs, treated as disposable and blamed for problems they did not cause.
- Source countries lose professionals they trained – especially doctors, nurses and carers – leaving their own people worse off.
Cheap labour became a policy, not an accident. It inflated the numbers politicians liked to quote, while hollowing out respect for work and the people who do it here.
Housing: Selling Off the Safety Net
If you want one symbol of how the establishment has neglected England, look at housing. In the 1970s, council housing provided a safety net and a respectable option, not a last resort. Working families could realistically expect a stable, affordable home through the local authority.
Then came a double move:
- massive sell‑offs of council homes under policies like Right to Buy,
- a collapse in building new social housing to replace what was sold.
At the same time, planning and finance rules encouraged housing to become an investment asset as much as a place to live. House prices and rents raced ahead of wages. The population kept rising, but the social housing stock shrank and private rent took over.
Today’s reality flows directly from those choices:
- long waiting lists and strict criteria for council housing,
- younger generations locked out of ownership or forced into insecure, expensive rentals,
- communities reshaped by speculation rather than need.
Immigration has added demand, especially in some areas, but the fundamental damage was done by decisions made in Westminster and Whitehall: selling off the safety net and refusing to rebuild it.
Public Services: Running Everything “Hot” Until It Breaks
The same pattern shows up in the NHS, schools, transport and local services. Instead of building spare capacity into vital systems, the establishment treated them like cost centres to squeeze.
- Hospital bed numbers were cut over decades, while demand grew.
- Staff training places were capped and pay repeatedly squeezed, then “shortages” were patched with overseas recruitment and agency workers.
- Local councils saw budgets slashed even as they were expected to cope with rising social care, homelessness and complex needs.
- Courts, prisons and police were run lean, leaving backlogs and fraying order.
Running everything “hot” looks efficient on a spreadsheet – until a shock hits (financial crisis, pandemic, cost‑of‑living spike) and there is no resilience left. That is how you end up with:
- record NHS waiting lists and corridor care,
- crumbling school buildings,
- local authorities on the brink of bankruptcy,
- a sense that the state is always reacting, never in control.
Again, ordinary English people and many migrants share the experience: you queue, you wait, you get told “resources are limited”, while the same class of decision‑makers who designed this system stays insulated.
How the Establishment Uses Division as a Shield
When systems underfunded and mismanaged for years start to fail, the anger has to go somewhere. Instead of facing that anger honestly, the establishment has often steered it sideways.
The script is familiar:
- If housing is tight, look at “them”, not at the millions of council homes sold and not replaced.
- If GPs are overwhelmed, look at “them”, not at the refusal to train enough doctors or keep experienced ones.
- If wages are low, look at “them”, not at the employers and policies that rely on an oversupply of labour.
By turning English against migrant, region against region, public‑sector worker against private‑sector worker, the people at the top protect the one thing they really care about: the underlying model. The message is subtle but constant: don’t look up, look sideways.
Your own experience of living and working abroad for years matters here. You know what it is to be “the foreigner”, and that ordinary migrants are usually just trying to survive and support families, just like anyone else. Recognising that lets you do something the establishment fears: criticise the model without swallowing the bait of hating your neighbours.
Conclusion: Re‑Humanising England – Where Anger Should Point
England has not been ruined by its people, or by the fact that different kinds of people now live here. It has been weakened by a British establishment that, for decades, treated the country like a balance sheet. It sold off the housing safety net, ran public services on fumes, leaned on cheap labour rather than training its own, and then told everyone that “the numbers prove it’s fine”.
If anything is going to change, the starting point is to aim anger in the right direction:
- at the choices to under‑build, under‑train and under‑fund,
- at the habit of using migrants as plugs in the system and then blaming them when it creaks,
- at the refusal to listen when ordinary English people say, “We can’t live like this any more.”
The task now is to re‑humanise England: to insist that policy starts from real lives, not spreadsheets; that locals and migrants are treated as people, not fodder; and that the country is run for those who live in it, not just for those who manage it.
Use your platform to make that distinction clear. Invite your readers to question the model, not each other. If enough people do that – calmly, firmly, and without turning on their neighbours – the establishment’s favourite trick stops working, and the conversation can finally move to what England could be if it were run with care and understanding, not just numbers.
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