Is Britain really broken?

Britain's reputation for decline has taken on a life of its own online. But how much of it is real — and what would it actually take to fix?

Sam Dumitriu, head of policy at Britain Remade, joins CapX editor Marc Sidwell for a forensic tour through the structural problems dragging on the British economy — and some surprisingly tractable solutions. The broken Britain narrative, he argues, isn't simply noise: there are genuine, self-inflicted wounds here, and they all tend to lead back to the same place.

The planning system runs like a thread through almost every conversation about British decline, and this one is no exception. Energy bills are high in part because building the infrastructure to bring them down has been made absurdly expensive. Housing is unaffordable thanks to layers of regulation.

But perhaps the sharpest insight concerns supermarkets. Since 1996, a Town Centre First policy has nudged Britain's retail sector away from large out-of-town stores towards cramped urban formats — smaller, less productive, and more expensive to run. The result, backed by rigorous comparative evidence from Scotland, is lower productivity, higher prices, and a planning system that lets established supermarkets block cheaper rivals from opening at all.

The overarching diagnosis is uncomfortable: politicians reach for sticking plasters precisely when structural reform is needed most, and the reforms that would work tend to require a political courage that has been conspicuously absent.

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