Britain in 2026 cannot be said to be in ‘crisis.’ A crisis is a time of intense challenges that frequently provoke notable change, often followed by a period of respite. Britain, arguably, has spent the last twenty years in serious stagnation. If that is a crisis, then it’s one that the country is now familiar with. From the economy to its political leadership, to the presence — or rather absence — of new ideas, Britain has been at a near standstill for at least two decades. Everything that is said to be in a state of crisis — our cost-of-living, healthcare, productivity, wages, education, public services — has been this way since the financial crash of 2008.
What we’re seeing, therefore, isn’t so much a crisis but the new normal. In this ongoing state of managed decline, a lack of ideas is largely to blame. Ideas and visionaries.
Fukuyama’s Prophecy
When the Cold War ended Liberal academic Francis Fukuyama claimed we were at the end of history. The battle of ideas was apparently over. Gone were the visionaries, the great ideologues and orators of the previous century. This was the age of the technocrats. And although Fukuyama was wrong, and has since admitted so, he was also right, because in the last 35 years, Britain has seen no new ideas enter the fold. A series of increasingly drab and bland technocrats have presided over this nation’s decline. Sure, this period has been punctuated by splashes of populism, which is currently gripping Europe, but these experiments haven’t changed the paradigm. No fundamentally new ideas have entered the political discourse.
At this point, it’s useful to consult history. In the 1970s, Britain felt exhausted. Under Harold Wilson, Edward Heath and James Callaghan, the post-war Keynesian model buckled under global pressures. The 1970s were a decade of simultaneous inflation and stagnation. We had the three-day week, two elections in 1974, recession, spiralling prices, the humiliation of the IMF crisis and the infamous Winter of Discontent. By the end of the decade, it was clear that the post-war economic consensus (demand management, corporatism, state-led industry) was incompatible with an increasingly globalised economy.
Britain needed a new idea. Keynesianism, the idea that had informed the politics of every post-war prime minister between 1945 and 1979, had lasted roughly thirty years before it failed. Having rebuilt post-war Britain by underwriting the welfare state and helping to sustain full employment, it became intellectually exhausted by the mid-’70s. For three decades, no new ideas had challenged the Keynesian paradigm, yet within five years of its decline becoming undeniable, a new idea did arrive.
Thatcher’s Neoliberalism
Margaret Thatcher did not simply adjust policy paradigms; she offered a worldview. Markets over the state. Monetarism over demand management. Inflation over unemployment. Privatisation over public ownership. The individual over the collective. As a result, trade union power was curtailed and capital liberated. The vision was radical and unapologetic. Thatcherism dispensed with the consensus that we were ‘all in it together.’ Instead, she warned that there would be winners and losers. Liked it or loathed it, Thatcherism was fundamentally a new paradigm. And it worked, at least in political terms. In reshaping the economy, it reshaped electoral politics and, in turn, gave new life to the Labour Party.
As Keynesianism had done previously, Neoliberalism converted the opposition. When Tony Blair came to power in 1997, he did not dismantle Thatcher’s settlement. He adapted it. The ‘Third Way’ was presented as modern and innovative, but it was still neoliberalism, only with a social conscience. Flexible labour markets and light-touch financial regulation remained; redistribution came through tax credits and public service spending. Blair’s ‘third way’ was not an ideological invention, but a political synthesis. He accepted the primacy of markets while softening their edges.
Children of Neoliberalism
Since 1979, Neoliberalism has defined Britain. It has defined us economically, politically and socially. But, just like Keynesianism, Neoliberalism lasted only thirty years before receding into the background.
The 2008 crisis exposed the fragility of deregulated finance and the myth of perfectly self-correcting markets. We had the credit crunch, then recession, then double-dip recession. The ideological edifice cracked. It felt eerily similar to the 1970s. Yet unlike the 1970s, no replacement ideology emerged.
Instead of a new paradigm, Britain reactively and desperately opted for austerity. The problems of neoliberalism’s failure were attempted to be solved with more neoliberalism. Growth remained weak. Regional inequality deepened. Productivity stagnated. There was no more talk of winners and losers. Now there were mainly losers and losers.
Thatcher emerged roughly five years after Keynesianism became visibly incompatible with global reality. Yet nearly two decades after neoliberalism’s failure, Britain is still operating within the same broad framework. The crash revealed that neoliberalism was in many ways just as impractical as Keynesianism, but unlike the latter, neoliberalism remained.
In many ways, Brexit was a reaction to this ideological vacuum. It was a howl from communities who felt abandoned by globalisation. But contrary to the promises made, Brexit did not crystallise into a coherent economic alternative. It may have appealed to nationalist sentiments, but the intellectual argument for Brexit was always a neoliberal one.
Are We Out of Good Ideas?
History warns that ideological vacuums rarely last. When liberal capitalism faltered in the 1920s, it did not produce managerial centrism. It gave rise to extremes: Fascism and Communism. Across Europe, systems strained by economic collapse and mass unemployment generated radical alternatives that rejected the liberal order outright.
Thankfully, today’s Britain is not Weimar Germany. But the pattern of stagnation followed by polarisation is recognisable. People are gasping for alternatives. Populists on the left and right are gaining traction by channelling these grievances. These are not fascists and communists, but they are, like fascism and communism, products of a society searching for alternatives. These radical ends of the political spectrum have reemerged precisely because the centre has nothing new or reassuring to say.
Grand ideologies come and go. And that’s how it should be. The idea that one ideology should preside across all times and contexts is unrealistic, and frankly unnerving. The problem is that in the late 1970s, a new doctrine was waiting in the wings. Today, there’s nothing. Nobody has had a genuinely new idea since 1979. Sure, there is a scattering of socialists, most recently the brief wave of Corbynites, who have adapted a century-old idea to the modern context. But these socialist enthusiasts lack popular support to deliver change.
Britain feels stuck because it is stuck. The old settlement has failed. The new settlement has not yet been articulated. In the meantime, technocrats manage decline, and voters oscillate between frustration and fury.
Economies today are dictated by the markets. And markets demand stability. New ideas are almost certainly condemned to failure from an economic perspective, and perhaps that’s why our politicians have been so timid — bar Liz Truss’ bold attempt, and resounding failure, in 2022. Markets don’t want innovation; they want stability, even if it comes from stable decline.
So maybe Fukuyama was right all along. We are at the end of history, just not the end he envisioned.
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