Why Britain Feels So Bitterly Divided and Why the Explanations Are Wrong

I read a strange syndicated piece this week on one of the big online news portals. It insisted that Britain’s divisions were the fault of an overmighty state. The column was confident, categorical — and almost entirely unsupported by evidence. Perhaps just another item of corporate copy making its way around the networks.

What stands out is not just the weakness of the argument, but the strange selectivity. History is truncated to suit the thesis. Numbers are invoked without source. Cause is confused with correlation. And then, when the factual scaffolding collapses, the conclusion is conjured from ideology: that a smaller state would magically reduce divisions.

This is not analysis. It is mood music. And it tells us more about the crisis of British journalism than about the crisis of British politics.

The truth is that the fractures have deeper roots, and they lie not in abstract debates about state overreach but in the material conditions of everyday life.

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The Missing Numbers

Let’s start with wages. Britain has endured the longest stagnation in real earnings in modern history. The typical worker in 2024 is earning only about £16 more per week, after inflation, than in 2010. That is a lost decade and a half. If the UK had matched wage growth in Germany or the United States, the average worker would now be roughly £3,600 a year better off. That gap is not a quirk—it is lived experience, felt in rents unpaid, cars not replaced, and children’s shoes worn thin.

The numbers on housing are starker still. The median home in England now costs 7.7 times the median annual salary, and on disposable income the ratio is even higher. By historical standards, that is systemically unaffordable. For most young adults, the prospect of ownership has evaporated. Private rents, meanwhile, extract disproportionate shares of income, leaving little left for savings or security. If divisions have an address, it begins at the lettings office.

Then there is child poverty: 4.5 million children in Britain live below the poverty line. That is not a side note—it is a national condition. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation calls the levels “unacceptably high.” Professional associations describe the daily fallout: hungry children, over-stretched schools, long-term damage to health and learning. In a country that likes to believe itself civilised, such figures are enough on their own to explain political anger.

Deindustrialisation adds another layer. Manufacturing’s share of employment has fallen from around one-fifth in the 1980s to less than one-tenth today. Entire towns that once thrived on blue-collar jobs now patch together an economy of casualised, precarious work. The gig economy, so often marketed as entrepreneurial freedom, in practice delivers low wages, little security, and few protections. It is not an alternative to the mills, the docks, or the yards—it is a downgrade.

Add to this the deterioration of public services. Court backlogs have doubled since 2019. Local government has been stripped to the bone. Schools fight deficits, hospitals operate in crisis mode, and the roads themselves seem to crumble faster than they can be patched. Infrastructure, long neglected, has become visibly threadbare. The government now talks of a 10-year plan for renewal, but the scale of decay is plain to anyone waiting months for a trial date or weeks for a GP appointment.

And then there is wealth. The top 10 percent of households hold more than £1.2 million each, while the bottom 10 percent have less than £17,000. The top one percent, in fact, control wealth on a scale comparable to the bottom half of the population combined. Britain’s tax code continues to favour capital over labour; dividends and gains are often taxed at lower effective rates than wages. While reforms are coming—the abolition of non-dom status, for example—the wider picture remains: inequality at levels corrosive to trust.

If you line these facts up side by side, the picture is not of a society supposedly louder simply because everything matters more. The picture is of a society made more precarious, less secure, and more unequal.

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The Media’s Diversion

So why is this picture so often blurred? Because corporate media outlets, themselves owned by billionaires or debt-laden conglomerates, find it convenient to divert attention. Instead of wages and housing, they spotlight immigration. Instead of inequality, they invoke cultural hegemony. Instead of broken infrastructure, they warn of looming ID cards.

Small-boat crossings dominate the headlines, even though they are a small fraction of overall migration. The effect is not accidental. Research shows that visibility and coverage shape salience: if the public sees boats on the front page every week, the issue becomes perceived as existential, whatever the numbers say. Meanwhile, the corporate press seldom runs sustained front-page campaigns on wage stagnation, child poverty, or court backlogs.

This is not to say immigration does not affect local services or politics. But to present it as the primary driver of division, while ignoring the structural economic pressures, is to misdirect the public. It is scapegoating masquerading as reporting.

The deterioration of journalism is visible not just in what is written but in what is omitted. Absent are the graphs, the tables, the sourcing. Absent is the sense of proportion. In their place: sweeping generalities, ideological prescriptions, and binary frames.

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The Real Causes of Division

When work no longer pays, when homes are out of reach, when schools and hospitals are frayed, when courts cannot deliver justice in time, and when wealth is hoarded at the top while tax reliefs multiply—that is when politics becomes existential. That is when people stop trusting institutions and start searching for sharper, angrier voices.

Division is not an irrational contagion. It is a rational response to economic insecurity and political systems that seem unable—or unwilling—to resolve it.

Take education: white working-class boys remain the worst-performing demographic in British schools. That is not about cultural indoctrination. It is about class, resources, and opportunity. Pair that underachievement with the absence of stable blue-collar jobs and you have an entire demographic cast adrift.

Take housing: generations who expected to own now expect to rent indefinitely. The resentment is not about cultural quotas. It is about wealth transfers, month after month, from wage-earners to landlords.

Take child poverty: no parent watching their child go without food or clothes believes the core issue is state hegemony. They know what the issue is: too little income, too high costs, too few protections.

Division flows downstream from these realities. The cultural narratives are merely how they are narrated.

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The Journalism We Need

What Britain requires is not another sermon about renewal versus decline, not another column declaring politics angrier than ever because the stakes are higher than ever. What it requires is journalism that names the numbers, holds them up to the light, and forces debate on their implications.

It requires honesty about what has happened to wages, housing, infrastructure, and inequality. It requires refusal to scapegoat migrants for the failures of planning law or fiscal design. It requires the courage to follow the money, not the mood.

The abysmal standard of today’s corporate press is not just a nuisance. It is a hazard. When newsrooms substitute ideology for evidence, the public debate itself becomes weaker, narrower, easier to manipulate.

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Conclusion

Division is not an abstract pathology of culture. It is the predictable consequence of fifteen years of economic stagnation, rising costs, broken services, and entrenched inequality. A journalism that cannot name these facts is not just failing—it is colluding with decline.

Britain deserves a press that treats facts as more than scenery and history as more than a convenience. Until then, the loudest noise in our politics will remain not the clash of ideas, but the grinding of teeth.