What's Our Problem?

A troubling malaise has settled across British society.  Surveys report that more than six in ten of us think ‘Britain is broken.’  Is this just the latest in a long series of panics about national decline, or are we really in trouble this time?

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In this major new book, published by Civitas, Peter Saunders identifies twenty of the biggest, most difficult and threatening problems that we face.  In some cases, he finds it is already too late to do anything about them.  Others may still be resolvable given enough time, resources and political will, but money is tight, voters are reluctant to accept necessary reforms, and some patterns are now so deeply embedded in the way we think and behave that reversing them would need us to turn our whole culture upside down. 

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If you want to know why  the country is in such a mess, and why nobody seems willing or able to sort it out, this book offers some challenging explanations and reaches some disturbing conclusions. 

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Chapter contents:

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Introduction: Broken Britain

 

1: Drowning in debt

2. Crumbling infrastructure

3. When the lights go out

4. An ageing population

5. The envy of the world

6. What happened to the nation of home-owners?

7. Weak families

8. Weak individuals

9. Weak communities

10. Mass immigration

11. Hating ourselves

12. When two tribes go to war

13. The soft cocoon of ignorance

14. Quiet Quitting

15. A coarsened culture

16. Criminality becomes normal

17. Under Surveillance

18. Suffocating in pornography

19. Threats from abroad

20. A broken constitution

 

Conclusion: What is to be done (and why we won’t do it)