How Britain Became as Poor as Mississippi: A case study in self-sabotage (Idrees Kahloon, June 10, 2026, The Atlantic)
Taxation is at the highest level since World War II, yet public services have deteriorated. The National Health Service, the celebrated pillar of the British cradle-to-grave welfare state, has a backlog of 6 million patients—almost a tenth of the population—waiting for treatment. The health service now has to spend more money settling maternity-malpractice claims than it does on actually providing maternity care. Many Brits can neither obtain an appointment with a publicly funded dentist nor afford a private one; in a 2023 survey, one in 10 reported doing DIY dental work, in extreme cases extracting their own teeth or gluing broken crowns back together…
Incomes can be shockingly low: Junior doctors recently went on strike for the 15th time in three years over their salaries, which start at just £38,800; the median salary for British civil servants is £35,680…
Recent plans to transform the country[‘s transportation system] have rested in no small part on High Speed 2, a superfast rail line intended to connect London with Birmingham, Leeds, and Manchester. But since HS2 was proposed, in 2009, its costs have tripled, to more than £100 billion. It is the most expensive rail line in the world. (A special structure to protect a rare bat species near the rail line in Buckinghamshire required 8,000 permits and was built at a cost of £216 million.) The most important sections of the proposed route have been lopped off. The rump line—going from Birmingham, Britain’s second-largest city, to not-quite-central London—may be finished by 2040…
Building infrastructure, or much of anything else, has become all but impossible in the United Kingdom. In addition to having the world’s most expensive (not yet built) train line, Britain also hosts the world’s most expensive (not yet built) nuclear-power plant, Hinkley Point C. Its environmental-impact assessment ran 31,401 pages; the plant will feature a £700 million “fish disco,” which will pulse sounds underwater to deter animals from its intake pipes. The government spent 32 years and £179 million planning a tunnel beneath Stonehenge to relieve traffic, only to officially scrap the plan this year. Even basic tasks, such as obtaining power, can be nightmarish…
Britain suffers from a housing crisis significantly worse than America’s. The problem cannot even be blamed on zoning, because Britain does not have a zoning regime to speak of. Rather, every attempt to build is a painful, ad hoc negotiation with local government councils and NIMBY residents. As a result, housing costs per square foot are among the highest in Europe. In the words of one report, “Our housing stock offers the worst value for money of any advanced economy.” France has roughly the same population as the U.K., but almost 50 percent more homes. And yet, since the financial crisis, the U.K.’s rate of housing production has only fallen…In London, the typical house sold in 2024 cost 11 times median earnings.
