Brits on the verge of a nervous breakdown

‘I am having one of those dark days when I feel the country cannot be saved. It’s over.’

A colleague posted this on X recently and the response was astonishing. Across the board, people agreed that Britain feels very far from Great these days, and that the damage is now beyond repair. Nor is this just a few miserable individuals: there is a general consensus that something has gone profoundly wrong. Never has the national mood been so low. Never have so many people wanted to leave the UK. Britain seems to be in the grips of a collective depression.

Does the ‘national mood’ matter? Of course it does. What’s the first thing we ask each other, friends, family or colleagues, every day, every time we meet: ‘how are you?’

A recent poll by King’s College and Ipsos highlighted just how bad Britain is feeling right now. Fewer than half of respondents said they felt pride in this country. Over half believe the culture is changing too fast, and a similar amount would like their country to go back to ‘the way it used to be’. A further 84 per cent said the country ‘feels divided’, and 86 per cent said there are tensions between immigrants and those born in the UK.

As well as the immigration crisis playing out before our eyes, the economy is on its knees. Having pushed back the date of the autumn budget as long as humanly possible, praying to find a few extra billion from somewhere, chancellor Rachel Reeves will be opening her red box of doom in a couple of weeks. She’s spent months, as Labour MP Clive Lewis has put it, ‘rolling the pitch to see what the public, the media and the City find acceptable’.

Now the moment of truth is upon us. We are stone broke. Busted. Skint. Out of cash, out of confidence and out of credibility. Budgets are always painful, but this one might just tip us over the edge. Working people at all income levels are being squeezed until the pips squeak, and the budget promises only more pain.

Labour appears to be doing everything in its power to turn what was a national depression when it entered office into a mental breakdown. From freezing pensioners to suicidal farmers, the riots sparked by the Southport murders to accidentally releasing sex offenders who should not be in the country anyway, this government does nothing but lurch from one crisis to the next. That’s without mentioning Labour’s schizophrenic stance on transgender rights, its incoherence on the Gaza conflict, its assault on free speech and the entrenchment of two-tier policing. Even Labour die-hards are in despair. It’s anyone’s guess who will crack up first, the people or their so-called prime minister.

With the UK in this state, you can’t blame Keir Starmer for not wanting to be here. It was reported that he’s travelled abroad on 40 occasions since he took power just over a year ago, and has six more foreign trips in the diary before Christmas. It’s almost as if he doesn’t like the place. With the lowest popularity ratings of any prime minister since polls began, keeping a low profile might be one of the few wise decisions he’s made since moving into No10.

It’s a national sport to ridicule our country: the addiction to tea, the obsession with the weather, the love of queueing, the silly stuff. But, in truth, us Brits are fiercely proud.

It’s hard to admit, but the country is falling apart. Many don’t want to live here anymore. Growing numbers want to escape permanently. This sense of hopelessness is felt across all ages and socioeconomic groups. Young people, in particular, feel despair at the rising cost of living, unaffordable housing and lack of opportunity.

Maybe it’s the time of the year, the clocks changing and these shorter darker days? For me, November has always been ‘the cruellest month’, to borrow a phrase of TS Eliot’s. But this year feels different – this collective malaise is about more than just being cold and broke, it’s about the immiseration of everything in our lives.

We can cope with poverty if we feel united – call it the spirit of the Blitz. We can all survive hardship if we feel hope. Nothing wrong with a bit of belt-tightening and making do. But people in Britain feel poor, fearful, polarised and downbeat. Where are the sunny uplands? What is there to look forward to?

The social fracturing started with those disastrous lockdowns, but has accelerated at pace since Labour came into power. With Starmer’s election, there was no moment of positivity, not even a brief post-election bounce. Remember the euphoria of New Labour, Cool Britannia and the sense of a fresh beginning with Tony Blair (no matter how false it turned out to be)? From day one under Starmer’s administration, it’s been negativity and doom. I wonder how much more the country can take.

Remember the period before deputy prime minister Angela Rayner’s war on allotments? Remember a time before the ban on free Coke refills at fast-food outlets? Remember being able to say what you like on social media? Allotments or sugary drinks or tweets aren’t that important – but they’re the simple things that give us pleasure. Now Reeves is even proposing to charge people for the privilege of driving their cars under pay-per-mile plans. For many, just getting out on the open road will soon be unaffordable.

When everything is being systematically smashed up, when the streets are full of either uncollected rubbish or anti-Semitic hate marches, when you can’t get a GP appointment or a decent school for your kids, when every penny you earn is being taken in taxes, when you can barely afford the weekly shop, when you can’t even drive your car and the roads are full of potholes anyway, when you see billions being sent abroad in foreign aid – what’s the point anymore?

Nearly a third of young people in this country are either actively planning or seriously considering emigrating. That’s a startling figure. Forget the economic woes, forget soaring inflation, dire OBR forecasts and IMF predictions, the lack of investment, businesses closing down, a dysfunctional NHS, and the billions being spent on benefits amid a growing welfare dependency – worse than all that is the emotional instability of the country right now.

Brits are not in good shape, mentally or physically. It’s no wonder ‘Never Here Keir’ is staying away.

Emma Woolf is an author, presenter and political commentator.