Bartek Staniszewski

The overwhelming smell of weed wafting down the street; heaps of decomposing litter floating in local canals and rivers; the noise of a dozen video calls and TikTok videos blasted through loudspeakers on the train. Many Britons are exhausted with the tide of anti-social behaviour that all too many of us have become accustomed to. The obvious remedy, it might seem, would be to crack down on this behaviour – for the authorities and the public to enforce Britain’s rules with renewed vigour. To do so, however, would only reinforce the problem. It is in fact the plethora of patronising dictats issued from the top down that is behind the collapse in Britain’s social order. The solution is to get rid of them.

The UK’s worklessness problem is a well-documented crisis. Over six million people in the UK – almost a sixth of the working-age population – are on out-of-work benefits, a number that has nearly doubled in the last seven years. The government’s attempt to begin to address this with the Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payment Bill ended in fiasco. Diagnoses for the spectacular rise in worklessness vary from the long-term effects of the pandemic through to a lack of well-paid jobs to the perverse incentives within the welfare system. But one notable culprit seems to have escaped the attention of policy wonks: autism.

'The NHS is, rightly, the biggest reason most of us are proud to be British,' Jeremy Hunt said in his Budget this week. The Chancellor isn't wrong: according to polling from last year, the health service is the top reason to be proud to be British among 54 per cent of British citizens; far more than our history (32 per cent), culture (26 per cent) or let alone democracy (25 per cent). But this is not something to be celebrated; instead, it is illustrative of the malaise that today affects British national identity. It is a sad reflection on how feeble British national identity has become Traditionally, there are two ways to look at national identity. One of them is ethnic. According to ethnic nationalists, a shared ancestry is what makes a nation’s people who they are.