Preface
This is the first edition of the United Kingdom Index of Systemic Trends. The UK Index is a dashboard on the performance and health of Britain’s political economy.
The UK Index seeks to assemble and provide the evidence in one place for a judgment as to the fundamental orientation and long-term direction of travel of Britain’s political economy as a whole – something largely absent from most of the present UK policy discussion.
It is intended as a corrective to overly narrow and short-term-oriented policy discussions in Westminster that continually miss the big picture of Britain’s longstanding decline by getting lost in the weeds of the latest policy relaunch, think tank report, or shallow political fad.
In addition, it offers a possible baseline and barometer by which can be judged the policy and political programmes of those who seek to offer easy answers – or, worse, the rebadging of past problems as future solutions – to the manifold structural social, economic, and political challenges facing Britain in the months, years, and decades ahead.
The Democracy Collaborative first developed the Index of Systemic Trends for the United States of America, publishing a first edition of the U.S. Index in 2019 and a second edition in 2024.[1] With it, we have been able to predict with broad confidence the political and economic direction of the United States even in a time of extraordinary turmoil and chaotic change.[2] Taking the longer view helps reduce the noise and keeps the fundamentals in sight. In a time of crisis and flux, in which the recent past is no longer a reliable guide to the near future, the long-run trends are both clarifying and deeply unforgiving.
This looks likely to be just as true for Britain as it has been for America. As with the U.S. Index, our intention will be to revisit the data with a new edition of the UK Index every five years – a suitable time period after which to check back for substantial changes in direction.
Our findings in this first edition are stark but unsurprising.
All across the UK Index of Systemic Trends the dashboard warning lights are blinking fiercely, indicating the magnitude of the crisis that is unfolding – and will continue to unfold, unless there is a radical change in direction.
A political economy is a system, and the current system is organised to produce economic concentration, financial extraction, growing income and wealth inequality, and widening regional disparities.
This is even before we feel the full impact of ongoing and future shocks and disruptions such as climate change, artificial intelligence, and the increasing regionalisation of the global economy into competing (perhaps even warring) rival blocs.
By the measures included in this Index, the United Kingdom would seem to be woefully underprepared for the emerging challenges of the near future and lacking in even the most basic resilience. Moreover, none of these anticipated shocks are likely to lead to improvements in the case of the majority of the trends we examine, with most likely to accelerate the difficulties and make things still worse.
Taking the long view also brings the underlying dynamics of the system into focus. One of the signs that a crisis is systemic, rather than purely political or economic, is that key indicators decline or stay the same regardless of changes in political power or business cycles.
Since 1979, the United Kingdom has experienced six turnovers in the party-political composition of governments at Westminster. It has also experienced five recessions (and recoveries). Yet, as our Index demonstrates, on many important economic, social, and democratic indicators there has been little lasting improvement and, in many cases, substantial ongoing deterioration over the period as a whole .
Moreover, there is a clear suggestion that the crisis is accelerating. The numbers on collapsing public faith in democratic institutions are borne out by the tumult in the political system as one government after another is rapidly pitched into crisis.
Since 2010, Britain has had seven (soon to be eight?) different prime ministers, compared to just eleven for the whole of the rest of the postwar era covering over half a century.
Six prime ministers in a single decade is not the sign of a functioning polity. In the absence of fundamental structural change, future governments will continue to be broken on the wheel of the crisis, in large part because they continue ineffectually to attempt to manage the existing model and are unwilling to reach for deeper, more systemic solutions.
Overall, then, the picture offered here is rather a bleak one. However, the UK Index of Systemic Trends is not intended to be an elaborate exercise in doom-scrolling (although much that it contains is sobering and suggests cause for alarm). Nor would we wish to overclaim or exaggerate its importance: it is by no means a comprehensive or exhaustive study.
Rather, it offers a reliable snapshot as to the performance of Britain’s political economy as a whole over time.
It is therefore designed to be illustrative of what we believe is an extremely important insight: that the current UK political-economic system is consistently failing to deliver improvement across a variety of different measures; and that this is indicative of a systemic crisis – and of the need to move in the direction of a new system that can and will produce better outcomes.
We suggest some plausible basic elements of that new direction in the Conclusion.
“All across the UK Index of Systemic Trends the dashboard warning lights are blinking fiercely, indicating the magnitude of the crisis that is unfolding – and will continue to unfold, unless there is a radical change in direction.”
“Since 1979, the United Kingdom has experienced six turnovers in the party-political composition of governments at Westminster [and] five recessions (and recoveries). Yet, as our Index demonstrates ... there has been little lasting improvement and, in many cases, substantial ongoing deterioration over the period as a whole.”
Acknowledgments
The writing of this report has been a collective endeavour at TDC. The data was collected and analysed by Howard Reed of Landman Economics, a Democracy Collaborative fellow, for which we are truly grateful. The narrative was written by a team of Joe Guinan, Thomas M. Hanna, Neil McInroy, and Howard Reed.
Thanks to Joana Ramiro for organising us, to Matthew Brown, Martin O’Neill, and Ben Sellers for input, and to openbox9 for design and layout.