It's ‘something for nothing Britain’ shrieks the Mail. Talk about blaming the victim | Gaby Hinsliff

today as proof of a “something for nothing” culture sweeping the nation, smothering entrepreneurship by some vaguely unexplained means and generally triggering moral decline. “Lockdown changed the psyche of the British people,” the former work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith told the paper mournfully. “For all those years we told them you can’t get something for nothing, and all of a sudden they did.

The obvious answer is retired people, perfectly naturally, and that if an ageing country like Britain chooses wilfully to shrink its dwindling labour force further by restricting immigration, it can’t then be shocked to find it has fewer people of working age paying taxes just as it’s facing mounting bills for healthcare and retirement benefits. Pensions are theof welfare spending, and typically we use the NHS most heavily in the first and last years of life.

But while that’s part of the story, it’s not the whole. Civitas finds that while the poorest working-age households have long been net beneficiaries of the system, now the middle quintile is too. Either they’ve somehow contrived even in the depths of austerity to be lavished with more generous public services than a generation that could still actually get a GP appointment, or else something has gone very wrong for middle earners.

The obvious explanation is the pandemic: some workers would have earned less during lockdown and therefore paid less tax, potentially tipping them over from net contributors into net recipients. Theoretically, now that the worst is over, they could just bounce back to becoming net contributors again. But givenBritain will grow more slowly than any other G20 country bar Russia next year, that’s not necessarily a given.

One answer to the perennial puzzle of how a rich country like Britain can sometimes feel broken is that actually we’re no longer that rich. Years of sluggish growth followed by the economic self-harm of Brexit has helped push Britain’s GDP per capita below that of neighbours we’ve always considered our peers, from France and Germany to Canada or Australia. Comparatively

It’s unsustainable unless you become a communist state with gulags. Even then it’s not sustainable.

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