As the UK endures the second decade of its crisis of economic stagnation, a loose group of commentators, activists and think-tanks have emerged to argue that this stagnation isn’t inevitable, and to call for more houses and infrastructure to be built, for energy to be cheaper and more abundant, and for a restoration of the technological optimism of earlier times. It’s not an entirely homogenous movement – some call themselves “Anglofuturists”, others organise under the banners of “progress” and “abundance”. As I wrote a year ago in my piece “Taking Anglofuturism seriously”, I am sympathetic to some of the goals of this movement. I agree that our economic stagnation isn’t inevitable and that the UK’s physical infrastructure needs upgrading, I regret the failure of recent new nuclear build plans, and I think that technological innovation is a key driver of productivity growth. Yet to me there seems to be a gap in the movement between willing the ends and identifying the means, with the suggested remedy all too often coming down simply to calls to deregulate more and reform the planning laws.
There is perhaps a lesson from history here, emphasised by some comments the historian David Edgerton made in a podcast last week. The kind of nation that Anglofuturists call for looks rather like what was delivered by post-war British governments between 1950 and 1980. Then, the UK was one of the most R&D intensive economies in the world, with a cross-party consensus that technological innovation would deliver economic growth. Despite persistent national soul-searching about a ruling-class trained in the humanities, a number of scientists and engineers rose to powerful and influential positions. The world’s first nuclear power station was designed and built in just four years, following which there was a large-scale roll out of nuclear power stations. A national capability for launching satellites was developed (and subsequently abandoned). This period saw the construction of most of our current motorway network, and, as my plot shows, new houses were built at a rate that has never since been matched. In this sense there is a certain retro quality to Anglofuturism, a harking back to a time when the UK seemed to look to the future with technological self-confidence.
Housebuilding in the UK. Permanent dwellings completed by calendar year. Data: ONS
This world was dismantled by the government of Margaret Thatcher, with its radical break from the post-war economic consensus and turn to Hayek, privatisation and a small state. A few years later, the end of the Cold War finally brought to an end to the “Warfare State” – the UK’s own military-industrial complex, which as Edgerton has so clearly described [1], was the driving force behind so much of the UK’s science and technology base. This included a nuclear energy programme that was intimately entangled with the UK’s nuclear weapons programme, and an aerospace industry struggling to make the transition from defence to civil applications. The new economic consensus, based on market liberalism in an environment of ever-increasing globalisation, has persisted through the New Labour governments until the present day.
GDP per person for the UK, in real terms (reference year 2023). Quarterly data from the ONS, annualised, 13/11/2025 release.
Yet, this consensus is no longer delivering the economic growth that we’d come to expect based on our post-war experience. Whatever we are doing, it isn’t working any more, and the growth of Anglofuturism and its allies reflect that failure.
Anglofuturism was dismissed by Edgerton as a “morbid symptom”. The allusion is to a well known quotation from the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci: “The crisis consists precisely of the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” [2]
The old economic consensus is not working, and the international stability it took for granted has disappeared. We can’t go back to the world of the 1950’s and 60’s (and there was in any case plenty wrong with those times). But, equally, it makes no sense to try to double down on the more recent doctrines that have got us into the current mess.
[1] “Warfare State: Britain 1920-1970“, David Edgerton, CUP, 2005. “The Rise and Fall of the British Nation” (Penguin, 2019) is also essential reading.
[2] From p276: “Selections from the Prison Notebooks”, Antonio Gramsci, translated by Hoare & Smith.