A friend said over dinner that England still hasn’t adjusted to who it is today and lives in the past. He was talking about the economy: an ageing population, a dependence on immigration discussed chiefly as a failure of control, and the distance Brexit put between Britain and its nearest trading partners. We had barely mentioned flags or royal pageantry. His point was that nostalgia had entered the balance sheet.

That felt right to me, perhaps too readily. I moved here from Rotterdam at eighteen and now live in London, which makes me one of the immigrants in the argument.

Two questions had become tangled over dinner. England’s need for migration is an economic argument. The small boats are also a moral and legal question: people are entitled to safety and a fair asylum process whether or not the NHS needs their labour. Nobody should have to prove economic usefulness before we care whether they drown.

On the economic question, the numbers support the dependency, although they need reading with care. In June 2025, about 21 per cent of NHS staff in England recorded a non-British nationality. Among doctors it was 36 per cent. Nationality is self-reported and is not the same as immigration status, so those figures cannot bear every claim made about migration. They do make one fact hard to evade: the health service England already has is staffed by people from all over the world. Politics continues to describe immigration chiefly as a failure of control even while the economy relies on it as labour.

My first explanation for that contradiction was class. I had a theory that the Industrial Revolution displaced old power more thoroughly elsewhere, while the English aristocracy absorbed industrial wealth and survived. Landed families married into new money and sat on railway and mining boards; industrialists bought estates, sought titles and sent their sons to the same schools. Instead of one elite replacing another, the two learned to recognise each other.

There is plenty of residue. Elitist Britain 2025 found private-school and Oxbridge graduates dramatically overrepresented in influential jobs. Twenty-four per cent of MPs and 53 per cent of diplomats had attended private schools; only 21 per cent of senior judges had attended comprehensive schools. The House of Lords kept its final hereditary seats until April 2026.

The theory was neat enough to make me suspicious, so I went looking for the strongest account against it. David Cannadine’s The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy documents how much political and economic power landed families lost during the twentieth century through death duties, the Parliament Acts, sold estates and their declining presence in the Commons.

I had made aristocracy explain too much. The stronger account is less picturesque: private schools, Oxbridge, the professions and property can reproduce class advantage perfectly well without a lord directing the machinery. Modern privilege is durable partly because it presents itself as the result of examination, polish and individual promise.

A median English home cost 7.7 times median full-time earnings in 2024.

Once hereditary status explained less than I had expected, ownership became more interesting. Brett Christophers calls the British settlement rentier capitalism: wealth extracted through control of land, finance, infrastructure, intellectual property and outsourced services. Housing is where that abstraction becomes everybody’s monthly problem.

Trussell’s community distributed 2.9 million emergency food parcels between April 2024 and March 2025, more than one million of them for children. In 2023–24, 4.5 million children—31 per cent of all children in the UK—lived in relative poverty after housing costs. Almost three quarters of them lived in a working family.

The median English home cost 7.7 times median full-time earnings in 2024. The national affordability ratio had roughly doubled since 1997. Meanwhile, the English Housing Survey estimated that four million homes failed the Decent Homes Standard in 2024, with the highest failure rate, 22 per cent, in private rentals.

Weak productivity growth has constrained wages, while too few homes have been built where people need them. The House of Commons Library connects low productivity to stagnant living standards; the Competition and Markets Authority found that planning failures and the limits of speculative private development had left housing supply persistently below need.

A familiar reply is that living standards have improved because electronics and entertainment are cheaper than they were. I remember cheap plastic electronics arriving in ordinary homes during the eighties. Cheaper electronics improved ordinary life, but comparing them with shelter, childcare or heat is a category error. A smartphone now mediates banking, job applications, government services and healthcare; its declining price tells us almost nothing about whether a household can afford the essentials around it.

Homeowners complicate any comfortable story about a tiny rentier class exploiting everybody else. Existing owners gain when scarcity drives prices up, spreading the rewards of exclusion through the middle class as well as above it.

My friend’s sentence stayed with me because it joined the parts without pretending there was one villain behind them. England talks as though self-sufficiency were still available, even as its hospitals depend on people from elsewhere and an ordinary home recedes beyond the reach of wages. The old order matters, but the class problem now has millions of beneficiaries. That is why honesty about it is politically expensive.

Source notes

Chris Chabot · February 2026 · updated July 2026
personal essays