One hesitates to add to the chorus of Budget-eve doom-posting, that peculiarly British genre in which the nation collectively sighs over its morning tea and mutters, “Well, that’s it then.” Yet here we are, in the autumn of 2025, surveying the smouldering ruins of what was once quaintly known as British industry, and discovering that even the most resolute optimist has packed his bags and emigrated to somewhere with functioning blast furnaces. The patient is not merely ailing; he has been enthusiastically euthanised by his own doctors, who now propose to redistribute the organs while assuring the relatives that the operation was a resounding success.
Let us begin with steel, that most elemental of national virilities. Once upon a time – specifically, in the days when men wore hats and Britain still pretended to an empire – this country produced enough steel to build ships that ruled the waves and railways that stitched continents together. Today, thanks to a heroic commitment to decarbonisation pursued with the zeal of a Puritan burning witches, the last blast furnaces at Port Talbot and Scunthorpe are being shuttered faster than a Labour Party manifesto promise. Crude steel output collapsed by nearly thirty per cent in 2024 alone, dropping below four million tonnes for the first time since the age of Dickens. The government, ever helpful, has subsidised the transition to electric arc furnaces that will recycle scrap metal imported from abroad, because nothing says 'green industrial strategy' like outsourcing your primary steelmaking to countries that haven’t yet discovered the joys of net zero. One imagines the scene in Whitehall: “Gentlemen, we have solved the emissions problem! Britain will no longer produce virgin steel; we shall content ourselves with reheating other people’s leftovers, ideally at electricity prices twice those of our continental rivals.”
And those electricity prices – ah, yes. British industry pays the highest industrial rates in Europe, a fact so routinely acknowledged that it has become a form of national self-flagellation. One almost suspects the Treasury regards expensive energy as a character-building exercise, like cold showers at a minor public school. Manufacturers are assured that the pain is temporary, a mere side effect of saving the planet, while their French and German competitors avail themselves of nuclear power so abundant it is practically given away with the croissants. The result? British Steel and Tata Steel have been reduced to archaeological curiosities, preserved only by the occasional government handout that arrives just in time to postpone the inevitable autopsy.
Automotive production, meanwhile, is performing a graceful swan dive. The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders – an organisation whose very name now sounds like a support group for the terminally nostalgic – forecasts a fifteen per cent drop in 2025, with output slumping to a level last seen when Harold Wilson was piping tobacco and the Mini was still considered cutting-edge. Electric vehicle mandates, imposed with the breezy confidence of people who have never tried to sell a £40,000 hatchback to a family earning the national median wage, have combined with global trade turbulence to ensure that British car plants spend more time on reduced hours than on actual production lines. One pictures the factory floors echoing to the ghostly whine of unsold battery packs, while ministers insist that the future is bright, orange, and located in Shenzhen.
Energy bills, of course, provide the perfect accompaniment to this symphony of decline. The average household now faces an annual dual-fuel bill hovering around £1,733 – a figure that has become the new benchmark for British masochism, rather like the weather or the quality of railway catering. Industrial users fare even worse, subsidising a renewables regime whose intermittent generosity is offset by gas peakers that fire up precisely when the wind refuses to blow and the sun sulks behind cloud. The policy is sold as 'green levies,' which is Whitehall-speak for taxing productivity in order to feel virtuous. One might imagine that a nation confronted with youth unemployment on the horizon, collapsing heavy industry, and energy costs that make Victorian sweatshops look competitive would pause to reconsider. Not a bit of it. Instead, the preferred solution is to redistribute the dwindling proceeds through ever more inventive taxation, while borrowing against a future that grows daily more theoretical. Welfare spending remains sacrosanct, immigration controls are tightened only after the horse has not merely bolted but set up a profitable breeding operation in the next county, and the ruling class affects a lofty contempt for the very people whose labours once paid its salaries.
In November 2025 the government, sensing that the natives are growing restless, announced the most sweeping asylum reforms in modern memory: refugee status rendered temporary, settlement delayed by two decades, appeals compressed into a single hearing. Doubtless this will be presented as tough-minded realism, modelled on Denmark’s admirable ruthlessness. Yet one cannot help noticing the timing: just as Reform UK surges in the polls – occasionally topping them, occasionally threatening hundreds of seats under the capricious algebra of first-past-the-post – the establishment discovers the virtues of border control it previously dismissed as xenophobic fantasy. Even more deliciously, surveys reveal that a majority of Reform’s prospective voters would cheerfully support a one-off wealth tax on assets above ten million pounds. Nothing quite sums up the British political scene like a party of supposed right-wing insurgents whose supporters turn out to be closet redistributionists, eagerly awaiting the chance to soak the rich while simultaneously complaining about immigrants on benefits.
And there, dear reader, lies the final irony. The only glimmer on an otherwise Stygian horizon is a party led by a man who has spent a political lifetime being denounced as a fascist, now polling as the largest in the land because the mainstream has so comprehensively vacated the territory of common sense. Yet even Reform’s triumph – should the electorate ever be rash enough to grant it – would merely herald further fragmentation. No outright majority beckons in 2029; merely a hung parliament of squabbling factions, each armed with a veto and a grievance. The civil service, that vast and unlovely organism, would obstruct; the courts would intervene; the Blob would digest any reformist impulse and excrete it as a consultation paper.
If anybody has some good news, one is all ears. Perhaps the Cheddars Man descendant discovered brewinging local teachers will rise up and rebuild Hadrian’s Wall with recycled wind-turbine blades. Or perhaps we shall simply adjust, as we always have, to a quieter, poorer, colder existence – brewing beer, telling stories of when things worked, and congratulating ourselves on our exquisite sensitivity to the feelings of the planet. After all, managed decline has a noble ring to it, rather like a dignified retreat or a strategic bankruptcy. The workshop of the world has closed for renovations; do not ask when it reopens, for the workmen are on a zero-hours contract and the funding has been redirected to diversity consultants. In the meantime, keep calm, pay the energy bill, and carry on – preferably to the nearest departure gate.