Opinion: Britain is Running on Empty – And the Young Know It

Finito World

British politics has become strangely preoccupied with its own past.

Legacy-blaming has replaced governing. A year into Labour’s time in office, the main business of government still appears to be reminding the country of the previous administration’s failures. Every policy is prefaced with a caveat. Every press release reads like a post-mortem.

The premise is simple: things are bad, but that’s because they were worse. Rinse and repeat.

But this is no longer enough — and increasingly, it is not believed. Something deeper is being sensed: that the system, not just the party, is no longer working. That governance itself is struggling to retain clarity, pace, or ambition. And nowhere is this more obvious than in the lives of the young.

Spend time with school leavers, recent graduates, or early career professionals, and a pattern emerges. It is not anger — though anger would be understandable. It is not apathy — though that, too, might be forgivable. It is something sadder, more corrosive: disbelief.

They do not believe that the state can or will deliver for them. They see housing as out of reach, career progression as erratic, and the cost-of-living crisis as semi-permanent. They watch their elders blame one another across dispatch boxes and wonder how this passes for leadership.

A generation raised in the shadow of austerity, Brexit, and a pandemic has learned to expect very little — and now we are asking them to believe
in a political class that expects to be thanked for managing decline slightly better than the last lot.

But belief matters. Not in a sentimental sense, but in the sense of cohesion. Societies cannot function when they are sustained only by cynicism. Nor can economies thrive when their most capable members assume they will need to move abroad to succeed — or worse, simply opt out.

At Finito, we work with people at the point of transition: from school to work, from first job to purpose, from uncertainty to clarity. And what we see — overwhelmingly — is not laziness or entitlement, but a deep desire to contribute, to build, to matter. The hunger is there. What’s missing is the infrastructure that supports it.

Our politics has become about symptoms, not structure. About announcements, not reform. The government debates chemical castration, fiddles with visa quotas, and haggles over historical treaties — but fails to confront the obvious: that for much of this country, especially the young, the system no longer seems credible.

The truth is that Britain is not out of ideas. It is out of nerve. It has confused management for leadership and caution for vision. It has allowed the language of difficulty to replace the vocabulary of hope.

This isn’t about parties. It’s about standards — of seriousness, of execution, of ambition.

We don’t need more clever slogans or legacy days. We need a new seriousness about housing, education, energy, infrastructure, and yes — about work. Not work in the abstract, but work that pays, that teaches, that grows, that leads to something more than survival.

If the country is tired, the young are exhausted. If the state is stretched, their futures are stalled. And if politics cannot supply solutions, it should at least stop congratulating itself for explanations.

The next election is already being talked about in some corners. But the real question is more fundamental: not who governs, but whether governing — real governing — can begin again.