Rory Stewart | How to Fix Broken Britain | How Rory Stewart Would Fix Politics in the UK
Disruptors
Rob Moore
4.8 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 24 March 2025
⏱️ 64 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | Rory, is the UK in rapid decline? |
| 0:05.0 | No, no, it's not. I think we've got ourselves in a hysterical fit. |
| 0:10.0 | The UK has been in moments of rapid decline. |
| 0:12.0 | I mean, during the Second World War, our economy contracted by 45%. |
| 0:16.0 | We've got about half as rich in 1945 as we were in 1939. |
| 0:20.0 | Where the UK is, is it's been through a phase of kind of 10, 12 years of being pretty stagnant |
| 0:27.1 | at a moment where the US has been growing fast. |
| 0:30.0 | And that makes us feel uncomfortable and awkward. |
| 0:34.2 | But I think a couple of things to say that. |
| 0:36.2 | One is that I'm a bit skeptical about |
| 0:38.6 | US growth and how long it will continue and what that model is. So before we get overly |
| 0:43.0 | excited that America's cracked everything. And the second is that a lot of the troubles we're |
| 0:48.3 | facing are to do with the fact that we're growing older, that we expect a very high level of public services |
| 0:55.2 | that they don't expect in the US, for example, public health systems and stuff. And also that we're |
| 1:01.1 | generally pretty impatient and grumpy because we're in a world where we're used to kind of instant |
| 1:06.7 | stuff. We're in the world, obviously, of Uber and Deliveroo and Instant Apps, and we're dealing with |
| 1:12.5 | government, which is, at the best of times, a pretty slow-moving beast. |
| 1:16.8 | So do you think we've had it good for a long time and now we're hitting some realism? |
| 1:22.9 | Because I sometimes wonder if we were out at the end of the Second World War rebuilding our nation, |
| 1:30.0 | we'd be very grateful for where we are now. But at the same time, inflation is compounding up a lot. |
| 1:37.8 | It seems your energy prices are going up a lot. Everyone's disposable income or affordability |
| 1:43.9 | does seem to be a lot lower. So back to |
... |
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