The Poor State Of The United Kingdom And What It Says About The Culture

The internet pulled up its bootstraps, took to the streets of X, and started dragging the United Kingdom for being abysmal on pretty much every front: immigration, food, housing, the deletion of their culture in exchange for burqa shops, and now… their economy.

A new report from the U.K.-based Institute of Economic Affairs revealed that Brits thought the UK ranked 7th against U.S. states in income per person, when in reality it ranks 51st. Worse yet, Mississippi, the poorest state in the United States, is richer than the United Kingdom. If they joined our great nation, they’d be the poorest state in the entire union.

Absolutely bloody news there, mate.

The beatdown didn’t stop there. Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves posted to X: “As we say in Mississippi, ‘Bless Your Heart.’ Or as you say in the U.K., ‘As-Salamu Alaykum.'” Phenomenal clapback.

I must say, this feels good. This was the rush of patriotism we all needed this week, amid war with terrorists, high-profile doxxing threats, Pope scuffles, and rape scandals. Despite our flaws as a nation, by golly, at least our weakest link (fiscally speaking) is more economically sound than the entirety of the United Kingdom.

The mockery is the easy part. The harder question is how the country that gave us the Magna Carta, Winston Churchill, and the Industrial Revolution ended up here. The answer is a masterclass in what happens when a government prioritizes the feelings of newcomers over the well-being of its own citizens for decades without correction.

Put the kettle on, because there is more tea to be spilled.

The U.K.’s GDP technically has grown since 2008. That’s because the population grew, mostly from immigration. Real GDP per capita — the number that tells you whether individual Brits are actually better off — crawled just 7.8% over 16 years. Productivity has flatlined at its slowest rate in 200 years. Net migration hit a record 944,000 in 2023, with large portions being low-skilled migrants who consumed public housing, the National Health Service, and welfare faster than the infrastructure could absorb them. NHS waiting lists are catastrophic. Housing costs are suffocating. And on top of all of it, Britain’s punishing tax burden on its most productive citizens sent wealth, investment, and talent straight out the door. You cannot bleed your earners dry and wonder why the engine stalled. The country hasn’t collapsed, but it’s buckled badly, and everyone can see it and feel it.

Their pocketbooks aren’t the only things threatened. Take the grooming gang scandal that rocked the U.K. over the past several years. Rotherham, Rochdale, Oxford. It is one of the most documented and most deliberately suppressed institutional failures in modern Western history. Multiple official inquiries confirmed that networks of predominantly Pakistani-heritage men systematically targeted and sexually exploited vulnerable young British girls. Authorities knew. Police knew. Social workers knew. For years, they did nothing for fear of being called racist. Children were abused. Officials had the evidence. They chose institutional cowardice over the safety of British girls.

This is the rot. Open borders without assimilation requirements created the conditions that allowed it to fester. Europe wasn’t only deluding itself over crime policy. It was deluding itself about everything.

The problem was a government that imported millions of people over two decades, refused to enforce meaningful assimilation standards, and then labeled anyone who raised concerns a bigot. When you grow your population faster than your housing, your hospitals, and your schools, without requiring newcomers to adopt the legal and civic norms of the country they’re entering, you don’t get a multicultural utopia. You get broken public services, Muhammad as the number one baby name, and a GDP per capita that loses to Mississippi.

We don’t get to enjoy this schadenfreude for long. The same ideological forces that hollowed out Britain — open borders dressed as compassion, multicultural paralysis dressed as tolerance, debilitating taxes on the most productive members of society — have not left our politics. They’re knocking on the door.

Net migration in America is now negative for the first time in 50 years. That’s an absolute win. But Elmo is already out here celebrating National Arab American Heritage Month, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is one green light away from unleashing rent control and a tax regime that would gut the financial capital of the world, and a sizable chunk of the progressive coalition openly sympathizes with terror. The U.K. didn’t fall in a day. It made a thousand small policy decisions, each defended as the humane choice, each quietly making things worse for the people who were already there.

Don’t be Britain, but Bless Their Hearts.