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A. G. Hopkins, "The Land Where Nothing Works: How Britain Lost the Plot" (Princeton UP, 2026)
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello and welcome to today's episode of New Books Network. I'm your host and I'm delighted to be joined by Professor A.G. hopkins, the Emeritus Smuts professor of Commonwealth History at the University of Cambridge. We're going to be discussing his newest book, the Land Where Nothing How Britain Lost the plot, published in 2026 by Princeton University Press. It's great to have you here, Professor Hopkins.
- [00:25]
B
Thank you for inviting me. It's a pleasure to be with you.
- [00:30]
A
I mean, I know we spoke previously about capitalism in the colonies and this is a very different book. So you've had a very long and distinguished career as a historian of empire capitalism, and really one of the pioneers of African economic history. What drew you at this stage to turn your attention to Britain itself? And why did this feel like the book you wanted to write now?
- [00:50]
B
Yes, thank you for that. I think this might well interest listeners. I think after I published Capitalism in the colonies in 2024, I rather thought I'd finished. But underlying my thinking and conversations for several years had been the problem that we're talking about today, namely the fact that so many things in Britain don't work. Don't work as they used to and don't work as they should. I mentioned the word potholes and I won't go on from there because your mind can run onto the national health is the overcrowded legal system, the overflowing prisons and so on. So I felt both depressed by this, not for myself, but for the future, and also somewhat bouts of fury about how we've got into this situation. So I actually had two motives. One was, frankly, a selfish, cathartic expression. I had to get this out of my system because it needed saying and analyzing as to why it was we got into this state. And then the second motive which was present that came more and more to the fore as I progressed, was the need, in my view, to center any explanation of where we are today in history. Now, that might seem a very obvious statement and not worth dwelling on, but I just have a sentence or two to add because there are excellent books about broken Britain and the like, and they're written by economists, they're written by political scientists, social commentators. They're all very valuable, but they have a short time span, they don't go back before 2008. And my view is we have to do that if we're to truly understand the situation within. And just an additional point, the statement I've just made, which will seem obvious to most people, is no Longer obvious to scholars because we've become so ultra specialized that economists don't go back into history. Similarly, we are the contemporary commentators and this wasn't always the case. On the contrary, in the grand scheme of history, we can see that this specialization is a phenomenon of our own time. If you take Adam Smith on the one hand or Karl Marx on the other, among many other Greeks philosophers, they took it for granted that you can't understand where we are without incorporating history. And that has gone. So I wrote my book because it seemed to me there was a gap in understanding and by inserting the historical dimension, I hope to add contribute to the discussion of our present discontents.
- [04:08]
A
I think that's very timely. In fact, I was just on a panel at the Economic History Society Centennial Conference, one of the centennial panels, talking about economic history and policy. And we had a range of people, from policymakers to economic historians. And one of the key things that people raised was, yeah, policymakers aren't going to read the Economic History Review necessarily to try and find something. And if you do want to get yourself out there, policymakers are interested in history, but they've got a lot on the plate. So if a book like this, I think actually really bridges that. And that was something that a number of successful examples on the panel used, that they had published a book rather than articles, and they pitched it in a way that was approachable, yet based in historical thought. I mean, that were my. This was my proposal for the panel was that policymakers need to be more historically minded. They need to see things in the long run, which I think you've explained far better than I did. So it's really timely and it's obviously something that people are thinking about. So, I mean, I think listeners will have got a little bit of an idea about what the book is. And I didn't give it the normal sort of summary. I do because I think it's a sort of book that doesn't really. I don't think that a summary fairly does it. So that's why I don't think we can boil it down into some sound bites. I mean, so I think that's what the approach today. We're going to explore it a little bit differently because it's. I think you can read this book with a number of hats on, so to speak. You can read it as a historian. You could read it as just somebody interested in the current situation. Right. So to give a little bit more background on what the book is. So the book opens as you've already made clear that the book opens with a vivid portrait of contemporary Britain. Deteriorating public services, growing inequality, regional imbalance and political disillusionment. Well, as we've just been saying, this is fundamentally a work of historical explanation. There is also contemporary commentary. For the benefit of listeners who have not yet read the book, what's your central argument? What happened to Britain and when did the process begin? Some really easy questions there.
- [06:27]
B
Yes, thank you. Well, you're right in saying what you did at the outset about the need to wear various hats. In fact, the presentation I have to give on Thursday that I referred to, I've got 35 minutes and I've gone to hell and back several times trying to compress my book in that time because the result looks so superficial as to be embarrassing. However, I can give your listeners a sense of the major theme that they need to hang on to. Let's look at it this way. If you consider the history of modern Britain, say since 1945, you've got a whole number of books that will either treat economic history or political and so on, and they all have enormous merits, and social historians have done wonderful work, pioneering social history, cultural history, et cetera, et cetera. Putting it all together has proved to be very difficult, and I won't go into the various attempts it be made, except to say, to your point, that my attempt to draw the history of the period from 45 to the present together depends on one huge historical change, and that is that Britain moved from being a manufacturing country to being a country based on free finance and associated services, I.e. lawyers, architects, education, et cetera, et cetera. Now, put like that, I'm simply describing the world that we see around us. But put in historical perspective, you can see how dramatic this is, because much of British history from the 18th century has been centred on writing about the Industrial Revolution. We move from agriculture to manufacturing, and scholars will trace the undulations in manufacturers, et cetera, et cetera. But what happened after 1914, and especially visible after 1945, despite attempts to revive it, was the permanent decline of manufacturing, both as a contribution to gdp, as a percentage employer of labor and as an exporter of goods, and in relation to other exports, which are now dominated by finance and the officers. That's my first very compressed statement of the theme.
- [09:19]
A
Yeah, I mean, you've done me a wonderful favor there, because you set me up for my next question. And, yeah, you mentioned manufacturing and the shift to finance and services, but another key theme is really what was going on in 1945 and the years following. Right, the post war social democratic settlement and for the benefit of our international listeners. I mean apparently New Books Network has listeners in every country apart from North Korea. So they might not all be aware of what this post war social democratic settlement wants. And why do you see. So yeah, what did it hope to achieve and why do you see its dismantling as such a decisive moment?
- [10:01]
B
Yes, well that's a wonderful question because if most of us who have just some knowledge of history think back from the present, in Britain we think of the era of Margaret Sacher, it was almost like the beginning of the world world because today many of the policies that we still adhere to are those introduced with variations by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. And what I wanted to show, not just for history, but as an example that has lessons for today, was that there was a previous revolution after 1940 and I've called it, along with other people, the Social Democratic revolution. Because the set of policies or the program of the Labour Party after 1945 was to create a society in which the welfare of the majority was the prominent or deep, the paramount aim of policy. And so this was a democratic intent and policies were designed to deliver that. Attle's famous phrase was fair shares. Now Margaret Thatcher would never have enunciated that. So they had this idea in the Labour Party about creating and if possible maintaining a sense of community, a sense of the welfare of the totality as the basis for the unity of the nation. Now these set of policies which seem very strange to us today, at least not present, were actually being pioneered elsewhere at the time in the United States. Hold your hats on because this is going to seem impossible. But in the 1950s, 60s the United States carried forward Roosevelt's policies in the New Deal which gave prominence to governments in organizing things and guaranteeing employment and so on. And President Johnson's Great society was also one in the 60s that set out to try to maintain that. And if we look across to the continent, we can see that welfarism and similar policies to those created and implemented by Labour were present on the continent of Europe. So what Britain was doing was novel for Britain, but it was part of a trend coming out of the depression of the 30s and the destruction of World War II, which was offering a peace dividend to a very world weary set of populations. So out of that we got the National Health Service, we got a welfare state, we got improved educational facilities. I am here because of those improvements. And there were various other policies which went far to guarantee full employment and reduce regional and social inequality. Now, one other thing to say about this, this policy was initiated by the Labour Party, but it's important to point out that it was a consensus. The Conservative Party generally went along with this and that at that time, the Conservative Party was dominated by groups called One Nation Tories. These were people, especially Harold Macmillan, the Prime minister of the 50s, who were persuaded of the need to extend welfare. And Macmillan's argument was, if we don't do this, if we neglect the majority of the population, then Soviet socialism is going to come in and we're going to have a very unpleasant revolution. So this was a kind of coalition, so to speak, which saw the welfare state up and running through to the 1980s.
- [14:58]
A
Yeah, I mean, I think that the consensus part is something that is perhaps might seem quite alien now given how we think about the two main parties in the uk, but this, this era of butzcolism was, was a serious thing. And I think what was really interesting when you said, when one of the things you said when you started that answer was you mentioned about fair share. And I literally just this weekend I was reading about what is, what are British values. And one of the, one of the few that we could boil it down to was fairness. Queuing or waiting your turn or being a good sportsman, it's all about fairness. So that was, that was really interesting to hear that comes up. But yeah, and you describe what followed the Thatcher years and I guess the present, not simply as a change in government or economic policy, but as a counter revolution that altered Britain's moral economy. I mean, this is something that is. I really enjoyed it in the book, was that it doesn't seem like you're flitting between subjects, but it's a very holistic understanding. And I think that's really important to understand because as you say, economic historians could just do the numbers and political philosophers can explain what things are. So what was this counter revolution? What values were displaced and what replaced them?
- [16:24]
B
The essential, the essence of it is going to sound like a very crude contrast. So let me do it and then it can be refined in the days and years to come. So the social democratic philosophy, as you have accurately summarized, was one that placed value on the community and therefore on the wealth which underpinned a sense of community. And through that, the sense of national unity. Now from 1979, but developing in conservative policies from the 70s, Margaret Thatcher and her chief guru, Keith Josey, overturned that philosophy and installed instead what you might call ultra individualism. In their view, the consensus politics of the 45 to 79 had failed. And it's perfectly true that there were flaws in the social democratic experiment. Nationalization was not always successful. And specifically in the 70s, there was two huge crises in 73 and 79 that were brought by the speaking about today. The rapid increase in the price of oil and this immediately increased unemployment. Political discontent was rather an era or a time in which political dissent and anxieties rose high. Now, Margaret Thatcher and her colleagues took advantage of this and were able to get into power on the basis that if we shifted to an individualistic policy, releasing entrepreneurs, the consequences of that would be rapid growth and then wealth would trickle down to the majority of population. Now, I'll stop there for the moment because there are other implications about why that happened. But let me put it as crudely as I have done and stop. Okay.
- [18:58]
A
I don't think that was crude at all. I think it was very impressive how well you managed to condense that. Um, so actually, yeah. Was there anything you discovered while researching or writing the book that surprised you or caused you to rethink part of the argument you might have initially had in mind?
- [19:15]
B
Yes. Thank you for that because it'll help me to improve. On my last answer, When I came to this subject of the counter revolution, am I called it a counter revolution was because of course it opposed the previous social democratic program and its ideology with something completely different. I had came at this with the broad assumption which was common in the books, that the social democratic program had failed. Then I read much more about the period and I don't want to to neglect its weaknesses, but historians now refer to the period as broadly speaking, and I quote, a golden age. We didn't have potholes, you could see doctors, et cetera, et cetera. It wasn't perfect. But it's not just nostalgia that suggests that there really was a peace dividend that gave advantages to many people now. So that meant that I had to rethink the social democratic program and through that to think anew about the counter revolution. In short, Margaret Satcher's counter revolution was not just to rectify the total failure of previous years, but to take advantage of advantage of the crisis of the 1970s to install a new political philosophy which suited particularly various rising economic interests.
- [21:01]
A
On the topic of rising economic interests, you spoke about this in the first answer. But one of the central themes is the long term shift from manufacturing towards finance and related services and the particular role of the city of London in driving that transformation. And obviously the political ideology that backed that but could you explain why this transition is so important in the book's argument? And what consequences has it had for different regions and communities across Britain?
- [21:32]
B
Yes, okay, I'll take that. If I can remember in two parts. Yes. Well, of course, the City of London had been a dynamo not just of the British economy, but of the world economy. Before 1914, it was British investment that financed railways over the world. It was British investment that actually developed the United States in the Midwest and Far West. So British, British finance, British overseas investments are huge importance to understanding work. Development, however, that fell apart during World War I and again in World War II because our investments were either canceled, like to be repatriated purposes for yore. So after the war, the City of London was still there, but it didn't have money to start investing abroad again. But what happened was in the 1960s, and I won't make this too technical, in the 1960s, a new currency was invented and it was called the Euro Dollar and there were also Euro bonds. Heavens, this sounds complicated. Basically these were just US Dollars that were held offshore because if they were repatriated back to the United States, they would be subject to taxation and also capital controls in the United States. Remember, the Vietnam War was posing huge burdens on the US So there were controls to prevent the export of capital. And so what happened was, was that the emerging multinational corporations were trading throughout the world, but they weren't taking their money back to the United States, they were recycling it. And today I can't tell you the percentage, but the proportion of world trade handled by euro dollars and bonds is enormous. It's a majority. So this is huge. And it began in the 1960s. And it did so by making the City of London the principal turnstile or haven for Eurodollars. Because the City of London had all the institutions Anglo British relations were. Okay, so the City of London got a new lease of light, not because it found new investment, but as a handler of Eurodollars and Eurobonds. And there's a point at which the empire comes into this because this strategy was associated with the increase in or the growth of tax havens. And decolonization meant that there were ready made newly independent countries without much power, but could serve as tax havens. So tax avoidance, we should say, and the expansion of the world economy from the 60s onwards depended very much on this novelty of the United Kingdom. I'll conclude that part of your question question by saying it was a famous phrase often quoted by the American statement Dean Acheson in 1962. The problem, he said, was that Britain had lost an empire and not yet found a role. He was wrong, although it looked as if he was right, because as the empire was lost, Britain found a new MO through the City of London and tax haven. You did ask me two questions. I said, I try to remember the second one. It's gone from my mind. If you can prompt me.
- [25:51]
A
It's not a problem at all. And thank you very much for that really detailed answer. I mean, I think that's. The book is full of this wide ranging, as I said, it ranges across subjects. But also I think what's really interesting is that, I mean, just as you said at the start, a lot of books that seek to answer a similar question might just look at 2000, right. Oh, whatever. But this, or even just a Britain, this range is much further. But yeah, my question was actually more zoomed in. So we've already explained why the transition was so important, but what were the consequences it had for different regions and communities across Britain? The rest of Britain, shall we say.
- [26:30]
B
My elderly brain is clearly sharing its limits. That's a hugely important question. Well, basically, London and the Southeast have always been central to British politics and economy. But of course, with industrialization, the center tended to have, I won't say rivals, but a balancing act, because you have the Midlands, you had Manchester, we had Liverpool, and you had Garmin and so on, which were big manufacturing centers, and you had elsewhere in Wales, in Yorkshire, in Scotland, coal mines and so on. So manufacturing and industry were terribly important. But of course, as I said earlier, after World War II, we saw this rapid decline in it. Now, you, manufacturing and Margaret Satchel, of course, closed, understandably many uneconomic old industries. So what happened there was that as the City of London and Suarez expanded from the 1960s and 70s, gathering taste right through to today, the rest of the economy tended to lapse. And so what you saw was an increasing regional social and economic inequalities developing. And that situation harbored. It was the embryo of political discontent and resentment of the dominance of the South.
- [28:08]
A
Yeah. As someone who comes from the Northeast, very, very much aware of the decline, as someone who comes from northeastern Yorkshire and growing up in the 1990s, all these attempts to start new industries, and sometimes unsuccessfully. I think you have mentioned it, but I think it might be worth taking a little bit of a deeper dive, because many of our listeners will know your earlier work on empire and global capitalism. But how important is Britain's imperial past to understand the historian you have touched
- [28:44]
B
on it, but, well, okay, so the empire in this story is important for two reasons. Economically, it was very important. The period after 1914, after World War II, for a while, because the old style, as we now see it, set of exchanges. Britain sends out manufacturers. The empire produces primary commodities, tea, coffee, cocoa, timber, etc. And that Kroger pattern of exchanges continued after World War II. So one thing to correct is the common assumption that after World War II the empire declined. India, we lost in new 1947. This is too crude. What happened was that Britain, including the Labour Party, was determined to hang on to the Empire because it was necessary for Britain's renewal of peacetime reconstruction. And that sense of complementarity manufactured for primal products lasted through until the end of the Korean War boom and so say till the mid-50s. From that time onwards, the relationship, the historic relationship between the center and the periphery tended to decline. Primary problems. Products were no longer in the demand they had been immediately after the war. So purchasing coal in the colonies tended to dwindle. Manufacturers were already dwindling and suffering competition from upstarts like China and India in cheap manufactured textiles, for instance. And then something else happened which attracted the attention of manufacturers and others. Europe began to recover from the war much faster than had been anticipated. So manufacturers, not all of them, but some, were attracted by Europe, which they hadn't anticipated. So by 1960, which is the classic year of decolonization and it all finished after that, you can see that the economic ties between Brit Britain in its empire whitcode and you got a glimpse of better prospects in Europe. So after the 1960s, the empire ceased to be of economic significance except for particular interests. And nationally, it ceased to be of great importance. The second aspect of this, as you might call it, political opposition, national. It's hard for us to imagine now the way in which the concept of empire had permeated, indeed saturated British society. You couldn't pick up a newspaper, you couldn't look at a hoarding, you couldn't go to see the news on the cinema, on the radio without having images of the Empire. It was one of the things that held Britain together. If you were very rich or very poor, the Empire was there. And so when the Empire fell away, that removed one of the pillars of what it was to be British. And so the Empire during its lifetime was important, important, and in a way that we may not fully have appreciated. Its demise was important because of the political consequences that I've outlined.
- [32:46]
A
I think that tees me up almost perfectly for a large jump, but I'm sure, you can tie it together. And the book culminates in a sense with Brexit. Yeah. Brexit is presented in the book not simply as a cause of Britain's difficulties, but of. As a symptom of a much deeper historical process. Could you explain how you see the relationship between this longer story that the book tells and the referendum of 2016?
- [33:14]
B
Yes, I'll do my best. Well, going back to my starting point, I think it's conventional and I don't want to understate the incredible value of books written by. By my colleagues and others, but Brexit is normally seen as a relatively recent phenomenon. And in a literal sense, it's true, but in the sense of growing discontent, we have to go back to the 1980s. We go back a little bit before because as I just said, the end of the empire in the 1960s removed one of the props of what it was to be British from the 1960s as well, church attendance, which we don't think about very much now, but for good reasons, because church attendance plummeted. And historically, from the 19th century, the established church, the Anglican Church, had been a pillar of what. What it was to be Anglican and to be British. And this was not just in the air and in the head, because churches, of course, had parishes and parishes were the center of communities. So the decline of the church was a second thing. And then thirdly, you have the monarchy. Now, the monarchy had stood as high as it's ever been during the war because the king and Queen. Queen stayed in London and they were the center of resistance, a great symbol. Now the monarchy continued, especially under Elizabeth ii, to be widely respected. But by the time you get to the late 19th century, the younger generation of royals were experimenting with how to modernize the monarchy. And there were various things now being publicized on television as well, which somewhat dented the image of the monarchy. It didn't remove it, of course. Monarchy still respected, but it didn't have the strength and centrality that it once had. So those three things tended to weaken the concept of nationality. Now we add in the consequences of the shift for manufacturing into finance and services, and you remember the implication of that for growth in the southeast of England centered on London, and the relative decline of the old manufacturing, coal mining, steel making industries elsewhere. And that development, the increasing inequality, did tend to harbor, as I mentioned earlier, the beginnings of a political discontent about regions and social groups who felt left behind. And if you look at the figures for inequality, link them up with the figures for unemployment, and then you broaden it a little bit to find discontent developing not among the poor, but among retirees in the seaside towns, for example, who were not financially stretched, but who felt that the world they had known of empire, of steady monarchy and so on, had been eroded. And they lost confidence in a Britain that was no longer around them and they felt could no longer be reconstituted. So you have all of that simmering and developing. And then 2008, the great financial crisis hit. And the result of the financial crisis, I have to do this very quickly, was austerity. Britain, unlike other countries, chose austerity as the way of getting back to a position we had previously, because we had to spend a lot of money bailing the banks out. And it was the ordinary people, the ordinary citizens who paid for that. And there was a lot of unemployment, there was a lot of, a degree of, of property loss through mortgages being called in and so on. So 2008 crystallized the discontent that had been developing from the late 19th century. Lo and behold, when that happens, there are two possibilities. Either the existing prediction, political parties take note of this and adjust, or if they fail, fringe parties will develop to capitalize and stir up the discontent, which I forewe well, the two political front parties fails grandly to deal with this problem. And as I've mentioned, our reaction to, to the financial crisis was actually to make things worse, though that was not its intention. The Labour Party stood aside. It was having one of its usual battles for leadership and was out of it. So the voting population looked at the political parties and they did not see that either of them was going to come forward with a solution to their problem problems. And they were right. And at that point, parties which we will roughly call populist, emerged, hence we have Ukip, hence we had Brexit. And at that point the Conservative Party jumped on board, seeing the way things were going. The referendum, which the Prime Minister Cameron had called, led to a vote marginally in favor of Brexit. And so that is what happened. Serf du Party becoming Brexiteers, as we call them, then road to power as a result of that. And I'll just finish off by saying that, tragically, if you like to put it this way, neither of these parts parties had succeeded in even addressing the problems that I started out with the Conservatives under Brexit, they had no policy other than hoping that Brexit would solve everything. Of course it didn't. It created more problems. And the assessment of the consequences for the British economy of Brexit. Brexit are that in future we're going to lose about 4% of our gross domestic product simply by having greater difficulties in trading with our greatest trading partner on continental Europe. The Labour Party, which took office in 2024 and is now with us, wasted its 14 years in office position. It did not rethink its policies to take account of the world that we were in, take account of finance and services, take account of the uneven development of the country which had left so many regions behind, take account of the growing discontent in Wales and Scotland in particular, which had gained from the European Community and lost as a result of Brexit. Neither party took account of this. And the result now is that people like me are writing books about it in order to draw attention to what I think is a. It really is. The word is overused. But I meant a music. Historic challenge to British society as a nation, as an economy, as society at this moment.
- [41:49]
A
Yeah. I mean, when I was reading and also from my personal sort of observations, I was sort of struck that it's a very. Almost like an unexpected alliance, that a lot of the more pro Brexit Tories are ones that are linked with the city and linked with uneven development, and yet some of the largest support is coming from these, the deprived regions that the cities drained it from. And it's not a. I'm laughing now, but I think it's one of those, if you don't laugh, you'll cry. And these are also often the areas, like the Northeast, where I grew up, where significant amount of funding came from the EU as well.
- [42:29]
B
May I just insert something here?
- [42:31]
A
Here? Absolutely.
- [42:32]
B
You've tricked something in my mind that I think listeners might respond to this particular example. I've talked, and you've talked about regional inequality. One way of measuring this which sticks in the mind is this. If you live in the northeast of England, your expectations of life at birth is 72.2 years. If you live in the Southeast, it is 82.2 years. That summarizes a whole wider world of differentials in inequality.
- [43:19]
A
I think that's one of those really wonderful things. Figures that. Yeah. You as someone who also dabbles. Well, I dabble. You mastered economic history. Figures like that, I think, really are useful for just summarizing things. And now I think we're getting towards the end of this wonderful interview, and I don't really want it to end, but all things must end. And I want to make it really clear that the book doesn't just simply diagnose problems, but it does look outward, particularly to our European neighbors for a sense of what alternatives might look like. It's tempting to see that as an invitation to discuss policy, but I want to maybe think about something broader. After spending several years researching and writing this tree and having lived through the change you describe, what do you hope readers take away from this book?
- [44:10]
B
Okay, this is my big moment. Well, I would would say firstly, perhaps a bit merrily, and he would like readers to accept the classic formulation of Karl Marx, Adam Smith, Montesquieu and others that you can't fully understand the present without knowing its history. History is not just a chunk of background to the present. History encloses the causes that appear later in our vision. And if we don't trace them through the stratigraphy of the past, we're going to lose elements of the explanation that we're striving for. That's one thing and something else that's come out of my starting point, my discontent with where we are and my regret that we are in such a mess. As I said, I am possibly at an advanced age and having been very fortunate, I am not possibly affected. But I am affected because the society I live in seems to me to be no longer at ease with itself. These inequalities are manifested in various ways which I think are also disuniting us. Quite apart from the attempt of Reform Party to unite us. Unite us on the basis of discontents, basically. And that, I think is a bad sign for national unity, for the sense of Britishness. We don't know what it is to be British anymore. The Scots know what it is to the Scots. The Welsh know what it is to be Welsh. So we are in a turmoil and we need a political solution that is going to pull things together and make sure that we do adopt the important, controversial, painful changes necessarily. In my last chapter, I do suggest some possibilities from a historical point of view that are consistent with my analysis, yet fit with recommendations being made by some economists. And behind all this is my concern, as I said, not with myself, but with the present and next generation of British citizens. A younger generation which is lumbered with university fees, which I didn't have to pay. A younger generation, which, unless they are already privileged, will have difficulties getting into the housing market. A younger generation, which has difficulties even with qualifications for getting jobs, still less it has to negotiate AI and its consequences in the future. And it seems to me the first time perhaps in history, don't quote me on this, that we may be depriving the younger generation of the one thing that it has that inspires the rest of us. And that is hope.
- [47:55]
A
Yeah, I hope that the listeners took that, I think, in the way that it was intended, in that there is a degree of optimism in there, despite the pessimism. But I think that, yeah, it's not a. I don't really want to emphasize. It's not, despite the title and the subtitle and possibly some of the contents, think the book isn't all doom and gloom. So, yeah, I think, if that's worth making clear, I think. On that note, I just really want to thank you for joining me today and for. Yeah, and for discussing this and also for writing the book. I'll just remind the listeners that today we've been discussing AG Hopkins, the Land Where Nothing Works, How Britain Lost the Plot, which is out now with Princeton University Press. Thank you, Professor Hopkins, thank you for inviting me.
- [48:45]
B
I've enjoyed our exchanges and I hope the listeners will get something out of the talk that I've been able to give.
- [48:53]
A
I'm sure they will. Thank you.
- [48:55]
C
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- [49:29]
B
Sa.