Because Tesla Cyber Trucks remained banned in the United Soviet Republic of Great Britain, the only visible way that English towns and cities have significantly changed since I was a child is that you no longer see elderly men wearing suits and hats. The category of ‘old people’ when I was a child still included people who had been old enough to serve in the Second World War. They looked horribly sad doddering past Burberry clad chavs, Steel Drummers and Pavel’s European Foods on the way to some empty soon-to-close Anglican church, ashen grimaces on their faces, Blair’s broken Britain. These ‘old people’ disappeared abruptly in the mid 2010s, replaced by a generation of old people who grew up with the television and so dressed themselves in a suitably demotic fashion, managing at best a pair of jeans.
When the Thick of It was made in the early 00’s, it was considered a statement for politicians to go without a tie. In 2026 it is only Estate Agents it is very rare to see workers under thirty-five wearing a tie with their shirt and blazer unless it is some sort of special occasion. Wearing a full suit in 2026 in Britain makes you look like TheReportOfTheWeek. It is surely not long now before the tie is thought of as we now think of cravats or powdered wigs.
Ties and suits have become much cheaper in the past fifty years, as has healthy food (the 70s diet of angel delight and TV dinners was horrific) but British people have never looked fatter or worse dressed. More civilised countries have avoided following this trend. In China cheap high calorie junk food is everywhere but almost all adults are still thin. In Japan, the salarymen are still so strict about wearing suits that the government has to plead with them to dress down in the summer months to reduce the use of air conditioning. Despite the liberating force of the washing machine and the female participation in the labour force is below 20% in wealthy Gulf States such as Saudia Arabia (in Britain it is now more than 70%, and spiralling further every year).
Go to any of these places and you will quickly see why, shame is used relentlessly to maintain standards. Serptenza, one of many yang guîzi rightly expelled from the People’s most noble Republic for making subversive YouTube videos advertising his sex life in China complained constantly that random Chinese would come up to him and call him fat.
Fat shaming is the secret ingredient. There is a minimum expectation for how citizens will present themselves to other people, a boundary which also existed in Britain in the 1960s and 70s, which is why people would take diet pills and starve themselves instead of accepting morbid obesity (outside of a tiny fringe), and also why they would wear ties and skirts instead of formless hoodies and tracksuits whilst out and about in public.
Many tedious essays have been written about the collapse of reading because of the hate algorithms with little international context. J’accuse has already discussed how China has maintained a literary culture while being exposed to the dastardly mobile phones, but we need look no further than France to see that it is possible for the internet and literacy to co-exist. In France, in 2025, 350 million books were sold, almost twice as many as were sold in the UK (adjusted for population), and almost three times that of the US. 45% of French people report reading every day (barely a quarter in Britain do). Le Monde had a higher print circulation (533,794) in 2024 than it did in 2010 (319,022), by comparison the Financial Times has fallen by over two thirds during the same period (390,315 to 109,995).
