Part 7: Britain Isn’t Broken | The Long View with Jon Rose, Adam Lawrence & Roger Martin-Fagg
Part 7 of The Long View Podcast Episode 1. The Full Podcast will be posted on 05 June 2026.
The dominant political narrative in the UK right now is one of decline. Broken public services, an overwhelmed economy, a country falling behind. It is a story told loudly and repeatedly — and it is, according to Adam Lawrence and Roger Martin-Fagg, significantly at odds with the facts.
Jon Rose put the question to them directly: setting aside the political noise, what is actually going on in the UK economy – and what should a new government be leading with?
The Triple Lock Is the Bigger Number
Roger made the case bluntly. The UK is the world leader in AI development – not just a participant, but a genuine frontrunner. Microsoft has moved its AI research centre to London. Of the twelve most important financial markets globally, London leads in seven. UK tax as a share of GDP sits squarely in the middle of the G20 – neither the high-tax outlier it is sometimes portrayed as, nor the low-tax haven its critics on the other side claim.
Adam added to the picture: there are more technology startups in Cambridge than in the whole of Germany. These are not marginal facts. They are significant indicators of a country with genuine economic strengths – strengths that are almost entirely absent from the current public conversation.
The political failure, as Roger framed it, is simple: communicate, communicate, communicate. The policy groundwork – particularly on infrastructure – is being laid. What is missing is the narrative to go with it.
KEY POINT: The UK’s economic position looks considerably stronger than the dominant narrative suggests. For investors making long-term decisions about where to hold assets and how to plan their finances, the gap between perception and reality is itself an opportunity.
Youth Unemployment: A Solvable Problem
The conversation turned to one area where the numbers genuinely are concerning: youth unemployment. In London, the figure is running at around 25% – a level that, as Adam noted, carries long-term consequences far beyond the immediate economic cost. Young people who spend extended periods out of work face significantly higher risks of unemployment throughout their working lives. The damage compounds.
Both Adam and Roger pointed to a specific and practical policy lever: removing employer National Insurance contributions for workers under 25. The logic is clean. Minimum wage increases over the past two years have risen dramatically – up around 30-35% in a relatively short period – which has already delivered the ideological goal of better pay for younger workers. The next step is to make it cheaper for employers to hire them in the first place, shifting the fiscal burden from businesses to the state in exchange for getting more young people into productive employment earlier.
Roger was direct: with inflation now sitting around 1%, the heavy lifting on minimum wage has been done. The focus should shift to employment – and removing NI for under-25s is, in his view, an obvious win.
What This Means for the Wider Economic Outlook
The thread running through all of this is a straightforward one: the UK’s economic foundations are more solid than the current mood suggests, the policy tools to address the genuine weaknesses are identifiable, and the main missing ingredient is political will and communication.
For anyone making financial decisions – whether about property, retirement planning or long-term investment – this context matters. A country with world-leading positions in AI and financial markets, significant infrastructure investment committed, and practical levers available to address youth unemployment is not a country in structural decline. It is a country that has, for now, lost the ability to tell its own story.
That is a communications problem. And communications problems, unlike structural ones, can be fixed.
