Britain 2040 - Post-Consumerism

Imagine a Britain where the high street isn’t just a graveyard of shuttered Debenhams and boarded-up shops, but a place where you actually need to go. Not for endless rails of polyester from Bangladesh, but because you want your boots resoled, your phone repaired, or your bike serviced. You might even stop for a coffee in a café that isn’t a soulless chain, because the chains couldn’t survive when the country stopped living off tat and debt.

Consumerism’s slow death didn’t bring collapse, despite the squeals from the usual suspects. The Tories shrieked that without endless shopping sprees Britain would fall into barbarism. Farage and Reform called it “eco-communism,” raging that the right to buy a third SUV was being stolen by “globalists.” Labour, true to form, muttered about “balance” while sitting firmly on the fence. The Greens were the only ones to call it what it was – survival – and for once history gave them the point.

By 2040 we’d had enough of buying a new car every five years, a new kitchen every ten, and a new phone every eighteen months. Our homes became less cluttered, our wardrobes less stuffed, and our debt piles smaller. We didn’t collapse into misery. We stopped mistaking consumption for prosperity. The repair trades came back – tailors, cobblers, joiners, and mechanics suddenly mattered more than hedge-fund gamblers in the City.

Air travel shrank, not because of rationing but because people realised you don’t need to fly to Prague for a weekend on the lash when Scotland, Cornwall, or Brittany are a train ride away. Food became local and seasonal again, not air-freighted asparagus in February. And yes, meat became a treat instead of a daily entitlement – a shock to Daily Mail readers who’d rather starve than give up their bacon sandwich.

The GDP charts looked flatter, but people looked healthier. The high street stopped being a monument to despair and started being useful again. Communities revived. The great status game of who has the newest iPhone fizzled out, because no one gave a toss. Even the banks had to find something more useful to do than flog credit cards to people already drowning in debt.

And before any American readers smirk, have a glance at your own rotting malls and boarded-up Main Streets. Trump promised “growth” while presiding over decay – a country where the only thing multiplying was debt and gun shops. His Reform UK admirers tried the same playbook here, peddling shallow slogans about “freedom” while really fighting for the right of billionaires to keep fattening their wallets. Both cults wanted you to believe that endless shopping was liberty. In reality, it was just servitude with a rewards card.

So when you hear the bleating that “without endless consumption the economy will collapse,” remember this: collapse never came. What came instead was a country that stopped worshipping tat and started living again.