6th October 2026
It is easy to become gloomy about Britain.
Turn on the television or radio and there is a steady diet of bad news. The cost of living is too high. Mortgages are expensive. Rents are rising. The NHS has waiting lists. Councils are short of money. Shops are closing. Businesses are struggling. Roads need repaired. Taxes seem to keep going up.
And then there is the wider world, with wars, political instability, climate worries and economic uncertainty.
There is certainly no shortage of things to complain about.
But perhaps every so often we should stop and ask a rather different question.
How lucky are we actually to live in Britain?
That is not an argument that Britain is perfect. Far from it. Nor does it mean that someone struggling to pay the rent or heat their home should simply be told to count their blessings.
Real problems are real problems.
But perspective matters too.
Start with the basics
Imagine being able to turn on a tap and expect clean water.
Switch on a light and expect electricity.
Flush the toilet and expect the sewage system to work.
Open the fridge and expect the food inside it to remain safe.
Go to a supermarket and expect shelves containing an extraordinary variety of food from Britain and around the world.
These things sound almost too ordinary to mention.
That is precisely the point.
According to World Bank data, 100% of the UK population had access to electricity in 2023. In 2024, 99.82% of the population used safely managed drinking-water services and 97.84% used safely managed sanitation services.
We do not normally regard these as achievements.
We regard them as the minimum standard.
That tells us something about the society in which we live.
Healthcare is another example
The NHS has enormous problems.
Waiting times, staff shortages, cancelled appointments and the pressure created by an ageing population are all legitimate concerns.
But the basic principle remains remarkable.
If you become seriously ill, the ability to receive treatment through a publicly funded health service is not dependent on whether you have several thousand pounds sitting in the bank.
Hospital treatment is generally free to people ordinarily resident in the UK.
That does not mean every patient gets the treatment they want when they want it.
It does mean that the financial risk associated with becoming seriously ill is very different from what it would be in a system where the ability to pay determined access to essential treatment.
And despite all the criticism directed at the NHS, the latest ONS national wellbeing figures found that satisfaction with the healthcare system had risen from 50.1% to 57.2% over the year to March 2026.
There is room for improvement.
But there is also something worth preserving.
We are living longer
Life expectancy is another measure of the underlying advantages of modern Britain.
World Bank data puts UK life expectancy at birth at about 81.4 years in 2024.
Of course, that headline figure hides enormous differences between individuals and communities.
And Britain has a serious problem with healthy life expectancy. ONS figures show that the number of years people can expect to live in good health has declined in recent years.
So again, the story is not simply good or bad.
But compare today's Britain with the Britain of a century ago and the transformation is extraordinary.
Many diseases that once killed people young can now be treated.
Operations that would once have been impossible are routine.
A child born today has access to education, healthcare, communications and opportunities that previous generations could barely have imagined.
We are richer than we sometimes realise
The latest ONS figures provide another useful reality check.
Median household disposable income reached £39,200 in the year to March 2025, an increase of 3.5% on the previous year. Even the poorest fifth of households saw median disposable income rise by 5.6% to £18,300.
That certainly does not mean everyone is comfortable.
Almost one in five people were still in relative low income after housing costs, while 24.6% of adults in April 2026 said they found it fairly or very difficult to get by financially.
So we should not use averages to tell somebody who is struggling that they are imagining their difficulties.
But neither should we allow today's financial pressures to make us forget the extraordinary material improvements achieved over several generations.
Technology has transformed everyday life
Think about what is sitting in the average British home.
A mobile phone can provide access to a library, bank, map, camera, television, radio, newspaper, shopping centre and telephone service.
The internet allows someone in Caithness to communicate instantly with somebody on the other side of the world.
A small business can advertise internationally without owning a shop in London.
A pensioner can keep in touch with family hundreds of miles away.
And even in this area there has been substantial progress. ONS figures show the proportion of adults without internet access fell from 10.7% in 2020 to 4.9% in 2025.
We may complain when the broadband goes down.
But the fact that we expect broadband to be there at all would have seemed extraordinary to previous generations.
Britain is not a poor country
Perhaps this is the biggest point.
The United Nations Development Programme's latest Human Development Index places the UK 13th in the world, with a score of 0.946. The index takes account of health, education and income rather than simply measuring the size of the economy.
Britain therefore sits firmly among the world's highest-development countries.
That does not mean everybody here is prosperous.
It does not mean poverty does not exist.
It certainly does not mean that governments should stop trying to improve things.
It simply puts our problems into a wider context.
There are billions of people in the world who would regard some of the things we complain about as luxuries.
But perhaps we should be careful with comparisons
There is an obvious danger in this argument.
Telling somebody in Britain who cannot afford their heating bill that people elsewhere have it worse is not much help.
Nor should comparisons with poorer countries become an excuse for accepting falling living standards.
A rich country should expect more of itself.
If we have the resources to provide better healthcare, housing, education and infrastructure, then we should debate how to do it.
The fact that another country has worse conditions does not make Britain's shortcomings acceptable.
But the opposite mistake is also possible.
If we spend all our time looking at what is going wrong, we can gradually develop the impression that almost everything is going wrong.
That simply isn't true.
Perhaps we need a better balance
The ONS national wellbeing statistics make the point rather well.
Britain's picture is mixed.
There are serious concerns about financial pressures, health and confidence.
But there are also improvements in some areas. Income is above pre-pandemic levels. Income inequality has fallen compared with 2019. Internet access has improved. Physical activity has increased. Satisfaction with healthcare has improved over the past year.
That is a much more complicated picture than either "Britain is broken" or "Britain is doing fine".
Perhaps the truth is somewhere between the two.
Britain is a wealthy, highly developed country facing some very difficult problems.
And because we are wealthy and highly developed, we have the resources to tackle many of them.
That should give us some grounds for optimism.
And what about Caithness?
There is perhaps an even stronger lesson for communities such as ours.
We can look at Wick town centre and see empty shops.
We can worry about the future of Dounreay.
We can complain about roads, healthcare provision, public transport, housing and the distance to Inverness.
All of those concerns are legitimate.
But Caithness is still part of a country where most homes have electricity, clean water, sanitation, heating, broadband, supermarkets, schools and access to healthcare.
We have the Pentland Firth on our doorstep, some of the finest scenery in Europe and an extraordinary amount of renewable energy potential.
We have Dounreay's scientific heritage, UHI, agriculture, fishing, tourism and a growing interest in what new technology might mean for remote areas.
The question perhaps should not always be "What has gone wrong?"
It should sometimes be:
"What have we got that we can build on?"
Counting our blessings does not mean giving up
There is nothing wrong with being demanding.
Indeed, people should demand good public services, decent wages, affordable homes and competent government.
But perhaps we should also occasionally recognise what has already been achieved.
A person living in Britain today can expect clean water from the tap, electricity at the flick of a switch, modern communications, a functioning banking system, widespread education, publicly funded healthcare and a level of personal freedom that many people elsewhere in the world can only dream about.
We should not take any of it for granted.
And perhaps that is the real point.
Counting our blessings does not mean accepting things as they are. It means recognising what we have while deciding what needs to be better.
There is plenty to complain about in Britain.
But there is also an enormous amount to be grateful for.
Perhaps we need to remember both.