A recent visit to the United Kingdom left me convinced that South Africa, despite all its glaring problems, has a more direct route to improvement than Britain. Both countries are stuck in low-growth traps. The difference lies in the nature of those traps and in how difficult they will be to escape.
Britain presents an impressive face to the world: richer, cleaner, and more orderly than South Africa in many visible ways. Its institutions function better, its administration is more competent, and daily life feels more predictable.
Yet that very cushion may be part of the problem. Over time, the country has built a deeply entrenched culture of safety, redistribution, and risk aversion.
South Africa is messier and more dysfunctional on the surface, and its failures scream for attention. But beneath them one finds a society with a stronger instinctive mistrust of the state, a habit of practical improvisation and self-reliance, a greater willingness to take risks, and – for the time being – a lighter overall regulatory burden, even as the government keeps trying to pile on more.
Britain’s safety-first settlement
Some everyday encounters during my stay stuck with me. I was told that in some offices, workplace rules dictate that engineers are not allowed to change their own lightbulbs. Climbing a ladder is considered too dangerous, so specialised staff with specialised equipment must handle it. When I went to buy razor blades, I had to get permission from a sales assistant. The reason given was safety: the streets, I was told, are full of dangerous teens who slash people at random.
These observations point to a broader pattern in which the pursuit of safety has steadily crowded out freedom.
Britain has made a lopsided trade-off. For example, it has sacrificed much of its energy freedom chasing protection from the climate apocalypse, embracing renewables that drive up electricity costs because their intermittency requires expensive backup systems to be kept on standby.
The national grid is already showing signs of strain. At the end of June, during a heatwave, there were several episodes of low grid frequency – a direct threat to system stability – forcing the operator to buy additional power at short notice from continental sources, sometimes at extraordinary prices and after securing special permissions to exceed normal interconnector limits.
On at least one evening the frequency fell below safe operational thresholds for an extended period, and the situation was stabilised in part by curtailing exports via “Emergency Assistance” requests to European partners. Experts like Kathryn Porter have warned that normalising such emergency measures, including cutting exports during low-frequency events, could create serious risks this coming winter when Britain relies more heavily on imports.
At the same time, the country is tightening its controls on speech in the name of preventing offence. In 2023 police made over 12,000 arrests – more than thirty a day – under laws covering electronic and postal messages judged grossly offensive or menacing. Defenders of these powers note that most of those arrested are never charged, and that is true: prosecutions have fallen even as arrests have climbed. But that is the more troubling part, not the reassuring one. Thousands of people are hauled in each year over something they have said and then released without charge, so that the process becomes the punishment and everyone watching learns to keep quiet.
Online safety legislation hands the government wider powers to monitor and shape public speech, while workplace rules treat competent adults as if they cannot be trusted to change a lightbulb and buying razor blades turns into a supervised activity. The cumulative effect is a society that feels ever more managed and timid, its old dynamism draining away.
Taxation is high and sharply progressive. According to the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World index, the United Kingdom ranked 13th globally in the latest available data (for 2023, published 2025), with a score of 7.88 out of 10. This represents a respectable position, but it reflects a long, slow decline from higher rankings in the early 2000s, when Britain often placed in the global top 10 with stronger scores. On “size of government”, the UK now ranks 115th in the world.
The direction of travel is clear enough. The current government has already leaned on bracket creep – the quiet tax rise that occurs when frozen thresholds pull more people into higher bands as wages and inflation climb, with no minister ever having to announce an increase – and it has raised employer National Insurance contributions.
Senior Labour figures are now floating more: raising capital gains tax to bring it in line with income tax rates, taxing land values, reforming property taxes, and even a wealth tax on the well-off. Andy Burnham, who made his name as mayor of Greater Manchester and is on the verge of succeeding Keir Starmer as prime minister, embodies the instinct behind all of it – the conviction that redistribution and state spending should come before incentives for growth and private initiative. Whatever the merits of any single measure, the cumulative effect is to pile more weight on
an already heavy and rising tax burden.
The result is a nation that once powered the Industrial Revolution now struggling to rediscover its animal spirits. Its ambition has been flattened. A genuine cultural shift would be needed to reverse course, and the visionary leadership required to drive it is conspicuously absent.
South Africa’s different trap
South Africa shares some of these burdens. Growth remains painfully low, averaging 0.7% over the last decade, while unemployment sits near 32-33%. In 2025 South Africa’s economy was just 6.7% larger than it had been a decade earlier, an extraordinary indictment of the policy environment under ANC rule – even setting aside the pandemic.
Violent crime continues at shocking levels, with over 5,000 murders recorded in the first three months of 2026 alone – an average of roughly 58 per day, even after some quarterly declines. The country’s infrastructure is neglected and visibly degrading, corruption persists undisturbed, and race-based policies such as BEE distort markets and deter investment.
Yet if you look past the headlines, another perspective emerges. Ordinary South Africans have developed a deep, healthy scepticism of the state after decades of broken promises. They don’t wait for government to solve their problems; they get on with it themselves. Private security fills gaps where policing fails. During load-shedding, households and businesses improvised generators, solar installations, and other workarounds with impressive speed. Township entrepreneurs operate with real energy despite the obstacles. There is a visible willingness to take risks and innovate simply because survival requires it.
Our regulatory environment, while far from ideal and getting heavier in places, is in practice lighter than Britain’s in many ordinary areas of life. The informal economy is large and lively. These traits are hard-won adaptations to difficult conditions. But they represent real latent strengths that a country sunk in managed safety and paternalism may have lost.
The decisive variable is political culture
The comparison feels counterintuitive at first. Britain enjoys better institutions, higher average wealth, and more reliable administration. Its decline is cushioned and, to many, culturally justified. Voters and elites alike have absorbed the idea that safety, offence-avoidance, and redistribution must come first. Any move toward greater freedom and individual responsibility risks looking reckless.
South Africa’s failures, by contrast, stand out more sharply as policy choices. Crime can be tackled with competent policing and a functioning justice system. Property rights can be properly secured. Race-based regulations can be replaced by equal treatment before the law. Energy and infrastructure can improve by letting private capability flourish. These changes are difficult, but they do not require overturning a deeply held national consensus about the proper role of the state. They are more straightforwardly reversible.
This is no excuse for complacency about our crises. They are profound and urgent. Skills emigration, municipal decay, and repeated policy errors continue to do real damage. Britain, for its part, retains formidable advantages in human capital, science, and basic institutional integrity. But its road to renewed vitality looks steeper precisely because so much of its political culture has settled into the safety settlement.
Why this matters for South Africa
This perspective pushes back against the defeatism that too often dominates our national conversation. South Africa’s problems are severe, but many of them are, in principle, fixable through better policy choices. Strengthening property rights, restoring competent criminal justice, moving away from race-based distortions toward genuine equal treatment, opening markets, and exercising fiscal discipline would unlock the entrepreneurial drive already evident on the ground.
Time and again, evidence from around the world, including comparisons tracked by organisations such as the Fraser Institute and Our World in Data, shows that societies with stronger protections for individual rights, secure property, and limited but effective government achieve far better results. In the freest economies, average incomes are many times higher, poverty rates far lower, and life expectancies significantly longer than in less free ones.
Economists Robert A. Lawson and Matthew D. Mitchell have calculated that over the past decade, “on average, incomes in countries with high and growing levels of economic freedom have grown by 2.24 per cent yearly. Incomes in countries with low and deteriorating freedom grew only 0.79 per cent.” They add: “At these rates, incomes will double in just over three decades in the free countries. It will take nearly nine decades for the least free.”
Britain’s experience should serve as a warning. When a society consistently chooses safety and control over freedom and responsibility, it slowly drains the vitality needed for sustained progress. South Africa, messy as it is, still possesses more of the raw ingredients – scepticism of authority, practical self-reliance, tolerance for risk – that make genuine renewal possible.
We cannot afford to squander them. The task is to build a solid framework of individual freedom so that South Africans can continue doing what they have already shown they can do: solve problems, create value, and build a better future from the ground up. This is the very core of the IRR’s work.
Our Blueprint for Growth papers and Freedom Bills lay out practical proposals showing exactly how to achieve these reforms. Through our extensive public communication, we explain why South Africa should pursue them as a nation: because doing so will make the country freer, and, ultimately, far more prosperous.
[Image: by SteveAllenPhoto999]
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