A fresh Ipsos poll drops a quiet bombshell: Sixty-three percent of Britons believe their country was happier fifty years ago, in the gritty groove of 1975, compared to a measly twelve percent who think the sun shines brighter today. On safety, the verdict is even starker, sixty percent say the streets felt secure back when ABBA topped the charts, versus seventeen percent who buy the official line that modern Britain is a fortress of felines and low crime rates. A plurality even wishes they'd been born in that pre-Thatcher, pre-TikTok era rather than our own fractured now. These aren't dusty pensioners waxing poetic over ration books; the vast majority of respondents weren't even alive in '75. This is raw, generational discontent, a collective gut punch admitting that the arc of history doesn't bend toward progress, but toward something colder and more chaotic.
And Britain? It's no outlier. Across the West, from the rust belts of America to the banlieues of France, the same sentiment simmers: Things were better back then. The truth of decline is etched in empty high streets, skyrocketing knife crime, and a cultural confidence that's been chipped away like a postwar council flat. Even with the modern brainwashing machine, media echo chambers and education systems churning out guilt-tripped graduates, the facade is cracking. People know. They feel it in their bones.
The poll, part of a global Ipsos survey, paints a portrait of pervasive pessimism that transcends borders. In France, seventy percent pine for the happier yesteryear, trouncing the global average of fifty-five. Britons, ever the stoics, clock in high but not highest, yet their responses cut deep into the national psyche. Take the war question: Forty-four percent insist 1975, peak Cold War, with nukes on hair-trigger and IRA bombs rattling London, was less risky than 2025, amid Ukraine's meat grinder, Middle Eastern flashpoints, and whispers of Pacific powder kegs. Only sixteen percent disagree. It's as if the Iron Curtain felt like a sturdy bulwark compared to today's borderless anxieties. An Ipsos spokesman nails it: These results scream "widespread dissatisfaction with the current direction of our country." No kidding. Half of respondents believe Britain is changing too fast and should slam the brakes, reverting to the "way it used to be." Eighty-six percent spot simmering tensions between immigrants and the UK-born. And the kicker? Most agree that openness to global migration threatens to dissolve national identity, that the declining white population spells trouble for social cohesion, and that ethnic, racial, and religious diversity, once the elixir of multiculturalism, now weakens the social fabric. Overwhelmingly, they back deporting criminal migrants. This isn't fringe sentiment; it's the centre shifting, as Brexit firebrand Nigel Farage puts it: "The public have just had enough."
What makes this confession so potent is the context, or lack thereof. The poll doesn't dwell on economics, but the shadows loom large: Stagnant wages since the Blair boom, housing costs that devour young dreams, and a welfare state creaking under the weight of unchecked inflows. Safety? London's knife attacks hit record highs in 2024, with grooming gangs and no-go zones that would've been unthinkable in the era of the Bay City Rollers. Happiness? Mental health referrals have quadrupled since the nineties, fuelled by social media's dopamine drip and a culture that pathologises normalcy. Even Gen Z, the cohort marinated in smartphone screens and safe spaces, splits narrowly on whether they'd rather be born now or then, barely tipping toward the present, as if endless Netflix queues outweigh the soul-crush of zero-hour contracts. These aren't rose-tinted memories; they're projections of a present so threadbare it makes the past gleam by comparison.
And here's the rub: This isn't uniquely British. It's the West's wake-up call, a chorus rising from the Atlantic to the Pacific. In America, Trump's 2024 landslide rode waves of similar nostalgia, voters yearning for the pre-woke, pre-globalist idyll of secure factories and unchallenged borders, where "Make America Great Again" wasn't code for mourning. A 2024 Pew survey found sixty-eight percent of Americans believe life was better fifty years ago, citing everything from affordable homes to a culture that didn't cancel comedians for punchlines. France's National Rally surges on the same fuel: Le Pen's base, from Marseille docks to Parisian suburbs, evokes a Gaullist golden age before mass migration turned neighbourhoods into fiefdoms. Even in Canada, poll numbers crater as polls show fifty-nine percent pining for the pre-NAFTA seventies, when Tim Hortons didn't serve as a cultural battleground. Australia, ever the sunny outlier, sees sixty-two percent agreeing the country's declined since Whitlam's wild days. The pattern holds from Stockholm to Sydney: Despite the West's material bounty, smartphones in every pocket, vaccines for every sniffle, the soul starves.
Why does the truth pierce through? Because the brainwashing, that relentless drip from media megaphones and university indoctrination mills, isn't as airtight as the elites imagine. Sure, the BBC frames every deportation as a human rights apocalypse, and Oxford seminars teach that British history is a ledger of shame, not Shakespeare and steam engines. Social media algorithms curate feeds of filtered uplift, burying the stabbings in Leicester Square under cat videos and climate doom porn. Education systems, bloated with critical theory, drill that progress is inexorable, that diversity is destiny, that any whiff of nostalgia is reactionary poison. Yet the propaganda falters against lived reality. You can't Zoom away the fentanyl crisis in Ohio or the tent cities in Manchester. You can't tweet past the grooming scandals in Rotherham or the opioid orphans in Appalachia. The evidence of decline is visceral: Skyrocketing violent crime, eroded trust in institutions (only twenty-seven percent of Britons trust the government, per Edelman), fertility rates cratering below replacement (1.4 in the UK, echoing Europe's baby bust), and a cultural timidity that lets vandals deface Churchill statues while police chase misgendered tweets. The West's vaunted "progress" delivers isolation in abundance — lonelier elders, screen-addled kids, communities fractured by fiat currencies and fiat identities.
The poll's Gen Z split is telling: Even the most groomed generation senses the scam. They've got the therapy-speak vocab and the pronouns pinned, but they also scroll past the unfiltered horrors, border chaos in real-time, economic anxiety in their parents' layoffs, a future where AI eats jobs faster than UBI can print them. Brainwashing works until it doesn't, until the dopamine hits dry up and the emperor's new clothes look threadbare. Farage spots the shift: "The centre is moving very rapidly." Indeed. From Reform UK's by-election wins to AfD's German breakthroughs, the Overton window cracks open not to revolution, but to restoration. People aren't clamouring for guillotines; they're crying for guardrails, for borders that mean something, schools that teach facts over feelings, economies that reward work over welfare.
This widespread yearning isn't defeatism; it's diagnosis. Fifty years ago, the West stood taller; flawed, yes, with its smoking sections and leaded gas, but unified in purpose, secure in identity, abundant in opportunity. Decline isn't destiny; it's a detour we chose, chasing utopian mirages of borderless bliss and equity engineering.
The Ipsos numbers are a flare in the night: Wake up. Reclaim the sane center. Deport the criminals, defend the culture, rebuild the family. Because if the past teaches anything, it's that golden ages aren't inherited, they're forged. Britain, and the West with it, can choose to mourn or mend. The poll says the people are ready. Now, the leaders must follow — or get out of the way.