James Yucel: The Death of Drive. Britain has lost its hunger – we must fight to get it back

James Yucel is Head of Campaigns at Onward & Director of Conservative YIMBY

Britain is no longer a competitive society – not in its mindset, not in its institutions, and increasingly, not in its outcomes.

Since the 2008 financial crisis, we have become a nation stuck in second gear. Productivity growth has flatlined, leaving us 40 per cent behind the US and trailing our European neighbours. Our education system no longer ranks in the global top ten, with school-leavers showing declining ambition and fewer aiming for top professions or entrepreneurship. One in five children leaves primary school obese, and poor health increasingly tracks poverty. Meanwhile, 82 per cent of UK managers have had no formal training, and a culture of risk-aversion – costing us to the tune of around £70 billion worth of red tape – is choking innovation at every turn.

This is not a crisis of capability, but of cultural conditioning. We have systematically removed competitive stimuli from public life, replacing them with a well-meaning but corrosive obsession with comfort and consensus. In schools, competition is often discouraged in the name of emotional wellbeing. In politics, accountability is rarely linked to measurable performance. In the economy, underperformance faces little consequence. Over time, this has produced a culture of indifference – one in which winning is vulgar and losing carries no consequence. Without a competitive ethos, the extraordinary becomes forgettable, and we reward noise over merit.

What does it say about Britain that most can’t name our Olympic medallists – but know who Stormzy voted for?

Take the decline of competition in early education.

Over half of UK primary schools now run non-competitive sports days without declaring winners, despite nearly three-quarters of parents saying they want their children to experience “healthy competition”, according to a 2017 survey. Behavioural policies increasingly shy away from visible performance frameworks like academic sets. Simultaneously, participation in team sports has dropped significantly, particularly among adolescents – with fewer than 20 per cent of pupils engaging in regular competitive sport outside school hours. Instead of encouraging ambition and resilience, schools are often left promoting passivity and equality of outcome.

By suppressing competition at the developmental stage, we condition children to avoid challenge and recoil from the concept that there are winners and losers in life. The consequence is a generation that feels entitled to comfort without effort – a mindset that explains the enduring appeal of Jeremy Corbyn among my peers, the only man to lose two elections and still get a participation trophy.

If children are taught that striving to excel may make others feel bad, and that failure is best prevented rather than overcome, it creates adults who are less entrepreneurial, less resilient, and ultimately, less invested in the collective performance of their country. We need more Tom Skinners and Kris Akabusis – grafters with pride and ambition – and fewer anti-Britain ‘slactivists’ like Zarah Sultanas, who side with MPs that think cousin marriage is a hill worth dying on.

What begins in the classroom ends in the economy.

Other nations have embraced competition as a civic virtue – and it shows in their global standing. South Korea, despite limited natural resources and a turbulent modern history, now outperforms the UK in education and manufacturing. Crucially, this is not by accident. South Korea’s education system is rigorously competitive, with students ranked nationally and locally, and admission to elite universities seen as a patriotic duty. Awareness of national performance is far more embedded in the public consciousness – many South Koreans can readily compare their country’s economic standing to that of Japan, China, or the United States. National progress is treated as a shared responsibility, not a background statistic.

The South Korean model shows that when citizens are trained to compete from an early age – in sport, academics, business – the result is not division but drive. A culture where healthy competition reveals where we stand and what we need to do to improve. It holds up a mirror. In sport, we accept that leagues and tournaments create excellence. The best teams rise, the weakest improve or fall. No one suggests abolishing the Premier League table because it hurts morale – we celebrate its clarity. In medicine, we do not give every hospital the same grade to avoid hurting feelings. We publish league tables, survival rates, waiting times.

Why?

Because standards matter. Yet in education, public service, and culture, we increasingly treat differentiation as dangerous.

Britain once led the world in industry, science, and sport – not by accident, but through ambition, struggle, and a culture of excellence. That culture is now dead. We have built a society that fears competition and therefore avoids it at any cost. The first step towards national renewal must begin with a change in mindset: performance over process.

Competition offers that path. If we want Britain to lead again, we must first want to win again.