The Price of Playing It Safe

1Nationalising risk

A free society cannot promise its citizens a life without danger, offence, failure or loss, yet much of modern politics now proceeds as though this were not only possible, but morally necessary. Every harm is treated as a policy failure, every anxiety becomes a regulatory demand, and every accident is taken as evidence that someone, somewhere, should have intervened earlier. The result is not safety but stagnation.

Britain is becoming a risk-averse society: personally, culturally, institutionally, financially and politically. We ask the state to protect us from hurtful words online, from exposure to difficult ideas, from financial losses, from imperfect public health choices, from commercial uncertainty, from environmental trade-offs and from the normal frictions of life. In return, we accept higher taxes, weaker growth, slower infrastructure, more intrusive regulation and a deeper dependence on government. We are not eliminating risk — we are nationalising it.

We are not eliminating risk. We are nationalising it.

2When the nanny state stops being funny

The nanny state has always had its comic side: the packet of nuts warning that it “may contain nuts”; the coffee cup solemnly reminding us that hot drinks are hot; the school that treats conkers, skipping ropes or tree-climbing as unacceptable hazards; the council fretting over hanging baskets. These examples are funny because they are absurd. But they are also revealing, because they show a society losing the ability to distinguish between real danger and ordinary life.

The joke has worn thin. The modern state is no longer content merely to punish crime, enforce contracts and provide a safety net — it increasingly casts itself as the manager of emotional, social and economic security. Citizens are encouraged to see themselves less as adults with agency and more as clients of a vast protective bureaucracy.

3From illegality to discomfort: the safety creep online

Online safety is one example. There are real harms online: fraud, child abuse, harassment, incitement and exploitation should be dealt with firmly. But we have allowed the language of safety to expand until it covers not only illegality, but discomfort. The Online Safety Act imposes legal duties on social media and search services to protect users from illegal content and children from harmful content, and requires platforms to restrict children’s access to categories of content including self-harm, eating disorders, bullying and hateful content.

Some of that is sensible, but the wider cultural impulse is not. A society that teaches people they have a right not to encounter distressing speech will produce adults who are less resilient, less tolerant and less capable of self-government. The proposed ban on social media for under-16s is a revealing next step — rather than attempting to teach children to navigate digital spaces safely, the impulse is to prohibit, and to hope that on the day they turn 16 children are magically immune from online harm when just a day earlier they were deemed too fragile to encounter it.

That is the pattern: a real problem is identified; a sweeping restriction is proposed; and the messy work of parenting, judgement, education and resilience is outsourced to regulation.

4Performative safety: the Covid lesson

Covid revealed the same instinct in public health. Used properly, protective measures such as improved hand hygiene can help, but the pandemic showed how quickly a society can substitute visible rituals of safety for serious risk management. Hand sanitiser appeared at every doorway long after evidence had clarified that surface transmission was not the main route of Covid infection, while excessive hand-washing routines left some children with cracked and irritated skin in the name of protection. Poorly fitted masks, worn under the nose or reused until they were little more than fabric amulets, became another symbol of the same tendency. Performative safety overtook actual safety.

5A country that finds it easier to stop things than build them

The same risk aversion is paralysing the economy. Britain has become a country that finds it easier to stop things than to build them. Infrastructure is delayed by consultation, litigation, duplication, environmental assessments and precautionary processes whose costs are rarely weighed honestly against their benefits. Too often, all sense of proportionality is lost.

Hinkley Point C’s “fish disco” has become a symbol of this problem. EDF says its fish protection measures, including low-velocity intake heads, a fish return system and an acoustic fish deterrent, will cost more than £700 million and provide more fish protection than any power station in the world. And it is expected to save a tiny fraction of the fish killed every year by Britain’s Atlantic fishing industry.

The government’s 2025 nuclear regulatory review response said fragmented, duplicative and ineffective processes should be replaced by a clearer and more proportionate framework, and that better coordination for projects such as Hinkley Point C and Sizewell C could avoid months of delay and hundreds of millions of pounds in overruns. Natural England disputes the caricature, arguing that mitigation requirements were part of the original development consent and that it is not currently delaying the project.

But even that dispute proves the deeper point. A country serious about energy security and decarbonisation cannot allow nationally significant infrastructure to become trapped for years in technocratic argument over marginal impacts, uncertain modelling and ever-expanding process. Regulation should force a clear question: what real-world outcome are we buying per pound spent and per month delayed? This question is rarely, if ever, asked in Britain.

6The permission structure: risk aversion in the markets

Risk aversion is also visible in financial markets. Artificial intelligence offers enormous potential: better fraud detection, faster credit assessment, improved compliance, personalised investment services and lower costs. Yet firms often hesitate not because the risks are unknowable, but because the permission structure is unclear. Fund managers fret that the technology is moving faster than regulation, leaving them paralysed and unable to innovate. In the past they would often rely on regulatory principles, develop new products and lobby the regulator during consultation processes if subsequent regulation conflicted with their real-world experience.

This is the paradox of the over-regulated society: when rules multiply, initiative shrinks, and firms become so used to permission they struggle to act in its absence. Regulators then face pressure to write more rules, which further weakens commercial judgement. The answer is not a thousand-page AI rulebook; it is a system of safe harbours, sandboxes and clear accountability, where firms are allowed to experiment, fail and learn within defined boundaries. Innovation requires risk — a society that cannot tolerate responsible failure cannot produce responsible success.

7The fiscal reckoning

The fiscal consequences of this mentality are now visible. The welfare state was designed as a safety net, yet it is becoming a default operating system. The OBR forecasts welfare spending of £333 billion in 2025-26, rising to £353 billion in 2026-27 and £407 billion by 2030-31. Compared with total managed expenditure, welfare (including the state pension) now accounts for roughly a quarter of government spending.

At the same time, the tax burden is at historic highs. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has said tax revenue as a share of national income is now the highest since 1948, while OBR figures show National Accounts taxes rising from 36.3 per cent of GDP in 2025-26 to 38.5 per cent by 2030-31. Meanwhile, the ONS reports public sector net borrowing of £23.3 billion in May 2026, £5.6 billion more than the OBR forecast, while central government debt interest payable that month was £11.7 billion, the highest for any May on record. Public sector net debt stood at 95.1 per cent of GDP.

High tax, high spending, high debt and weak growth is not a sustainable bargain. The ONS estimates that real GDP grew by 1.4 per cent in 2025 after 1.0 per cent in 2024; growth of 0.6 per cent in the first quarter of 2026 was welcome, but not remotely enough to carry the weight of the promises government has made. The labour market is also flashing warning signs: payrolled employees fell by 138,000 over the year to April 2026, while unemployment was 4.9 per cent in February to April 2026, up on the year. Public sector employment, meanwhile, reached 6.19 million in March 2026, around 18 per cent of all people in employment, with central government employment at a record high.

This is what dependence looks like: more people drawing income from the state, more households relying on transfers, more pension promises funded by fewer workers, more economic activity mediated by government, and more of every additional pound of success taxed away. A country cannot tax aspiration indefinitely and expect abundance. Yet that is what we do. The moment a family, founder, investor or professional begins to get ahead, the state treats that success as an immediately harvestable revenue stream.

A country cannot tax aspiration indefinitely and expect abundance.

8Rediscovering the national risk appetite

Britain needs to rediscover its risk appetite. That means personal risk: the willingness to let children grow, to tolerate offensive speech, to accept that health is partly a matter of judgement and trade-offs, and to accept discomfort as part of ordinary life. It means financial risk: rewarding saving, investment, entrepreneurship and ownership rather than punishing them through instability and ever-rising tax rates. It means institutional risk: allowing regulators to prioritise outcomes over process, and ministers to approve infrastructure without years of defensive paperwork. It means political risk: telling voters the truth that the state cannot protect everyone from everything.

The alternative is managed decline under the banner of compassion. We will become a country that bans more, builds less, taxes more, grows less, borrows more and calls the result safety. But safety without dynamism isn’t security; it is a slow decline into poverty.

A confident society doesn’t worship danger, but neither does it worship protection. It teaches people to weigh risks, bear consequences and pursue rewards. It distinguishes between a safety net and bubble wrap, between regulation and paralysis, between genuine harm and ordinary discomfort. Above all, it understands that risk is not the enemy of prosperity. Risk is the price of agency.

Risk is not the enemy of prosperity. Risk is the price of agency.

Britain needs to rediscover its confidence. And Britons need to rediscover adulting.