“Every provocateur who wangs on all the time about Britain being ‘broken’ should be sent to an actual failed state or autocracy for a month as a learning experience, there’s no shortage of them.
Believe it or not the 1980s also had delayed trains, unemployment, industrial strife, turds in rivers, crime, riots, underperforming schools. Some things have improved and some things have got worse.
Britain isn’t perfect but I don’t trust the people talking it down for their own populist purposes.”
BlueSky post by Jim Pickard, Chief Feature Writer of the Financial Times, 18 January 2026
In this widely-shared social media post, journalist Jim Pickard presents a familiar world view in British contemporary culture. Yes, the current social order cannot meet your basic needs, but it couldn’t meet the previous generation’s needs either, and if you lived in a country colonised by the British Empire your life would be even worse.
It’s common for this position to be critiqued from an anti-capitalist and anti-colonial perspective, but the feminist perspective tends to be overlooked.
Pickard is correct in his analysis that the 1980s was a difficult period in UK history, particularly so for women. The first ever shelter for women fleeing domestic abuse had opened in London a few years earlier, however, women were still shamed, stigmatised and blamed for the male violence they endured. Page 3 girls and sexual harassment were normal. Women were finally allowed to have their own bank accounts (since 1975) but marital rape was still legal. The vast majority of British women were in employment, but they were typically paid around two-thirds of male wages, and women were still expected to complete all or most of the childcare and domestic chores.
As Pickard points out, the 1980s had “delayed trains, unemployment, industrial strife, turds in rivers, crime, riots, underperforming schools.” In 1983, just 23 of the 635 MPs were women. The House of Lords was also roughly 95% male. So, government policy on transport, the economy, worker’s rights, the environment, crime and education were controlled almost exclusively by men. While state school performance has been an issue for several decades, research consistently show that girls thrive and outperform their male peers in all-girls schools.
Moving on to the present day, the gender pay gap has narrowed, but the gender wealth gap leaves women significantly disadvantaged. Marital rape is now illegal, but the rape conviction rate is still less than 2% and around 30% of women have experienced domestic abuse since the age of 16. Globally, women complete around 75% of unpaid care work.
We do indeed still have “turds in rivers, crime, riots…” but who is responsible for this? The dumping of raw sewage into British rivers has been carried out by male-dominated corporations, while the male-dominated Environment Agency (and male-dominated Parliament) turn a blind eye.
Around four in five defendants in the criminal justice system, and more than 95% of prisoners, are male. It is common, in patriarchal societies, for women to be told they need male guardians to protect them from violent men, whereas in reality living with men puts women at risk of violence.
Strikingly, all of these social problems could be improved by progressive social and political reforms. However, the opinions expressed by Jim Pickard seem to encapsulate why we see so little progress on these issues. The British cultural elite tend to deny that the UK has any serious social problems, choosing to instead frame critics as ‘the problem’, and point to other countries where vulnerable people face ‘even worse’ forms of oppression. This is reminiscent of abusive husbands throughout history, who tell their wives: ‘if you leave, your life will be even worse’.
What this debate leaves out of the equation, is the possibility that women could experience equal social, economic and political power to men, or alternatively, women could choose to live entirely separate from men, and hold 100% of social, economic and political power in female only communities.
Pickard suggests that anyone “talking down” Britain is doing so “for their own populist purposes.” Following this logic, women should accept male domination as the only possible form of existence, and to even think and talk about alternatives is framed as selfish, disloyal and unpatriotic.
Given that male domination is a central feature of every human society, we don’t have outcome data for either gender equal or female only societies. However, we do know women report feeling alienated and disenfranchised living in societies designed by and primarily for men, that girls perform better in female only school environments, lesbians report more satisfying sex lives than heterosexual women, and single women without children are on average happier than married mothers. This isn’t to say that all women would be happier living in separatist groups, but at the very least, women should be holding equal social, economic and political power in their own communities.
Living under Patriarchy 