Britons Believe Country Was Happier and Safer 50 Years Ago
by Oliver JJ Lane
A large worldwide poll has found Britons to be one of the most dissatisfied nations with 50 years of ‘progress’, with a majority saying they believe people were happier and safer last century, and a plurality even saying they wish they’d been born long ago.
Most Britons think the country was happier 50 years ago, pollster Ipsos finds, with only a fleeting minority thinking things are better now. Some 63 per cent in the UK said they agreed with the statement “All things considered, how would you describe things in your country today, compared with 50 years ago, in 1975?”, five times more than the 12 per cent who say people are happier in 2025.
The UK was well ahead of the global average of 55 per cent who felt their nations were happier in the last century, and only a handful of countries exhibited signs of their inhabitants being more dissatisfied. The nation most likely to say things were happier in the 1970s was France, at 70 per cent to just five per cent opposed.
Happiness isn’t the only metric where Britons see back-tracking over the past half century. 60 per cent said the country was safer in 1975, found Ipsos, with just 17 per cent saying they thought things had got safer now. Most thought it would have been better to be born in the 1970s than the 2020s, and even among the least convinced generation, Gen Z, it was a knife-edge finish with only fractionally more convinced it would be better to be born now.