The Green-Eyed Monster

A friend was driving a Rolls-Royce Dawn through a town in southern Spain. UK plates. An Irish pedestrian spotted it, assumed the driver was English, and asked "English?" . My friend, who was driving, said: "I'm Irish, actually." The man's expression changed. Warmth. Admiration. "Wow, amazing, well done."

Try to imagine an English person saying that to another English person driving a Rolls-Royce. You can't, because it doesn't happen. The English reaction to a countryman in an expensive car is a tightening around the eyes, a half-thought about inheritance or fraud, possibly a remark to whoever is in the passenger seat. Not hostility exactly; something more like discomfort. A sense that the display itself is a breach of manners.

This is what people mean by tall poppy syndrome, and it is one of those things everybody knows about Britain: the country can't stand a winner. It's the national character flaw, trotted out in every conversation about why Britain doesn't produce enough entrepreneurs or why its best people leave. The diagnosis is so familiar it feels self-evident.

It is also, according to the data, largely wrong.

In 2021, the sociologist Rainer Zitelmann commissioned Ipsos MORI to survey attitudes toward the rich in seven countries: the US, Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Sweden. Each country had over 1,000 respondents. The results were not what the tall poppy narrative would predict.

Britain tied with Sweden for the lowest social envy of any country surveyed. Roughly half of British respondents qualified as "non-enviers," the same proportion as the United States. France had more than a third of its population in the high-envy bracket. Germany was not far behind. Britain was nowhere near them.

Separate Ipsos research in 2023 found that 77 per cent of Britons consider hard work essential or very important for getting ahead. Only 20 per cent attribute success mainly to luck. Among over-75s, three quarters describe themselves as "satisficers," content with their lot, not burning with resentment. Just 7 per cent of Baby Boomers report feeling jealous of other people's success. 41 per cent of non-envious Britons say they regard self-made rich people as role models.

The country that supposedly can't stand a winner turns out to admire winners at roughly the same rate as the Americans. The difference is in how the admiration is expressed, which is to say: it isn't. 69 per cent of Britons say they dislike visible displays of wealth. Only 10 per cent enjoy them. The British code is not anti-success. It is anti-display. The achievement is respected; the Rolls-Royce is not.

If Britain's relationship with success were simply cultural, a national habit of understatement passed down through generations, the numbers would look roughly the same across age groups. They don't.

Gen Z are six times more likely than Boomers to report jealousy of other people's success. That is not a gradual cultural shift; it is a cliff. And the jealousy data sits alongside a broader collapse in young people's relationship with their own country. In 2004, 80 per cent of 18-to-27-year-olds said they were proud to be British. By 2025 that had halved to 41 per cent. The share willing to fight for Britain fell from 22 per cent to 11 per cent, and 41 per cent said there were no circumstances in which they would take up arms at all.

The BSA tells the same story across the whole population, just slower. Pride in Britain's history fell from 86 per cent to 64 per cent between 2013 and 2023. Pride in its democracy went from 69 per cent to 53 per cent. The share who would "rather be British than any other nationality" dropped below half for the first time on record. And in a 2026 Pew study across 25 countries, 29 per cent of Britons said they were not proud of their country at all, the highest figure of any nation surveyed.

The older generation's relationship with success is quiet admiration, expressed through understatement: a nod, a raised eyebrow, the phrase "doing rather well." The younger generation's relationship is anxiety and resentment. Something happened between these two cohorts. The economic pressures are real; housing costs, stagnant graduate wages, a tax system that now takes 37 per cent of a £30,000 salary when you include student loan repayments. But housing costs don't explain why pride in history fell 22 points, or why 41 per cent of young people wouldn't defend the country under any circumstances. Economics explains frustration. It doesn't explain shame.

Whether the cause is cultural or manufactured, the economic consequences are visible. The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor measures early-stage entrepreneurial activity across dozens of countries. In 2024 the American rate was 19 per cent, an all-time high. Britain's was 12 per cent. The gap is 58 per cent, and it has been widening. When GEM asked British adults who spotted good business opportunities whether fear of failure would stop them acting, 61 per cent said yes. Before the pandemic it was closer to 40 per cent.

Self-employment peaked at 5 million in late 2019, fell to 4.2 million during the pandemic, and has not recovered. As of late 2025 it stood at 4.38 million, roughly 700,000 below the pre-Covid level. The rate dropped from 15.3 per cent to 13.1 per cent of total employment. Some of that is structural; platform work reclassified some self-employed as employees. But GEM's fear-of-failure metric, which jumped 21 points in five years, suggests the appetite for going it alone has genuinely declined.

The patent data tells a longer story. UK resident patent filings have fallen 50 per cent since 2000. Britain is the only G7 economy where domestic filings are below 1980s levels. Over the same period, Singapore's rose 268 per cent, South Korea's 169 per cent, America's 66 per cent. The Centre for Policy Studies notes a structural skew: British businesses spend $3 on R&D for every $1 that flows through universities; in America and Japan it is $7 to $1, in China and South Korea $9 to $1. British research is disproportionately academic, which is excellent for citations and less useful for products.

The older data and the newer data describe two different countries. The older country is modest, content, quietly impressed by achievement, suspicious only of flashiness. The newer country, or at least its younger half, is anxious, ashamed of its own history, resentful of others' success, and losing people, patents and businesses to places that feel less ambivalent about ambition.

Something happened between the generation that scores 7 per cent on jealousy and the one that scores 43 per cent. It was not a gradual shift in manners. The BSA charts show a stable plateau from 1995 to 2013, then a sudden drop on every metric of national pride and confidence. Whatever the cause, it arrived in the last decade, it landed hardest on the young, and it did not come from the culture of understatement that people mistake for envy. That culture is still there, intact, in the over-60s data. The thing that changed is something else entirely.