When I hear the phrase ‘broken Britain’, I feel confused and slightly indignant. Can a nation be ‘broken’? What would a mended Britain look like? Who or what broke it? Has it always been broken? Perhaps brokenness is the natural state. The first conclusion I draw is that this is a nebulous phrase designed to prey on people’s individual insecurities while saying nothing specific.

Two groups of people stand to benefit from social disrepair: politicians and corporations. Both are meant to provide public services but both can do it a lot more easily and more lucratively if we are not paying attention to what they are doing.

I am not talking about a global conspiracy or an establishment that keeps its masses deliberately confused, but we have to face up to the fact that our constant focus on the minutiae of British society, which is frankly tolerant, affluent and comparatively safe, is a diversion. We are allowing ourselves to turn a blind eye to the larger issues, while the incentive to tackle deep-rooted issues such as the global syndication of the drug trade or hyper-sexualised advertising runs dry.

Somewhere along the way, the individual people who run our government and big companies stopped behaving humanely. They fell afoul of the inherent tension between individual needs and social responsibility. And we are going along with them.

Huge food producing conglomerates are genetically modifying and then patenting basic foodstuffs. They are so powerful and monopolising that they can force independent farmers out of business by suing them into oblivion if they violate their dubious patents.

The world’s media is dominated by Rupert Murdoch, who routinely exploits politicians’ fears of media influence over public opinion. The largest distributor of information in the whole world is fundamentally, like so many basic institutions, a money-hoarding enterprise.

These are not the actions of social-minded creatures who are planning for the future existence of their race or even their own children. No wonder the kids are stabbing each other.

But the largest contributor to the social undercurrent of unease that makes us feel ‘broken’ is what Kurt Vonnegut called ‘the most abused, addictive and most destructive drug of all: fossil fuels’. I think we are suffering from that secret anxiety we all feel when we know we are avoiding a mountainous issue, whether it be a mortgage payment, a term paper or the impending upheaval of society following the imminent depletion of fossil fuels. We are in the final moments of an era that is completely defined by its relationship to oil. No petroleum can exist again for millions of years. A bit of collective restlessness is to be expected.

We have the unique distinction of living through an age of exceptionally amazing developments in human understanding and a colossally selfish era of human civilization. How did multi-billion pound (for now) corporation BP build a deep-sea pipeline without ensuring that if it malfunctioned it could be fixed?

Why am I talking about oil slicks 3000 miles away? Because that is as much ‘Britain’ as what happens on your doorstep. Our insular complacency is a sad and malignant by-product of the industrial and post-industrial age, and we must try to cure it.

Britain is not broken. It is asleep. The people are lulled because they are powerful. If, as the sleeping giant, we should awaken and demand to know where our food comes from, then companies would find better ways of generating their profits. If we demand referendums on serious issues, then we will get them. If we face our fear of fossil fuel scarcity and demand that trillions are spent on clean energy and not fighting, then politicians will have to act in order to keep their jobs.

The only solution is diligence. If you feel that you are being wasteful or complacent then you probably are. Resist, desist and find another way. The planet and even the universe will carry on regardless. I just think it would be nice for humanity to develop space travel, and when the sun inevitably burns out, to be able ‘to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no [one] has gone before’.