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I was paying tens of thousands of pounds in tax – and then your phone ends up getting stolen out of your hand in the street. What am I paying all that tax for?” Ray Amjad, 24, poses this rhetorical question from the one-bedroom apartment he’s currently renting in Japan. He’s lived there for eight months, ever since concluding that he was on a hiding to nothing in the UK.
Amjad could epitomise the so-called “brain drain” that has plagued the nation over the past year – a term referring to the mass exodus of young, talented Brits who are abandoning the UK to live abroad. A Cambridge graduate originally hailing from Manchester, Amjad secured a well-paid job after university before going travelling. But visiting other countries opened his eyes to what he saw as the failings of his native one: petty crime, train strikes, overpriced accommodation, crumbling public services and, of course, “miserable” weather.
“I travelled to around 20 different countries and I thought, ‘Wow, the UK could be a lot better!’” he tells me. “I ended up meeting other people on those travels, who left the UK 15 or 20 years ago, and they were telling me about their life overseas. And then I met lots of young people in the UK who were planning on leaving.” He thought maybe he should join them.
He’s not alone. Around six months ago, a new trend popped up on social media: people began posting TikTok and YouTube content with titles like “Why I’m leaving the UK”. Kate Barr, the 29-year-old behind the YouTube channel EduKate, was one such emigration advocate, uploading an eloquent, emotive video called “THE UK IS DYING AND I NEED TO VENT”. In the accompanying caption, she wrote: “I recommend leaving the UK in 2025. It’s a very stressful place to live and I predict this is just the beginning. You only get one shot at life and I’m not spending it working for barely any money helping other people become millionaires. F*** that!”
In the viral video, which has garnered nearly 1 million views and 56,000 likes since she uploaded it on 31 December, the Scottish graduate explains her decision to move in summer 2024. She first pursued a “cool job opportunity” in Greenland for four months before relocating to Hong Kong to teach English. “This is now my home, definitely for the next year,” she says, reeling off a comprehensive list of UK grievances: “s*** pay”; high taxes without seeing where that money is going; expensive tuition fees and student loan interest payments; NHS waiting list times; lack of mental health provision; lack of pension provision; lack of career opportunities; lack of affordable housing or job satisfaction; a decade-long waiting list for her disabled adult sister to have access to supported accommodation so that she can live independently.
“I would, with a heavy heart – because I love my country a lot – genuinely recommend as a young person in the UK that you consider moving,” she advises. “This idea that the UK is better than everywhere else is just b*llocks. That mindset is really holding us back – it stops us from feeling that we can complain.”
Though the countries that these Gen-Zers have opted to move to vary – from the United Arab Emirates to Australia, countries in southeast Asia to closer to home in Europe – their motivations are often eerily similar.
Lack of opportunity, for example, comes up frequently. Sol Hyde, a 24-year-old ex-strategy consultant, has shared multiple videos about his decision to swap the UK for Dubai and Bali. “At this point in my life, as a young entrepreneur, there’s no reason why I’d be in the UK,” he says in one. “There are serious problems that need to be fixed before aspirational people like myself think that the UK is a good place to be.”
Hyde believes that there’s “an inbuilt culture against success” in Britain and calls it a “toxic” environment – a bugbear that Amjad also shares. In Amjad’s opinion, the UK puts a cap on ambition; young people who want to succeed are encouraged, but only up to a point. Growing up in a deprived area of Manchester, Amjad was met with scepticism from peers and teachers alike when he said he was planning on studying at Oxford or Cambridge. That culture is a turn-off for young entrepreneurs like him; since moving to Japan, he’s started his own successful business creating apps, websites and software.
“I did a startup accelerator in the US for two or three months – I think the attitude towards people who have big ambitions or big hopes in the UK is quite different to America and other cultures. It’s almost as though there’s an upper bound on what you can achieve in Britain. In London, the upper bound is, you might get a nice job in consulting or finance or whatever – whereas when I was in San Francisco, you’d meet people who’d make revolutionary companies or apps or services.”
Other accomplished friends of his have also flown the coop, particularly those who studied medicine – “because they heard doctors are treated better and paid better in Australia or Canada”.
It’s almost as though there’s an upper bound on what you can achieve in Britain
Ray Amjad
Australia in particular is increasingly enticing for young Brits looking to relocate. A record number of young travellers has turned the country into the world’s most desired destination for foreign working tourists. According to statistics released in December, the number of working tourists from the UK had risen from 31,000 in 2023 to almost 50,000 year-on-year. This surge in popularity is largely attributed to the widening of the eligibility criteria for Australia’s working holiday visa. People up to the age of 35 can now live and work there for three years (the upper age limit was previously 30), while British applicants are no longer required to complete 88 days of agricultural labour per year in order to stay there.
Two young Brits told The Times last year that they had tripled their income, felt more appreciated, and enjoyed a better quality of life since moving to Oz.
They appear to be the tip of the emigration iceberg. Some 72 per cent of 18- to 30-year-olds would consider living and working abroad in the short or long term, according to a survey of more than 3,000 young people by the British Council. Two-thirds of those polled claimed their standard of living was worse than it was for their parents’ generation; more than half said they struggled with low wages.
In a separate report from Currencies Direct, young Brits were the demographic most likely to be considering exiting the UK, with 74 per cent of those aged 18 to 34 thinking about moving abroad in the next five years. Eleven per cent of 18- to 24-year-olds said they were considering the move imminently.
Cameron McCleary, now 25, was one of them, biting the bullet and booking a one-way flight to Thailand in January of last year. Previously a firefighter from Birmingham working 40-60 hours a week, he made the decision to move after watching swathes of social media content showing his peers discovering a better quality of life outside Blighty.
“I find the UK a very depressing place to be, even now when I go back and visit family and friends,” he tells me. “From the weather, to government decisions, to the cost of living and even simple things like going to a supermarket and communicating with the staff, it feels like nobody is happy, nobody wants to be there.” He adds that he doesn’t blame people for this – “It’s like a knock-on effect, everything starts at the top and unfortunately it has worked its way down and the people at the bottom are the ones who are suffering the most.”
I find the UK a very depressing place to be, even now when I go back and visit family and friends
Cameron McCleary
Having started off in Thailand, McCleary then spent time in Malaysia and Indonesia, before happily settling in Cyprus around six months ago. One huge benefit has been independence – after sharing a small house with his mother and brother for the first 23 years of his life, he’s finally able to afford his own place. He also commends the 320 days of sun a year and the safety of life in Cyprus – “I enjoy knowing that now I can walk to the shop at 11pm without having to watch my back or even question if something bad is going to happen to me” – an upside that Amjad also appreciates. “People leave their MacBooks at Starbucks and disappear for 20 minutes in Tokyo, and they come back and their MacBook is still there,” he says. “You can’t really do that in London; your laptop would be gone in two minutes.”
Though McCleary does miss friends and family (and, of course, a Sunday roast), for him the pros of living away from home vastly outweigh the cons. “It’s the best decision I ever made for myself,” he says. Barring an emergency, he doesn’t see “any reason as to why I would return to my old life in the UK”.
It’s not quite so clear cut for Amjad; he desperately misses British humour and sarcasm, and is yet to find a culture where he feels he “clicks” in the same way. He would, he says, potentially return to the UK one day to settle down and raise a family. “Hopefully some people in government might read it and be like, ‘Hey, we should make some changes!’”, he says of this article. Barr expressed a similar sentiment in her video, saying of the UK’s current societal drawbacks: “The more people that start talking about it, the more chance there is that something will actually be done about it.”
In the meantime, these young Britons’ brains, talent and – crucially – disposable income will likely remain far from home.
