Alex Smith: Well, before officials, it was people working in the community context who were really seeing more and more people, especially older people … who were reporting loneliness or who didn’t have the vocabulary to report it in that way, but who were giving signs of loneliness or social isolation. So, it was people working in education, in healthcare, in older care. And it wasn’t actually until there were concerted campaigns through philanthropy, civil society, that the government really started to pay attention to this.

In particular, there was a UK leader named Jo Cox who was a real voice for [both] the prominence of loneliness, but also how catastrophic loneliness could be. Tragically, in 2016, Jo Cox was murdered, which of course gave prominence — paradoxically, ironically and tragically — to her voice, but also made people in the population pay more attention to the issue of loneliness. And so, there was a slow-burning snowballing, if that’s not to mix the metaphor, towards concerted impact by the UK government, which culminated in 2018.

The strategy, when it launched in 2018, was supposed to work through three fundamental tenets. First of which is that it would improve data; so, the UK government would collect data on who was lonely, how lonely did they feel at different times in their lives. The second plan was to embed loneliness as a major policy consideration across all government departments, health, education, work, culture, the Treasury … then thirdly, to build a national conversation and to reduce the stigma on and around loneliness.

They also gave £20 million ($27 million) for community organizations that were already tackling loneliness to do more of that work. So, really it was about money, metrics and then a minister … the world’s first-ever Minister for Loneliness was appointed in 2018.

It was working significantly for the first few years. People were talking more about loneliness, understanding it more and maybe even starting to participate differently in their local communities, even after a year or two.

Then in 2020, the pandemic changed everything. Everybody was locked down across the country. People could only leave their house to go shopping or to exercise for three or four months. And after that, came a significant social and political upheaval with huge inflation, wars in the Ukraine and the Middle East, the UK left the European Union in 2020, as well. We had four unsteady prime ministers in two years, so there was no stability really at the government level.

The loneliness strategy was not the top priority for political leaders, but loneliness was not a top priority any longer for people in communities, right? They were more concerned about whether they could pay the bills, whether they could heat their homes, whether they could put food on the table. There was a really severe cost-of-living crisis.

And I think, in particular, when the Labor government came in in 2024, they had obviously a different governing philosophy [and] a different approach to social issues more broadly, so they folded the loneliness strategy into multiple other strategies; it no longer had its own plinth and its own strategy behind it. It was folded instead into a men’s health strategy, a youth strategy and a Pride in Place strategy, all of which mentioned loneliness but none of which gave it that particular impetus or thrust for government, different departments across government, to really try to tackle this issue.

So, in the last two or three years, the progress that has been made in the UK over the previous 10 years or so has started to stall. And there’s a really clear sense of that in the loneliness field and in communities across the country right now.

In my mind, there are two absolutely fundamentals here.

The first is political leadership: giving voice to this issue, campaigning on this issue, talking about how loneliness is insidious for people’s health, their sense of well-being, their sense of belonging [and] their sense of connection. You know, this does really relate to democracy and our ability to live with one another in community. So, I think that political leadership, vocabulary and storytelling is absolutely fundamental.

The other thing I’d say is that collaboration between civil society organizations with government and also with businesses is fundamental. In the period of progress on loneliness in the UK between 2010 and 2020, civil society organizations were working hand in glove. They were incredibly close to one another. People liked one another. They were using the same vocabulary around this. They weren’t talking about social cohesion or social connection. They were talking about loneliness. … And I think that combination of political leadership and political voice alongside civil society and business collaboration are the two factors that can help countries, the UK and other countries around the world, to continue to drive impact on this issue.

You know, the most important thing for different countries to do is to tackle loneliness in a way that’s culturally appropriate for their own countries and their own communities. And so, every strategy should be different. It should be related to the unique circumstances that are occurring in that particular country. I would say that in the US, [former Surgeon General] Dr. Vivek Murthy’s storytelling, his voice around the issue of loneliness and his endless energy in campaigning on the issue really kind of made a virtue of tackling the issue.

So again, there are countries that can do things differently, and that should be done and should be uniquely done to suit each country. But I think the fundamental is having consistent vocabulary, consistent political leadership, and a consistent effort to really recognize that, with the arrival of artificial intelligence in the future, with how jobs and communities are continuing to change, it means we have to put loneliness as a core issue at the center of our national storytelling and politics. And I think without that political leadership, we’ll continue to stall on making progress on loneliness and continue to see it as an issue arising in communities.

I don’t think so. I don’t think any country has been ambitious enough for the scale of the challenge that they’re seeking to tackle. I don’t think any country has sustained their efforts long enough to really see impact.

But [we’re all also] kind of battling against a world that’s raging, whether it’s climate change, migration, war, conflict, economies, you know, all of these kind of layering and converging issues are making it very difficult for political leaders to lead. But they’re all also reasons why we have to put loneliness at the center of everything that we’re doing politically. Because without doing so, I think we’ll see we won’t be able to make progress on climate, we won’t be able to make progress on cohesive communities, we won’t be able to make progress on a fairer economy until and unless we think about loneliness as a facet those issues.

Well, we’ve talked about the health consequences of loneliness, we’ve talked about the individual consequences of loneliness, but for me, the thing that always motivated me to work on loneliness was that this is the fundamental core of how we live.

There’s a lot of evidence that the more we withdraw from one another, the more we feel separate from one another and isolated from one another, the less we trust in democracy. Young people in particular, there’s evidence that shows that the lonelier they feel, the less likely they are to want to vote in democratic ways, participate in the democratic process, and the more they’re likely to turn to populism and authoritarianism. So, I think there’s more at stake in this than just individual lives, as absolutely fundamentally important as those are, what we have at stake here is, fundamentally, the survival of our ability to live and coexist with one another and to live in democratic societies.