Clio the cat, ? July 1997 - 1 May 2016
Women’s Aid found that 59 per cent of councils had reduced their funding for women’s refuges in 2019-20 and that there was a 24.5 per cent shortfall in places. There were 33 fewer refuges in 2020 than in 2010. In 2023, a government report found that in 2021/22 there were 3329 instances where the reason given for not being able to offer refuge was that the service could not ‘meet the needs of the household’. In 7704 instances (40 per cent), the service recorded that they ‘did not have capacity’. Sure Start Centres, which, in the IFS’s summary, bring together ‘health, parenting support, childcare and parental employment services into a one-stop shop for families with children under five’, were a recognised Labour success story: 31 per cent of the cost was found to be offset by the number of hospitalisations the centres helped avoid in children under fifteen. Their effectiveness was at its greatest in 2010, when they were best funded and there were 3631 centres in England. Since then, more than 1400 have been closed. Youth services have been cut by 75 per cent – the most recent data, from 2022, show that there are 4500 fewer youth workers and 760 fewer youth centres. Since 2010, the number of people sleeping rough in England has more than doubled and all other forms of homelessness (for instance, families living in temporary accommodation) are at record highs. Around eight hundred libraries have closed (a fifth of all libraries in the UK, most of them in deprived areas) and more than two hundred museums. In many cases, surviving institutions have reduced their hours and cut staff. More than a thousand publicly accessible swimming pools have been closed, and nearly 60 per cent of public toilets. So many bus routes have been cancelled that buses now cover 14 per cent fewer miles than in 2010. Councils face an estimated £14 billion backlog in road maintenance, with up to 50 per cent of roads judged to be at risk of complete deterioration within fifteen years. In 2023, the RAC reported that the number of callouts for pothole-related breakdowns were at a five-year high, and had increased 40 per cent on the previous year.
This is only a tiny sample. Most cuts have disproportionately affected poorer areas, which were more reliant on support to begin with. And all of this is in the context of increased demand – social care alone, which councils have tried to protect, now swallows 60 per cent of their budgets – as well as high energy prices and a cost-of-living crisis. Councils have been pushed into dependence on business rates (although the success of local businesses differs widely across the country), encouraged to make investments and to sell off what assets they can, including parks and historic buildings. Meanwhile, local taxes have gone up, producing a situation in which residents are paying more for fewer and worse services. When I first wrote about cuts to local government in the LRB (15 December 2016), I said that in the previous six years Britain had become a ‘darker, dirtier and more dangerous place’, and it has continued firmly in this direction. I also wrote that ‘soon councils themselves will be floated on the market, cut loose from most of their government funding, with every possibility that they will sink.’ Since 2000, fourteen section 114 notices have been issued – a declaration by a council of effective bankruptcy. Two were issued in 2000, the other twelve since 2018. There were more section 114 notices in 2022 and 2023 than in the thirty years before 2018; two of these bankruptcies partly reflected the failure of speculative investments. A Local Government Association survey last year found that almost one in five councils thought it ‘very or fairly likely that [they] will need to issue a section 114 notice this year or next due to a lack of funding to keep key services running’. I was not being prescient in 2016, but stating what was blindingly obvious to anyone who looked (including the government, which carried on regardless).
In other areas of public spending, the effects of austerity have been just as severe. The civil service itself was cut from 481,000 to 384,000, reaching its lowest level since the war in 2016, just in time for the colossal demands of the Brexit transition. Only in 2022 did it recover to its 2010 level, but then in April Sunak decided to fund a spending increase on defence by cutting numbers all over again (by a proposed 70,000). In education, school capital spending is down 32 per cent (this when more than two hundred school buildings have recently been identified as having been built with collapse-prone concrete). In the decade after 2010, spending per pupil in England fell by 9 per cent in real terms, meaning that 2020 levels were the same as in 2006. Average teacher pay, in real terms, has been reduced to 2001 levels. The legal system has been put under enormous pressure. Since 2010, 43 per cent of the courts in England and Wales (around 240) have been closed, leaving almost half of local authority areas without one. Access to legal aid has been greatly reduced. In 2022, the Law Society reported that in the wake of the 2012 Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act,
the number of legal aid cases to help people get the early advice they need dropped from almost a million in 2009/10 to just 130,000 in 2021/22. Over the same period the number of people having to go to court without representation trebled. The number of advice agencies and law centres doing this work has fallen by 59 per cent.
As the Bar Society has pointed out, one obvious advantage of early legal advice is that it prevents conflicts from reaching the courts. There is currently a record court backlog of more than 67,000 cases. When in 2018 Rory Stewart became prisons minister under May, he brought himself up to speed on the effects of the cuts he had been voting through for the previous eight years:
The problem had begun, I gathered, in 2010 – when Cameron and Osborne had decided that the department’s budget would be cut by 25 per cent. There had been some valiant attempts to save money. The first Conservative secretary of state in 2010 had fired a third of all prison officers and privatised the maintenance of prisons. The second secretary of state had privatised the probation service. The third, Michael Gove, had decided to sell off the London prisons, which stood on prime city-centre real estate. Liz Truss, the fourth, had rented out floors in our office building, got rid of more managers and promised to reduce costs across prisons and courts with new technology. But none of this had been enough, in part because Cameron had not followed through on his promise to cut the prison population.
In England and Wales, there is now a record number of prisoners – 87,973 in February this year, projected to rise to a ‘central estimate’ of 105,800 by March 2028 – and two-thirds of prisons are officially overcrowded. Conditions are known to be appalling (as Stewart attests): rates of suicide, self-harm and violent assault have increased significantly. The chief inspector of prisons, Charlie Taylor, warns of ‘more deprivation, squalor, and the risk of further violence’.
Not even totems of Britishness have been safe. The armed forces numbered 207,000 in 2000 and 142,000 in 2023; the number of frontline fighter jets is down by 40 per cent since 2007, to 119. Two showy aircraft carriers were built for £6.2 billion, but their usefulness is limited, since they cannot both be properly defended at the same time. Ben Wallace, defence secretary from 2019 until 2023, admitted that the armed forces had been ‘hollowed out and underfunded’. The BBC has had its budget reduced by 30 per cent in real terms since 2010 and this year announced £200 million in further cuts. The BBC World Service, a soft-power asset, has been especially badly affected. The director-general, Tim Davie, said this year that, in a crucial period of digital transition, ‘to strip money from the BBC ... has been particularly shortsighted.’
In the two departments Osborne swore to protect, the picture is no better. The commitment to spend 0.7 per cent of gross national income on aid, which made Britain one of the world’s great powers in international development, was abandoned by Sunak in November 2020, when he was chancellor. It amounted to a £4 billion cut. May, rebelling against the Conservative whip for the first time in her life, said in Parliament that the decision meant that ‘fewer girls will be educated, more girls and boys will become slaves, more children will go hungry and more of the poorest people in the world will die.’ The sharpness of the reductions and the abruptness with which they were announced have been widely criticised. Earlier this year, the Public Accounts Committee was told that in 2022/23, ‘Afghanistan, Sudan, Ethiopia, Nigeria and Zimbabwe received between £14.7 million and £39.8 million less than their initially allocated funds.’ According to the Byline Times, in 2022 development aid to Africa was ‘down 57 per cent. Pakistan, once recipient of £331 million a year in aid ... only received £58 million. The African Development Fund was cut from £177 million to £27 million.’
As for the NHS, though its budget continued to increase after 2010, it did so at a far reduced rate compared to both its long-term average and to the average of the (highly successful) previous decade, and its deficit has continued to grow. Staff pay was held down, also amounting to real-terms cuts (as much as 16 per cent for junior doctors, 8 per cent for nurses). What’s more, as the King’s Fund observed in its report on the ‘Rise and Decline of the NHS in England, 2000-2020’, the government ‘sought to protect spending on NHS running costs by diverting resources from other parts of the Department of Health’s budget, such as capital spending and ... spending on public health, education and training, and central administration. Decisions taken in the 2015 spending review amounted to a cut of more than 20 per cent in these other budgets or more than £3 billion in real terms by 2020/21.’ That is to say, the Tories decided to reduce spending, run down hospitals and create shortfalls in staff, while doing an enormous amount (with their decisions on social care, early years wellbeing and poverty, among other things) to funnel many more people into the system and depriving them of a place to go when they’re fit to leave it. Last year, there was a 38 per cent increase in the number of people waiting more than a month for an appointment with their GP. This year, 7.5 per cent of the positions meant to be occupied by nurses, midwives and health visitors were unfilled. Already before the pandemic, hospital waiting lists had doubled in size, with average waiting times also inevitably increasing; they have doubled again since 2019. Eighty per cent of patients reporting to A&E departments before the pandemic were seen within four hours; that figure is now down to 55 per cent. The proportion of cancer patients waiting longer than two weeks for an urgent hospital appointment has increased by more than 20 per cent. And the NHS has faced a series of unprecedented strikes. Junior doctors recently announced a five-day walk-out – their eleventh since March 2023 – for just before the election.
The Conservatives have made the country poorer. Employment levels have been very high throughout these years, but the jobs created under the Tories have mainly been low-paid and insecure (the use of zero-hours contracts took off after 2010 and is at yet another record high). Wages have been stagnant. Average pay, adjusted for inflation, is less than it was in 2007. According to the IFS, the total growth in average pre-tax pay ‘between 2009/10 and 2023/24 is equivalent to what we previously might have expected in about 17 months’. The main explanation for this lack of growth is Britain’s abject failure to meaningfully increase productivity, which had been increasing by around 2 per cent a year until the crash, before being driven down by Osborne’s destruction of public investment (according to the World Bank, Britain’s Gross Capital Formation between 2010 and 2015, the best marker for levels of domestic investment, placed it 150th out of 174 countries) and hasn’t recovered (between 2015 and 2021, it ranked 145th). Last year, productivity grew by 0.1 per cent. Hindmoor points out that the problem is now less to do with public investment (inflated by the pandemic and other pressures) than with private, the City of London preferring the large profits currently offered by short-term dividends. It also reflects regional inequality, a stubborn problem which has only worsened. Since 2000, in all parts of the UK with the exception of London and Scotland, productivity has decreased decade on decade compared to the national average. Two big Tory ideas, Osborne’s Northern Powerhouse and Johnson’s Levelling Up, came in response to this, but neither concept was allowed to disrupt the predominant strain in the Tories’ economic thinking. Devolution to new ‘metro mayors’ in Manchester, West Midlands and the Tees Valley, among other places, has been judged a success, but has not been backed up with far-ranging powers; Gove’s White Paper for Levelling Up was half-baked.
Hindmoor notes that ‘stagnant wages, low growth in household income, low overall rates of growth and relatively high levels of income inequality have combined to generate high levels of relative and absolute poverty.’ This list of causal factors could also include the facts that the Tories have deliberately put people out of work (nearly a million in the public sector alone) and kept public sector wages below inflation, while overseeing a Gradgrindian welfare regime (including cuts to housing benefit, the two-child benefit cap, the institution of a five-week wait to take up benefits under the new, sometimes punitive Universal Credit system). In 2021, the New Economics Foundation estimated that if the welfare system the Tories inherited in 2010 had been left unchanged, 1.5 million fewer people would be in poverty. The major reduction in child poverty achieved by New Labour has been reversed and the increase from 23.8 percent of UK children living below the poverty line in 2021/2022 to 25 per cent in 2022/2023 was the fastest rise for thirty years. The number of people in working households below the poverty line is now well over a million. In 2010, food banks were almost unknown in the UK; there are now more than three thousand. Between April 2023 and March 2024, the Trussell Trust (which runs around half of them) handed out 3.1 million food parcels, an increase of 94 per cent over the previous five years. It estimates that one person in five who uses a foodbank belongs to a working household. An astonishing fact: British children born and raised in the austerity years are shorter than those in recent generations. Another, stated with startling brevity by Hindmoor: ‘Increasing life expectancy in Britain has been replaced by falling life expectancy.’
Needless to say, Brexit has stamped all over this situation in dirty boots, compounding existing problems and creating new ones. The loss of large-scale EU grants for disadvantaged areas was inadequately made up for by the government’s new UK Shared Prosperity Fund, which – it’s almost funny – Sunak has now pledged to abolish in order to fund the proposed return of national service. The OBR’s most recent estimates have Brexit reducing long-term productivity by 4 per cent and reducing both imports and exports by 15 per cent relative to non-Brexit projections. The new, much touted trade deals with Japan and Australia should each increase UK GDP by 0.1 per cent over fifteen years.
Why, with this record, did the Tories keep on winning? Let’s start with some qualifications. They have actually only won twice, failing to gain a majority in 2010 and in 2017. In 2015, Cameron achieved a tiny majority of ten; only Johnson went big with a majority of eighty in 2019, which by the time Parliament was dissolved last week had been reduced, by suspensions of the whip, by-election defeats and defections, to 47. But they have increased their vote share: in 2010 they won 36.1 per cent; in 2015 36.9 per cent; in 2017 and 2019 they won 42.3 per cent and 43.6 per cent respectively. In the last two elections, definitively in 2019, they created an ominous new electoral coalition, using Brexit to unite their traditional moneyed southern base with working-class, non-university-educated voters in the Midlands and Labour’s northern heartlands (the fabled ‘Red Wall’).
As Samuel Earle observes in his snappy (though under-edited) survey of the ‘Tory Nation’, the Conservatives, who were in power for most of the 20th century, are always able to draw on their identity as the party of government, committed to the ‘national interest’. This has been very helpful in girding their messages on the ‘necessity’ of austerity and economic ‘responsibility’. They have also had the booming, blue-faced support of the anti-EU Tory press. Bale, who refers to the ‘party in the media’, sprinkles choice headlines through his book. There was the Daily Mail declaring the judges at the High Court ‘ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE’, when it ruled that Parliament must be given a vote on invoking Article 50. There was a great deal of fawning over May, quite detached from the reality of her political situation: ‘STEEL OF THE NEW IRON LADY’ (the Mail); ‘May to EU: give us a fair deal or you’ll be crushed’ (the Times). Johnson (‘BORIS’) was adored (between his resignation as foreign secretary and his becoming prime minister, he wrote a column for the Telegraph and now writes one for the Mail). Truss (‘LIZ’) was too: ‘Cometh the hour, cometh the woman,’ the Mail said. Later, along with the Times, Telegraph, Metro and Express, it led with her declaration, on entering Downing Street, that ‘Together, we can ride out the storm.’ The Truss-Kwarteng mini-budget was greeted by the Mail: ‘AT LAST! A TRUE TORY BUDGET.’
Too often – no doubt cowed by the power wielded over it by a hostile government that has continually shrunk its budget – the BBC has allowed itself to follow the agendas set by the ‘party in the media’ and to accept uncritically the Tories’ ideological framing of events. Between 2010 and 2015, it became as fixated on the question of what Labour was going to ‘do about the deficit’ as Osborne could have wished. (Bale, writing in 2023, notes that ‘the wider media’s tendency to portray the nation’s finances as if they were a household’s is ... likely to prove helpful to Jeremy Hunt – just as it was to George Osborne.’) The apparatchik status of much of the media has been underlined by a series of ‘revolving door’ appointments. Osborne, who had never been more than a freelancer for the Daily Telegraph, became editor of the Evening Standard after leaving Parliament in 2017; its owner was later made Lord Lebedev of Siberia by Johnson. James Slack, the Mail’s political editor, became May’s official spokesman; Jack Doyle, an associate editor at the Mail, became Downing Street communications director. Robbie Gibb, who had worked as an editor at the BBC’s Newsnight and on its flagship Andrew Marr political interview show, became Downing Street director of communications in 2017 (Johnson put him on the board of the BBC four years later). James Forsyth, political editor at the Spectator and a columnist on the Sun and Times (and best man at Sunak’s wedding) proved a remarkable diviner of government thinking; in 2022 he became Sunak’s political private secretary. Forsyth’s wife, Allegra Stratton, formerly political editor at Newsnight and national editor at ITV News, became the Downing Street press secretary in 2020, before being implicated in Partygate and resigning. And it is good to be reminded that Johnson tried, unsuccessfully, to have Paul Dacre, long-time editor of the Mail, appointed as head of the media regulator, Ofcom; and to have Charles Moore, former editor of the Telegraph and the Spectator (and still a columnist), appointed as chair of the BBC. In the end, he had to make do with putting them both in the Lords (Moore is happily ensconced; but Dacre’s elevation was blocked by the appointments commission, despite Johnson nominating him twice).
The Tories also had several pieces of political good luck, even if they didn’t always look that way at the time. First, they were able to ruthlessly exploit the hapless Lib Dems in coalition, gaining useful political cover for austerity and triumphantly defending first-past-the-post in the 2011 referendum on the electoral system (in one of their most brilliantly awful pieces of opportunism, the Tories argued that proportional representation would produce more unprincipled coalitions like the one they were currently in, adducing the Lib Dems’ breaking of their promises on student fees). In 2015, the Lib Dems were annihilated (going from 57 MPs to eight), and the Tories gobbled up their seats. The spectacular rise of the SNP after the narrow loss of the Scottish independence referendum granted by Cameron in 2014 also proved helpful: in the 2015 election, it purged Labour from Scotland (losing 40 of 41 seats) and in the long term gave the Scottish Tories a bit of a boost, allowing them to claim their old mantle as defenders of the Union. The SNP continued to claim that Scotland had no influence on who ruled at Westminster, but had the Tories not won thirteen Scottish seats in the 2017 election, twelve from the Nationalists, May would not have been able to form a government, even with the help of the DUP.
Austerity, in the short term (appropriately), was a vote-winner. The public, as judged from opinion polls, bought wholeheartedly into the Tory narrative about the deficit and the need for ‘tough decisions’. Labour’s post-2015 election post-mortem found that it had lost partly because it ‘was perceived as being anti-austerity’. But the Tories were riding a tiger. As Hindmoor writes, public attitudes began to shift not long afterwards, away from the belief that austerity was necessary, to a majority in favour of tax rises and spending increases. Perversely, this initially helped the Tories. The changing of guard in 2016 meant that May was able to respond to this mood and define herself against the Cameron-Osborne government: her pitch to voters was anti-austerity in tone, if not in practice, and her 2017 manifesto talked pointedly about ‘the good that government can do’. Johnson, as in all things, did it louder and without blushes. He ran hard against his own party’s record, going into the 2019 election shouting about ‘Levelling Up’ and promising among other things to deliver twenty thousand more police officers, not mentioning that it was the Tories who had cut twenty thousand police officers in the first place. (The anti-austerity turn also produced a Corbyn-led Labour Party, which helped make itself a convenient enemy.) As the cases of May and Johnson prove, it has not been entirely unhelpful for a party so long in power to have had five prime ministers. Each one has formed a ‘new’ government and presented it as such, wildly indulged in this notion by the ‘party in the media’.
The Tories were luckiest of all that, after thirteen years of New Labour investment, as for Thatcher after more than two decades of postwar social-democratic consolidation, the state they sought to wither was in robust health when they went to work. Headline cuts move slowly through layers of bureaucracy and service provision. Safety nets fray, but hold for a time. People don’t at first notice the change, or when they do are prepared to accept it as ‘necessary’, or to put faith in the new tone of the latest prime minister. But that period is now over, and the Tories wasted the chances they were given to switch course. There inevitably comes a time, as in the mid-1990s and now, when the country suddenly looks exhausted, hobbled and gaunt. In 2008, 12 per cent of Britons thought that young people would have a worse life than their parents; now more than 40 per cent do. With the effects of austerity buckling every limb, Labour regularly refers to ‘national decline’ and makes hay with the idea that ‘nothing works in this country any more.’ The Tories’ poll ratings confirm that this is an accurate reading of the public mood, as does a recent YouGov poll, which found that 73 per cent of Britons think the country ‘is worse now than it was in 2010’.
Yet it would be a mistake to think that what has happened to Britain since 2010 is an accident, an unforeseen side-effect. The Tories are short-term thinkers, judged by any objective standard. But by the standards of a motivating ideology, which tends to dispose of inconvenient facts and justify any amount of harm in the service of a general vision of the way things ought to be, they are not. A neo-Thatcherite ambition can easily be discerned in the country they will bequeath to Labour. The size of the state and the quantity of its contacts with the public have been greatly reduced. Local government – a mini welfare state of its own, and a long-term Tory bugbear – has been destroyed. Trade unions have been further hampered. The right to protest has been restricted. Workers’ rights have continued to diminish. Britons now access most of their services through private companies. The housing market is roaring, and so is the rental market, with little social housing between. Universities have been thoroughly marketised. Schools have been detached from local government supervision as ‘academies’. The NHS looks more susceptible to capture than ever before. Taxes on the rich remain low by Western European standards. So does corporation tax. Britain has left the EU, is in charge of its own immigration policy, and has made a series of (God help us, Truss-negotiated) independent trade deals. The market is freer, its strictures more unfeelingly enforced.
Thatcherism degraded the social fabric to the point where the Tory Party was removed from office in 1997 on a wave of discontent. Thatcherism in its second guise – represented finally by Sunak announcing the election in a downpour, soaked through in his skinny suit – has done the same, and the Tory Party looks set to be removed again. But Keir Starmer and his soon-to-be chancellor, Rachel Reeves, are, like Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, the children of their political moment. Blair and Brown, for all their achievements, continued to inhabit the house that Thatcher built. Starmer and Reeves, with their aversion to tax rises and rhetorical endorsement of the household budget/national budget parallel (‘to my mum,’ Reeves has said, ‘every penny mattered ... and the basic test for whoever is chancellor is to bring that attitude to our public finances’), their embrace of the private sector, their courting of the City, their exclusive focus on economic growth and insistent acceptance of the grim and limiting Tory ‘inheritance’, look set to do the same. The structures of the post-1945, pre-Thatcher socio-political settlement are becoming traces. Fourteen years ago, Cameron and Osborne justified austerity by saying they were ‘fixing the roof while the sun is shining’. But the roof is gone now, and there is nowhere to escape the rain.
The last working-class hero in England.
Kira the cat, ? ? 2010 - 3 August 2018
Jasper the Ruffian cat ? ? ? - 4 November 2021
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