We’re all in agreement that everything in Britain is broken. The whole national health service is on the verge of collapse, from cancelled GP appointments to ambulances and A&E departments so overwhelmed that it is approaching a humanitarian crisis. Travelling anywhere by train is either catastrophically expensive, unreliable, overcrowded, or some combination of the above. All this was the case even before a winter of strikes. Our infrastructure is creaky or crumbling. Housing is unaffordable. Heating is unaffordable. Everything is unaffordable and nothing seems to work as it should do.
It isn’t hard to search for causes. After a decade of austerity, the public sector was running on fumes even before the rolling crises of Covid, energy price hikes, and the double problem of inflation and rising interest rates. When interest rates were low and investment would have been cheap, we were cutting spending instead. As Jonn Elledge phrased it recently, the government “had the perfect opportunity to fix the roof while the sun was shining”. Now it’s too late. Growth is stagnant, and borrowing expensive. Brexit has shrunk the economy, slowing down trade with barriers and red tape, and taken investment elsewhere. Institutional mismanagement has been compounded by a lack of institutional continuity, amid years in which politics seemed to be characterised by round after round of prime ministerial and cabinet musical chairs. What hasn’t been mismanaged has been defunded.
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