The Only Way Is Up E-Book

Polly Toynbee

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 401

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

'The kind of brilliantly written polemic that Toynbee's many fans have come to know and love...a terrific book' Stephen Bush, Financial Times Labour have won their most decisive victory in decades. But what damage has been done to the country and how do Labour fix it? Political change has arrived. But the new Westminster government's inheritance looks grim. We're all in it together, the Tories used to claim, but they left behind sharper social divisions and vastly greater inequality with widening gaps in class, wealth and income. Collapsing public services at home, coupled with threats from a scorching earth and war in Europe, have left our country with gaping unfulfilled commitments. The Only Way is Up gives us a ready reckoner on how to repair the damage and set the UK on the path to sustainable growth. Combining the latest data with expert analysis across health, children's services, the economy, environment, policing and defence, Polly Toynbee and David Walker tell the story of what went wrong during the Tories' wild ride and what must now be remedied.

Leseprobe

The Only Way Is Up

Also by Polly Toynbee and David Walker:

The Lost Decade: 2010–2020, andWhat Lies Ahead for Britain

Dismembered: How the ConservativeAttack on the State Harms Us All

Cameron’s Coup: How the Tories tookBritain to the Brink

Dogma and Disarray: Cameron at Half-Time

The Verdict: Did Labour Change Britain?

Unjust Rewards: Exposing Greed and Inequalityin Britain Today

Better or Worse?: Has Labour Delivered?

Did Things Get Better? An Audit of Labour’sSuccesses and Failures

First published in Great Britain in 2024 by Atlantic Books

Copyright © 2024 by Polly Toynbee and David Walker

The moral right of Polly Toynbee and David Walker to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

No part of this book may be used in any manner in the learning, training or development of generative artificial intelligence technologies (including but not limited to machine learning models and large language models (LLMs)), whether by data scraping, data mining or use in any way to create or form a part of data sets or in any other way.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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E-book ISBN 978 1 80546 267 5

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Contents

Introduction: Their Legacy

1   Children: A Case of Neglect

2   The Economy: Going Nowhere

3   Climate: High Water Everywhere

4   Housing: A Property-Owning Plutocracy

5   Health: Waiting and Waiting

6   Misgovernment

7   Security: Criminal Neglect

8   Equalities: Unjust Rewards

Conclusion: Up, Up and Away

Endnotes

Index

INTRODUCTION

Their Legacy

THE QUEUES LASTED three long days, curling round the corner and out of sight down Ashley Road from before dawn till the clinic slammed its doors at 5 p.m. Swelling crowds of all ages came back day after day to try to register with the newly opened surgery in St Pauls: Bristol was one of the dentistry deserts, nine out of ten practices across England having shut their doors to new NHS patients.

Norman Stephenson, aged 66, was desperate; he had been forced to superglue his broken dentures. An 80-year-old shivering in the February cold was brought a chair and a blanket by one of the campaigners who had fought long and hard to get the NHS to open a practice. Standing for hours, some people had taken time off, losing precious pay from zero-hours jobs. Others had brought children with them: without check-ups, they would later become emergency cases. Among those turned away when the patient quota had been filled was Bristol’s poet laureate, Miles Chambers, his teeth falling out.

Welcome to what was Tory-governed England. The rest of the UK was not very much different, except maybe in retaining some sense of hope and possibility that came from not being ruled by Tory Westminster. Scotland and Wales still depended on decisions made there but had leeway, ambitions, contrasting values; England could at least attend and learn something. That Bristol queue represented the multitude waiting for NHS treatment: 7.7 million on official lists that included parents hoping for a diagnosis of their child’s worrying behaviour, pensioners fearful a precious podiatry appointment wouldn’t turn up, all those hanging on phones at the witching hour of 8 a.m. to see a GP. In this England, NHS care could no longer be taken for granted, no longer reliably serving need. For health, read the public sector: threadbare, precarious, understaffed and stretched beyond reasonable limits. That was what had become of the realm under the Westminster governments elected in 2010, 2015, 2017 and 2019.

Dicing with diarrhoea

The 2024 picture did not make for pre-watershed viewing. People were lonelier, saw friends and family less often. It’s hard to untangle COVID, austerity and Tory policies, but the condition of public services explained a lot. Referrals of children with mental health problems skyrocketed. Saudi money had captured Heathrow Airport and Newcastle United FC, with scant interest in getting to net zero in either. Sewage poured into rivers so that to row or swim was to dice with diarrhoea. Gardens were bereft of bees and butterflies; more than half the gulls, gannets and other seabirds that used to breed off the coast had gone. Victims and perpetrators of crime waited months, often years, for hearings put off because roofs leaked, computer systems crashed and magistrates’ courts were sold off. A plaintive voice on the GWR train intercom: sorry, no coffee, we’ve a defective urn on the line. Money and the cost of living vied with health as people’s top concerns. Once growth and improvement had been the norm; now you were lucky to earn today what you earned yesterday, the year before or the decade before. The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), set up by Tory ministers, said it would take till 2028 for employees to earn what they had been making in 2008.

You can sample an era through its buzzwords. Such as ‘precarity’, ‘living on the margins’. Fully a quarter of adults had no safety net, getting by with less than £100 in savings. What happened if they had an accident, lost a job or a child fell sick? Citizens Advice estimated five million people were stuck: however hard they tried to make repayments, however good their debt advice, there was no way their income would ever cover their outgoings. These were not the shirkers sneered at by Liz Truss: they worked, often at more than one job. The strivers lauded by Theresa May were having to strive even harder.

Those are two of the era’s five Tory prime ministers, but this isn’t another story about politics: books and podcasts have poured out as the borderline between politics and entertainment has slipped and slid. Johnson’s shtick worked for a while and the death of a clown made for good copy. People were briefly pleased to escape doom and gloom, but the buffoon on a zip wire did things that affected everyone’s lives and livelihoods, outcomes often ignored in the raucous Westminster charivari. We’ve tried in successive books to capture what happened outside the big top – the effect of new laws, regulations, ministerial whims and the orders they give civil servants. We look too at what ministers and MPs didn’t do, when they left in place dysfunctional structures of power, bad taxes and unjust spending, increasing unfairness and inefficiency. Exploring what went wrong, we can at least point up what could now go right. It’s like Captain Flint’s map of Treasure Island. We now know where the gold is buried, but it’s up to you, citizens and voters, to get the better of the pirates.

A reserve price of a pound

Economic and political pessimism was pervasive. But the Scottish thinker Adam Smith appeals to optimists, who quote his saying to the effect that bad as things might be, there remains a ‘great deal of ruin in a nation’. It’s good counsel not to wallow in adversity, so here’s a tale from the sage’s hometown of Kirkcaldy in Fife, a fine old burgh with spectacular views across the Firth of Forth. We were monitoring retail while researching for our book The Lost Decade and noted the fate of Kirkcaldy’s Postings shopping centre. Anchor tenant Tesco had departed in 2015. Within a couple of years, 13 of its 21 units were empty. The Columbia Threadneedle pension fund put it up for auction with a reserve price of just £1. In fact the three-acre site went for a still modest £310,000, to a developer who demolished the shops ostensibly to build housing.

That left an eyesore, Kirkcaldy’s centre deadened, a word describing too many former high streets across the UK. Delay stretched on. Hoarding assets on your balance sheet was allowed to be more profitable than development, regardless of the effect on a townscape or residents’ sense of loss. There are bright sparks in the gloom: despite council penury, Kirkcaldy’s Adam Smith Theatre complex in a fine late-Victorian building was given a makeover and in spring 2024 was able to mount at least one new live musical production. It’s true that towns and theatres in Scotland depended, to some extent, on decisions taken by the Edinburgh government, which had been controlled by the nationalists. This book focuses on England, where most people live, offering side glances at Wales and Scotland, leaving the special case of Northern Ireland on one side.

You will say, keep a sense of proportion. There’s always more to life than politics and policy. Adam Smith’s moral sentiments had not entirely shrivelled up. During these individualist years, people found joy and solace coming together, supporting the Lionesses, doing Parkrun, joining book groups (increasingly popular among younger readers), buying more vinyl (and even audio cassettes) and – at least in the capital – reviving pie and mash shops (eels were critically endangered, and besides, who’d eat anything that had swum in English waters?). One of the central social facts of the era was work. Jobs remained plentiful even in Yosser’s Liverpool, and the minimum wage climbed. Crime declined, the reasons for its long-run descent across Europe uncertain but surely welcome. Thousands more Chinese and other overseas tourists arrived, the silver lining to sterling’s weakness. Money might be tighter, but thousands still thronged Jet2.com and Ryanair desks for flights to the slopes and the Lanzarote sun. Beavers were successfully reintroduced in Devon and Argyll. In other words, millions got on with their lives, many oblivious to politics, just coping, despite insecurity at work, rent increases and the impossibility of buying your own home if you were young. But pressure on GPs and prevalent mental ill-health were consequences of financial and emotional stress, amid a pervading country-wide sense of underachievement, wasted lives, blighted chances. How much more content, fulfilled and stretched people could be, young and old. Things could have been and might still be so much better.

Bizarre, erratic, freakish

At Westminster we have to rerun the bizarre, erratic and sometimes eye-poppingly freakish behaviour of the party so long in power there and across swathes of English local government. Law-breaking, quick-fire dismissals of leaders and warped choices made on tax, spend and public services don’t make a happy story. It’s hard not to rub your eyes in disbelief at the infantile phenomenon of Liz Truss, but also wrong to paint her as somehow deviant when she was indeed the life and soul of the party during these years.

Politicians and those who report on them deceive themselves if they think ministers and civil servants are ever fully in charge. Economy and society are complex and social science is primitive. Behaviour and attitude may be influenced by but aren’t steered in any linear way by decisions made at Westminster (or Cardiff or Holyrood). Sensibility shifts in subterranean spaces where ministers’ speeches and rabid radio outbursts may be unheard – they are not what the people with AirPods in their ears are listening to. Consciousness changes at its own pace. The judgements people make about the fairness of things follow their own trajectory. So, for example, Labour’s 2010 Equality Act remained a fixed point for courts, public services and private companies despite the Daily Mail, whose ranting sounded increasingly out of touch with the bulk of the public. Just about everyone was now ‘woke’, meaning general consciousness had absorbed the rights and wrongs of race, gender, sexuality and disability. And, in an era of rule by mega-rich men and Old Etonians, also of class.

At the National Portrait Gallery in London, newly redone, the wall captions reflected this altered awareness. Sir Francis Drake in his ruff and doublet may or may not have played bowls on Plymouth Hoe as the Duke of Medina Sidonia and his armada approached: it’s indisputable and uncontroversial that he and the Spanish traded slaves. Online attention-seekers and reactionary GB News presenters made no headway against spreading awareness of racial injustice in the UK’s imperial past. As history was amended in the light of contemporary perceptions, that was a sign of progress.

There weren’t many. Data journalist John Burn-Murdoch pored over the graphs and concluded the UK was now to be classed as a poor society that happened to have some very rich people. Our European neighbours were simply better off. Being middle income in the UK was now to be poorer than someone of equivalent status in France or Germany. Teachers or managers in Tours or Tübingen might or might not be happier than their peers in Trowbridge or Tayside, but look at their clothes and lifestyle and there was no denying they were just more affluent. Debates about benefits and dependency were lively across the Channel too, but a British family on Universal Credit struggled on an income nearly one third less than families at the bottom of the scale in France and Germany.

Airy self-confidence

Decay and dilapidation became themes. Our neighbours endured the same financial crash, they too were locked down during COVID and suffered the Ukraine war’s energy spike, yet the UK fared worse. It had to be Brexit and the quality of Westminster government that made the difference, with ministers’ and MPs’ ideological tics and half-articulated theories about the benignity of markets and the malign state doing the damage. Bad ideas were one thing; the era was also marked by breathtaking incompetence. And scandal, both personal and systemic: take your pick from Windrush, Grenfell, the late detection of reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete in public buildings. Here’s the acronym, RAAC, because it’s going to crop up again, an all too obvious symbol of the UK’s failure to rebuild and renew.

The Post Office revelations were another symbol. The indefensible prosecutions antedated the period, though the post-2010 governments shared culpability. Other scandals had Tory fingerprints all over them. David Cameron attempted to dismantle the NHS in 2012, and years later it was still grappling to stitch itself back together again. The privatization of the probation service by arch-incompetent Chris Grayling had to be reversed in chaos within three years. He moved on and up, and as transport secretary tried to award a £14 million ferry contract to a pizza delivery firm with no ships. Help to Buy – an impressive example of economic illiteracy, someone said – was hindrance to buy, inflating house prices. COVID contracts were let to companies connected to an underwear-maker fitted up with a Tory peerage. Airily self-confident, Cameron exited whistling a happy tune after one of the most spectacular failures in modern times, losing the Brexit vote: his autobiography is much mea and very little culpa. Then, a miracle, resurrection: a desperate Tory successor plants him in yet another Tory seat in an ermine-stuffed House of Lords. His predecessor as foreign secretary had chosen to continue sunning himself on a Greek beach rather than return to supervise the chaotic exit from Kabul. However, 74 cats and 94 dogs were airlifted out, leaving loyal Afghans who had worked at great risk for the UK government waving on the tarmac.

Austerity

The sorry tale starts with austerity, a deliberate Tory decision in the wake of the financial crash not to ask the better-off to pay more in taxes but instead to cut back welfare and public services. The national accounts did not need to be balanced, as claimed in the puerile analogy played out by George Osborne: the Treasury is not a household account. He won congratulatory headlines, but for the country this was epic failure, as economic growth was stymied, with enduring consequences for household incomes. For all his claims to prudence, Osborne increased national indebtedness to the tune of £555 billion. The cuts were no way to gird an economy in urgent need of investment at a time when the cost of borrowing had never been so cheap. Stripping away social and physical fabric planted the seeds of the Brexit vote and left the UK vulnerable when the pandemic hit.

The vaunted civil service Rolls-Royce took a battering and now resembled a jalopy, its drivers dizzied by the speed at which their departmental doors revolved: in just 14 years, 7 chancellors of the exchequer, 10 education secretaries, 10 environment secretaries and 16 housing ministers. The standing of permanent secretaries wasn’t raised by alcohol-fuelled singing and dancing at Number 10. Officials might have forcefully said no, minister, but few did. ‘Well, I would have advised them against it’, an ex-panjandrum told us privately. And that was about it, despite those devastating reports on misspending from the National Audit Office (NAO). The era exposed the fatal weakness of the ‘good chaps’ theory of government, which said it didn’t matter that things were not formalized or publicly accountable because gentlemen were in charge. These gents had been to Eton, Winchester and remarkably often to Oxford, but quads and cloisters did not turn them into trustworthy holders of power; all too many were charlatans and incompetents.

At least they were under some surveillance. Watchdogs mostly remained rigorous and honest. Ministers later regretted inventing the Office for Budget Responsibility, Truss refusing to let it cast an eye over her ‘true conservative’ catastrophe. Its chair, Robert Chote, was the former head of another of these valiants for truth, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), which like the research charity the Resolution Foundation was conscience, inquirer and generous provider of data and analysis; books such as this could not be written without them. The Office for National Statistics (ONS), on reduced cash, ran mostly reliable numbers for households and habits and the state of the nation. The NAO became more caustic as the years went by, the chickens of austerity coming home to roost amid greater inefficiency and ineffectiveness. The Commons Public Accounts Committee packed a punch under Margaret Hodge and her successor Meg Hillier, compiling a devastating database of waste and misgovernment. However, MPs and ministers could ignore it and did, consigning inconvenient evidence to the shelf.

Fag-end Thatcherism

Tory ministers speed-dated around the cabinet table. What they had in common was fag-end Thatcherism. Her battered copy of Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, her grocer’s daughter’s aversion to regulation and taxation and her romance with Ronald Reagan might never have amounted to a doctrine, but it was a coherent enough world view, with its blind faith in markets and rejection of collectivism. They all signed up to the pledge, ‘no such thing as society, there are only individuals and families’. This was ideology, in the sense that belief overrode evidence.

Thirty-plus years after Thatcher’s fall, the evidence was in, and it was clear. The experiment has run its course. It divided; we fell. Her talismanic privatizations created monopolies putting shareholder dividend before investment in vital national assets. Regulators proved no match. Think Thames Water, the company teetering towards bankruptcy and state supervision of a kind already imposed on failed railway franchisees, leaving the network a chaos of moving parts. Breaking up energy supply made net zero even harder to attain. Another shibboleth was exposed: cutting taxes for business did not bring promised productivity gains or growth. Thatcher’s flagship Right to Buy depleted the stock of affordable social housing, part of the cause of the housing crisis. All this we cover in the following chapters.

The governing party had never been philosophically coherent, for all the fogies’ invocations of Edmund Burke. Anti-individualism in matters of cannabis or gender identity contradicted pro-individualism over markets. A necessary Tory quality these days was selective amnesia, picking parts of their shape-shifting history when it suited; and what a mixed history, from the aristocratic paternalism of Harold Macmillan and Alec Douglas-Home, via Grantham to Ashfield and Lee Anderson, appointed deputy chair of the party by Rishi Sunak for his plebeian racism, then sacked by Rishi Sunak for his plebeian racism. Here was a Conservative Party that attacked the very institutions that conserved British identity: the BBC, the NHS and recently the National Trust and the Royal National Lifeboat Institution.

A daily hate

They came to power with Cameron acting the moderate, but privately they vowed to foment ‘chaos’ and ‘creative destruction’ to show people the state didn’t work. If that sounds conspiratorial, read Oliver Letwin, supposedly a moderate, let alone the barmy army of Britannia Unchained and Truss, the self-destructor. The party’s long hegemony rested on ruthlessness, staying in power at all costs. And putting your own people in, as they proved time and again with ostensibly meritocratic public appointments (chair of the BBC, chief executive of the British Museum, board of NHS England).

They weren’t united. Especially after Brexit, they turned fissiparous, with new strains of Trump-inflected extremism, each with its pet think tank and coterie of journalist supporters. But there they stayed. Sustained by a deeply unjust voting system and a stuffed House of Lords, the Tories remained the party of the haves, of tax-fearing small business and white suburbanites, favoured by corporate boardrooms and successful upwardly aspiring ethnic minorities. Historically they relied on social contradiction. Mothers once voted for a party that consistently opposed their rights and benefits. They would never have won down the decades without backing from at least a third of workers, despite their attacks on trade unions and employment protection. Theirs was the party of the old, though they used to oppose raising pensions and recently degraded older people’s health and social care.

The Tories are the Daily Mail’s party, the Daily Telegraph their parish newsletter: these papers inflated Johnson’s bank account for dashed-off columns. The Daily Mail’s founder, Lord Northcliffe, said his mission was to give readers ‘a daily hate’, the objects of which have serially been Jewish people, Liberal and Labour politicians or anyone of progressive mien in public life, the poor, welfare recipients, the BBC, greens, advocates of LGBTQ rights, migrants, sportspeople, media folk or actors with liberal opinions, the European Union, universities and academics. Add to it Murdoch’s media and the new broadcast channels such as GB News, copying its hate formula to target, harangue and victimize. Social media, contrary to earlier hopes, started to amplify the right, stoking up culture wars over transgender issues, ‘cancel culture’, and diversity and inclusion initiatives in the armed forces and the NHS. Cutting aid from 0.7 to 0.5 per cent of GDP, diverting it to fund migrant accommodation at home and abolishing the international development department were sops to the daily haters, resulting in another loss of UK credibility and soft power abroad.

Writing in the Daily Express, a cruder and more extreme version of the Daily Mail, the implausible defence secretary Grant Shapps claimed ‘woke culture has seeped into public life poisoning common-sense discourse’. Here was Tory opportunism on display. They had all voted for Cameron’s very woke legalization of same-sex marriage. ‘Woke’ makes for a case study of failing to swim against the cultural tide. Despite the big bellows of their media, they failed to ignite many sparks over the iniquities of no-platforming in universities, to take one example. Liberal social attitudes were here to stay. Trying to wrench back Big Ben’s hands over abortion, LGBTQ rights, racial and disability equality was bad politics. The culture war was well and truly lost long ago.

Merry-go-round

The Brexit referendum was supposed to put out the fires. Cameron thought a referendum would finally cauterize the wound, so he took a gigantic risk with the UK’s future for the sake of internal party management. And lost on both counts. The Europhobes’ anarchic demands simply accelerated after their 2016 victory. All those comings and goings at Number 10 did not signify pluralism. Cameron was slick, camouflaging juvenile Thatcherism behind the PR operation he had mounted in opposition, hugging huskies and devising a new green party logo. Even then he didn’t win outright, forced into coalition with the Liberal Democrats. Four successors stood on the steps of Number 10, each podium personally designed, each arrival proclaiming itself some kind of novelty. May, tongue-tied and gauche, benefited from astute slogan-writers, but she left her JAMs (‘just about managing’) worse off. If her own beliefs were essentially tea-party-on-the-lawn-with-the-vicar Toryism, over the Brexit negotiations she still put party unity ahead of any wider national interest, even over the interests of Brexit-alarmed business.

For a while Johnson mesmerized, one of several right-wing journalists who clambered into the seats of power. Columnists tend to believe their work is done once they have found a telling word or phrase. He coined ‘levelling up’ but proved incapable of – was probably uninterested in – giving it meaning or substance. Dishonesty will out, and eventually it did, his Commons mendacity beyond cover-up. Back to the 1850s with Truss, as viewed through the prism of American think tanks funded by reactionary moguls: the markets she worshipped had her for breakfast. Sunak struggled to give his promised makeover any content whatsoever. Strangely, Truss might turn out to be the most significant of them. By taking Thatcherism to its extreme, she dealt the doctrine a finishing death-blow.

But this zombie has risen from the grave before, so don’t abandon garlic, stakes or whatever weapons are needed to dispatch it. COVID looked at first as if it might be pivotal. For a while its lethal brutality forced the Tories to abandon gut precepts. A stale joke at right-wing conferences used to be Reagan’s epigram, ‘I’ve always felt the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: “I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.”’ Then a Tory government – a Tory government! – had to forbid people to leave home while it pumped in billions to people and businesses. Reality trumped ideology when public health brooked no fiscal faint-heartedness. Remember beaming Sunak, a plate precariously balanced in each hand, advertising Eat Out to Help Out, the subsidy for restaurant food. Here was this no-such-thing-as-a-free-luncher handing out free lunches, which also unfortunately revived transmission of the virus. Companies large and small were propped up by the job retention scheme. Individual employees were sustained in paid furlough. People who had never touched a benefit in their lives were kept afloat on state credits. But once released from COVID masks, the Tories reverted to form, and within their ranks the Spectator and Telegraph crowd turned their flame-throwers on those who had ordered the lockdowns and payouts, in a new round of infighting.

Come together?

Inequality grew, not accidentally. Many on the right regarded it as a healthy and inevitable feature of competition: the poor more or less deserved their fate; only markets should decide soaring chief executive pay. UK billionaires burgeoned and the top tenth triumphed. And yet the facts about growing inequality that leapt from the graphs and expert analysis had curiously little social resonance. The rich keep themselves to themselves, hence those gates; the poor ditto, in peripheral estates and high-rises. The physical distance between Grenfell Tower and Holland Park is a few hundred metres, the wealth gap enormous but curtained, out of sight.

Can a country where maldistribution of resources is so large ever come together, even in the face of threats to collective security from AI and cyberattack, let alone hostile states? Climate change predicates more equality of sacrifice. The wicked issues ahead, such as migration, demand collective strength to guard the barriers and passport gates, check the visas and vehicles and inspect places of work. Undocumented people will continue to cross frontiers across the world, including the English Channel. Migratory flows pose hard questions for progressives, but dogmatic marketeers have the deeper dilemma. Pulling up the drawbridge entails paying higher wages and higher prices. There is no easy solution, but among preconditions is close cooperation with European neighbours we have offended, as well as a strong, well-resourced UK state.

Back to those children queuing in St Pauls. Tooth decay so extreme that it needed surgery had become the single most common reason for those aged five to seventeen being admitted to A&E. Long gone were the days when dental check-ups, like school medicals and eye tests, were part of the ordinary furniture of childhood. Soaring autism diagnoses, with many parents waiting months and sometimes years for appointments, followed the disappearance of educational psychologists and support staff from schools. This can be remedied. Boomers could begin to make amends.

Back to the future

That’s the legacy of these years. What now? If not yet a new world, then a new world view is struggling to be born. Its midwives are climate disaster, the bank crash, the COVID shock, the lived experience of austerity, and international tensions of an intensity unknown for many years. In gestation is a renewed belief in the necessity of a good and strong state. Will Hutton says we need to go back to the future and rework the Edwardian coming-together of progressive liberalism and employees, workers by hand and brain. We need drones not drones. Whatever the electoral recipe, some kind of social-market democracy grows out of the earth scorched by austerity.

Aspects may even be guaranteed. Take housing. Dust to dust, says the scripture: bricks and mortar crumble. New-build will have to replace the old dwellings in which so many live – one in six in England built before the First World War. In an alarming recent leap upwards, 5.7 million properties in England were now at risk of being flooded. The Victorian heritage has stood us in astonishingly good stead, but every accumulating year of underinvestment in repair and renewal brings more collapsed timbers, sewers and pipes, more cracks in the concrete, more disconnected cables. Labour failed to fix the roof while the sun shone, sneered Osborne. During the Tory era the sun shone mercilessly, raising temperatures and storms and further damaging the tiles, but these householders failed to invest despite conspicuously low interest rates. Osborne loved photo ops at construction sites in a high-vis jacket and helmet. Choose your idiom: all mouth and no trousers, fur coat and no knickers.

Generational tensions will out. Those born in the 1980s were wondering why their pay peaked in the 2000s and why fewer of them owned their own homes compared to their parents. As for those in their twenties and thirties, they simply had less; more were still living with parents because they couldn’t afford to rent or buy. Rents kept rising, having children looked unaffordable, the length of time they would have to save until they could afford a deposit kept growing. The political implications seem plain. Formerly, said an expert commentator, ‘young Britons had realistic expectations of upward mobility and home ownership, and their political interests naturally allied with the party of homeowners and low taxes’, i.e. the Tories. Not today.

A peak period for wealthy retirement

Demographics are destiny. A society where couples can’t afford children will die out. In 2022, England and Wales recorded the lowest number of live births since 2002, when the population was smaller: it was now below replacement rate. Births rose in the Labour years, suggesting policy can make a difference. Now the average number of children born to a woman was 1.49, on a falling trend since 2010 and the lowest rate since good data was first collected in the 1930s. Ageing is inexorable. By 2024, nearly one in five people were over retirement age, their numbers up nearly three million during the last decade. Over-85s will double in number in the next quarter-century. Even if they will then make up only one in twenty-five, the intensity of their need for health and social care in the later stages of life will press hard.

If the policy consequences of ageing point one way, what about the politics? In 2019, the over-70s were more than twice as likely to vote Tory as those aged 30. But the 2010s may turn out to have been the peak period for wealthy retirement. Future retirees will have less generous pensions, with their increased housing wealth less spectacular. Each year the age at which a majority of older cohorts tend to vote right has been advancing, with no sign the young are turning Tory as they age in the way of previous generations.

Those likely to be most reliant on home helps, district nurses, bus passes, smooth pavements and open community centres should be voting for decent provision, and paying the taxes needed to support them. They should also take a sane view of who the home helps and district nurses will be. If they are not migrants, the domestic workforce will have to grow in pay and number. Those contemplating their later life as pensioners and dependants may rue their support for the anti-statists when their need grows, when they feel the effects of those cuts in training for nurses and doctors or in career progression for teachers and public servants. Polling suggests more women of childbearing age wish they had one more child but are deterred by the cost of their upbringing and childcare when wages are stagnant. Making life better for mothers and would-be mothers is a necessity. Children were the principal victims of austerity and anti-collectivism. The UK, or at least England, had turned its back on its own future.

Growth culture

There’s no way up without reviving growth, in incomes, in opportunities, but also in basic technical capacities. Market dogmatics having failed, the new formula marries public interest and corporate ambition through planning. To secure long-term private investment requires the state to lead, steer and where necessary de-risk and reassure. To those who say, that’s back to the future, we’ve been there, we say, no, we haven’t. Glimmerings in the 1960s weren’t followed through. The circumstances the UK finds itself in now and into the 2030s require government to spur enterprise in biosciences, digital technologies, energy and communications as well as the arts, education, the law and organizational services, on which the UK balance of trade has come to depend. The UK is the second largest exporter of services in the world; the very phrase ‘industrial strategy’ was narrowing and anachronistic. How to harness, stimulate and promote: government alone can fuel business ecosystems, keeping an eye on training and physical infrastructure and, as necessary, protecting against undercutting and dumping by foreign predators. Only a strong central government can mitigate overconcentration of GDP growth in London and the south-east, which accounts for two thirds of the UK’s trade surplus in services, to better exploit the talents of less-favoured areas.

A concomitant of all this is a shift in UK corporate culture. The quid pro quo for government assuring the future is that boardrooms accept social responsibility, meaning reasonable levels of taxation on company and individual gains and an attitudinal shift among directors against widespread tax evasion. Misalignments between the interests of shareholders and directors have to be rectified; also between fundholders with a long-term interest against private equity manipulators out for a short-term hit. The City and financial sector were badly shaken by Brexit. The London Stock Exchange has been losing business to New York, Paris and Frankfurt. Here too is scope for better matching private enterprise and the pursuit of profit with a wider interest, mediated by the state as planner, regulator, tax authority and trade negotiator.

If trends in ageing are inexorable and the consequences of failing to invest are already visible all around us, what happens if the sharp increases in inequality in the UK keep widening? Tory politicians have surfed the indifference or ignorance of many, but social bonds are not infinitely elastic. In an earlier book we used the metaphor of a camel train crossing the desert, the sheikhs at its head having long passed out of sight, no longer part of the train at all. What then if the middle and lower ranks refuse to go any further? Or branch out in a completely different direction? In the case of the UK, a long history and relative absence of disturbance should not be taken for granted.

Turning point?

In the following chapters, we weigh the legacy of the last 14 years. The story of what the Tories did and didn’t do is a baseline, a tally for judging what comes next. At the end of each chapter we offer some pointers. Generous volunteering at local food banks shows this has not entirely become the kind of society they wanted. But society has to connect with the state, and that can only happen through the ballot box and metamorphosis at Westminster, together with the other parliament and assemblies and local authorities. We wrote this hoping an account of failure would first anger and provoke but second whet the appetite for change, knowing what we can do about those mistakes made.

This book is dedicated to today’s children. They will reach adulthood on a globe heating even faster than predicted, which in 2023 hit 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial temperatures, with all its consequences for sea levels, climate and crop failure. Will they get decarbonization back on track for net zero? They are going to need vocational and professional training to install solar panels and heat pumps, as well as the skills to tame AI, develop a domestic drone industry and find a hundred and one other solutions. So they need to hear why further education has been run down and technical qualifications torn up. They will ask their parents: what were you doing, voting for clowns and cakeism, and the deceit of promising European levels of public services on American levels of taxation? And why the rich got richer even as total taxes rose and public services buckled.

Emerging bleary-eyed from lockdowns, the public looked around and saw how unprepared the UK had been for the pandemic, with fewer NHS staff, beds, intensive care places and ventilators, and a lack of care homes or protection for those living in them. In the years before 2020, ministers had been lackadaisical, dismissing warnings. It wasn’t just lack of protective equipment; austerity had thinned out collective capacity to endure a crisis. Schools had nothing spare as they tried to set up online lessons while still teaching key workers’ children in classrooms, so many children not owning a laptop. A Southwark head teacher showed us the families gathered at her gates, hoping to catch the school’s Wi-Fi so children could do homework on their mobile phones. Hardship was visible in places previously regarded as well-heeled. Food banks became the red flag marking people in need, most of them in jobs that paid too little for survival.

But it’s only when your feet touch the bottom of the swamp that you can push up to the surface. We need to know what went awry, auditing what did not happen, such as investing, stimulating productivity, equipping people with the skills to survive, exploiting technologies, building, planning, greening, self-sustaining, restoring good government and a sense of orderliness and due process. We know a lot. Improvement and progress now depend on wresting all those critical reports off the shelf and mining them for what and what not to do next. Chances for improvement, economic, social and emotional, depend on collective choices. By 2024, pollsters were finding that well over half of voters wanted the government to spend more on public services, with fewer than a third choosing tax cuts instead. That felt like spring in the air. But history tells us that regimes and societies are perfectly capable of repeating error (the second time as farce, someone said). Yet it’s also true that knowledge and experience cumulate. We’ve been down and seen what went wrong, so now … the only way is up.

Now that we enter a new era, this book chronicles the baseline for judging the new government. This is the legacy they inherit, this audits the starting point to look back on later to see how far ‘up’ they have taken the country on a path to recovery, repair and renewal.

1

Children: A Case of Neglect

NOT A GREAT time to be a child. Bliss it wasn’t in that dawn to be young. This generation was the least physically active generation ever, said a despairing Children’s Commissioner. Exploited and intimidated online by unregulated social media companies, waiting 94 weeks for an autism assessment, never even having the chance of visiting a local library to borrow a book or disc because, as in Birmingham, two thirds had been closed, this was not a country for young people.

But consolation was at hand. Every school in England was given an oak-framed portrait of King Charles, to complement the King James Bible sent them by education secretary Michael Gove. That name rings out across the era, stamping his authoritarian seal on children’s lives, as if unprecedented volumes of mental distress and later pandemic lockdowns weren’t enough. His first act had been to lop children, schools and families from the title of his department, moving to abolish Every Child Matters and Sure Start, Labour programmes wrapped around the whole child.

Perhaps it was only to be expected that children were neglected. Unless their parents are affluent, they are not of much interest to markets, hence to a market-oriented government; many Tory MPs sent their own children to the private schools where they themselves had been. But Gove had missionary zeal, stemming from his partisan fear and contempt for educators as a vector for liberal and progressive politics. He shared with his cabinet colleagues an ideological rejection of the interventionist programme pursued by Labour, embracing child poverty, the Child Trust Fund and early years schemes. But Tory voters had children at state schools, which explains why educational resources, despite the Liberal Democrats’ token pupil premium for poorer areas, were redistributed to schools in more affluent areas.

Laying out all the Tories’ child-unfriendly actions, one after another, is shocking. Surely all governments put children and the future first? More children were living below the official poverty line, 4.2 million of them excluded from an ordinary quality of life. That was up from 3.6 million in 2010. Poor children tend to become poor and underperforming adults. In Chapter 4 we cite a Tory adviser bemoaning neglect of housing, warning that as a society we had fallen out of love with the future.

That things were not going well for children in the other UK nations serves only to remind us of a profound and banal truth. Children are posterity. Fail to cherish them, let their schools crumble, increase their class sizes, deprive them of joy and happiness as well as a solid grounding in the skills and aptitudes we need, and society will decline. Little wonder, COVID aside, that school absence was at ‘crisis levels’ by 2024.

Joyless

Joy was off the curriculum. Trips and outings became rarities. Municipal parks were shut, sold or left unattended; playgrounds closed and hundreds of community football pitches disappeared, along with school playing fields and swimming pools – 400 of them shut down between 2010 and 2023. Nearly 800 libraries closed their doors, those havens for children and families on winter days. Youth services disappeared; more than 4,500 youth work jobs went, with 760 council-run youth centres closed in the 10 years since 2010, said the YMCA. Labour had left a Connexions service in place, offering careers advice; it was largely abolished. The national careers service that replaced it was online only, failing confused or drifting teens who needed encouragement and support.

The 2012 Olympics generated tremendous enthusiasm for all ages, amid high hopes that success in the arena would boost involvement, stimulate children and improve their well-being. But when auditors investigated, they found participation in sport had fallen in the three subsequent years ‘and the government’s commitment to the sporting legacy had waned by 2016’. What a wasted opportunity.

It became more dangerous to be young. Infant mortality rose for two years in a row to 2018. The last time there was such a trend was 1939–41; it was hard to find any other cause than austerity. The fate of children drove the distinguished paediatrician Al Aynsley-Green to write a passionate denunciation when he stood down from the role of Children’s Commissioner for England. He lambasted the denial of fact by the propaganda machine in the Department for Education – such as the increase in the number of four- and five-yearolds arriving in reception classes still wearing nappies. As of 2024, one in four children starting school were not toilet-trained, worsened since the pandemic’s loss of nursery years.

Death and disturbance

The number of child deaths had hit record levels, including those who died because of abuse and neglect, suicide, perinatal and neonatal events and surgery. In 2023, the death rate rose by 8 per cent over the previous year. More than a third were officially declared to be avoidable. Camilla Kingdon, president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, knew the reasons why. Most deaths were in deprived areas and ‘the clear driver is rising child poverty. Figures such as these in a nation as rich as ours are unforgivable.’

Previous progress on stopping expectant mothers smoking and raising rates of breastfeeding reversed. Something bad was happening in children’s lives, increasing mental distress. Even before 2010, GPs and psychiatrists were seeing more; then an explosion, a doubling of referrals of under-18s between 2017 and 2022. Numbers with probable mental health problems rose sharply from 12 per cent in 2017 to 20 per cent in 2023; waiting lists ballooned as one study found a quarter of sixth-formers had sought mental health support in the previous 12 months but many (a third) were still waiting; numbers and waits were worse in deprived areas.

One reason was COVID, which increased depression, girls suffering more than boys. Another was money: children living in households struggling with unpayable bills had higher rates of mental illness. Tory governments can’t be held responsible for all the causes of this wave of distress, which included exposure to harmful social media, online bullying and intolerable peer-group pressures. The charge against them is twofold. One was austerity: more than a quarter of children with a probable mental disorder had a parent who did not have enough money to let their offspring take part in activities outside school or college. The other was a failure to react, to mobilize, to put this burgeoning distress at the top of all priorities. This government forsook them. A 2021 review of children’s social care put the annual cost of not addressing the needs of all children who had ever needed a social worker at around £23 billion. Here was one of those calculations regularly dismissed by blinkered Treasury civil servants. How to calculate the costs of notacting, not intervening, not providing adequate services? It was possible to work it out: over a lifetime, failure to help children and young people resulted in hospital admissions, early withdrawal from the labour market, lower productivity and economic loss. The NAO concluded that the problems of children and adolescents ‘may become entrenched and require intense and expensive support to reverse or mitigate any harm. For the individual, consequences could include mental health difficulties, periods not being in education, employment or training, or contact with the criminal justice system. Different outcomes often overlap, for example around three quarters of children sentenced in 2019–20 were assessed as having mental health concerns.’

Parents were desperate: schools, social workers and the NHS were failing them. Waits for diagnoses, let alone treatment, stretched into years. The causes of flaring numbers of children who might be autistic were multiple: more parents were concerned about their kids’ behaviour, diagnostic criteria had broadened. But also shrunken school budgets, fewer educational psychologists and teaching assistants, and for those Tory ministers were responsible. Along with, as we see in Chapter 6, a cynical heaping of responsibilities onto councils at the same time as their grants were gutted. Autism demanded a wide strategic response; it was piecemeal.