Upon returning to my new home in London recently after a weekend abroad, I encountered perhaps the largest queue I have ever seen. Heathrow Airport had so few staff working that evening that many passengers were waiting longer to get their passports stamped than their planes had been in the air.
Thankfully, my Australian passport allowed me to go through faster automated gates, averting the rightfully grumpy gazes of the poor bastards stuck in the longest of lines. But elsewhere Britain’s administrative decay and the sheer failure of its core infrastructure is harder to skirt.
Residents in one Surrey village have been told not to drink their tap water for the past month, as the privatised water company Thames Water faces potential bankruptcy and its aging assets pose a “risk to public safety”. England’s healthcare waiting lists have tripled in the past 14 years. Compensation payments to rail commuters affected by delays have reached record levels. At one primary school in Devon, “temperatures are so low that children keep gloves and coats on during some lessons”, while the average secondary school needs an estimated £1.5 million ($2.85 million) worth of maintenance and upgrades.
As the United Kingdom enters the final days of its general election campaign, the word that keeps cropping up to describe the state of the country after 14 years of Conservative rule is “broken”.
The Guardian is running a series titled “The broken years: Tory Britain 2010-24”. One of the country’s best-selling books is titled How They Broke Britain. Google “broken Britain” and you’ll find an endless stream of news articles, in which members of the public, business leaders, activists and aspiring politicians bemoan that “nothing works anymore”. The glum national mood has even gone global, with the ABC’s If You’re Listening podcast running a mini-series on “Who Broke Britain?”.
It is ironic that the phrase “broken Britain” is now associated with the damage wrought by the Conservatives, for it was they who originally coined it. In the lead-up to the 2010 election, then party leader David Cameron used the term to diagnose a “social recession” and a sense of “moral decay”, fanning overblown fears about youth crime, teenage pregnancy and anti-social behaviour.
So how did things shift so decisively, to the point where the Tories are on track for a historic drubbing? The origins lie with Cameron himself.
Death by a thousand cuts
Some mistakenly view Cameron with rose-tinted glasses after his embarrassing clown car of successors. But he could reasonably be considered the worst of the lot, and the modern progenitor of Britain’s breakdown.
After winning the 2010 election, Cameron pivoted towards a drastic cutback of government spending, right when other developed countries were continuing to stimulate their damaged economies in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). The Queen’s favourite bagpipe school was mercifully spared — but little else was.
The eminent American economist Paul Krugman recently wrote, “At the time, this looked like an obvious macroeconomic error; more than a decade later, it has become a social and political catastrophe.”
The consequences are hard to overstate. The University of Glasgow found that from 2012-2019, the cuts contributed to 335,000 more deaths than would have otherwise occurred. This is more than the number of excess deaths caused by the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK.
When you slash the public services and payments that people rely on, a great many of them simply perish.
England kicks an own goal
The Bank of England found in 2015 that Cameron’s austerity cost the UK over 2% in lost GDP. That’s about a full year of pre-COVID economic growth.
Add such self-inflicted wounds (including Brexit) to some already challenged economic fundamentals, and you get a general stagnation. The UK economy effectively never recovered from the GFC, leaving the average Brit £10,200 worse off than if the economy had grown at pre-2010 trends.
According to the Resolution Foundation, “the UK [is] one of only six countries of 38 in the OECD whose employment rate has fallen since 2019 … Average wages are now only £16 a week higher in real terms than they were at the time of the 2010 election”.
While the Tories managed to obscure their legacy of underinvestment in crucial state capacities for nearly a decade, via a series of distractions and crises, the chickens are now coming home to roost. As the Financial Times’ John Burn-Murdoch wrote in 2022, “You might appear to ‘get away with’ austerity for a few years if you’re lucky, but when your luck runs out you’re going to be in a world of trouble. Britain is dealing badly with the shocks of the last two years because it has been gutted over the last 12”.
The British public is now undergoing what has been termed the “great noticing” — a dawning awareness of the pup they were sold by the fiscal vandals of the 2010s.
A warning sign for the Australian right
You would think the Liberal Party in Australia would take the implosion of its British counterpart as a lesson in what not to do. But that, unfortunately, would overestimate its foresight.
Some Coalition MPs are reportedly advocating for a turn to “UK-style” austerity. Liberal MP Garth Hamilton, who lived in Britain ahead of the Tories’ successful 2010 campaign, said Cameron had “brought people with him on his commitment to significantly reduce government spending”, according to The Australian. If only Hamilton had stuck around to see the consequences.
Fellow Liberal MP Henry Pike agreed, speaking glowingly of Cameron and urging shadow treasurer Angus Taylor to “be bold about cutting some things that need to be cut, I would be very happy to take that to the election”. Taylor, though he is seemingly squeamish about the word “austerity”, is indeed reportedly planning a “restrained” budgetary offer.
The likelihood of the next Australian election rehashing the core themes of the 2010 UK ballot is rising. Yet we can see where this eventually leads: public ruin and electoral oblivion.
For the Liberals to copy a policy with such obviously disastrous consequences would be comically incompetent if it weren’t also so potentially deadly. Austerity kills. If the Coalition follows its UK counterparts in implementing it, it deserves to suffer a similar wipeout.
Is the Coalition doomed to make the same mistakes as the UK Tories? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
