Britain’s once-famed welfare state seems unable to deliver. Public services are riven with conflict and starved of funds. Nothing works. Yet there the argument ends. The government defends the status quo, the opposition claims it is all about money. The Treasury rules. Reform ossifies. Progress is zero.
Scratch the surface of this week’s strikes and it is clear that each of the services has suffered from a longstanding absence of constructive reform. The triaging of health treatment is plagued by bottlenecks. Home care of elderly people is withering. School teaching is oppressed by obsessive examinations. Housing policy is led by builders’ lobbies, not by housing need. Energy policy has become obscene, even to the most ardent advocate of privatisation.
