Britain is becoming a diminished Ruritania. That we are in trouble is hardly in doubt, a country reeling from the wounds inflicted over the past 12 years of Tory “government” that have cumulatively created an economy far too small for the demands we make of it. Jeremy Hunt’s autumn statement may have averted a fresh round of disastrous mistakes, but there was no disguising the mess that has been bequeathed him. We face the reckoning.
There is the legacy of the former chancellor George Osborne’s recklessly unnecessary austerity – public services so squeezed, as the Institute for Government declares, there is simply no fat left. While salaries in the private sector are fractionally higher now in real terms than in 2010 – itself damning enough – real pay for NHS staff, reports the Nuffield Trust, is now about 5% lower than it was then, with doctors and consultants suffering more than 10% real cuts. It is a similar story across the public sector and likely to intensify after the autumn statement, with its assumption that wages should rise at 2% in an era of inflation running at 9.1% this year and 7.4% next. Unless corrected, the flight of staff will mean swaths of public services can only implode.
