A crunch, building for years, is upon us. Everywhere you look, the story is the same: backlogs, unfilled jobs, overfilled beds. Nothing is working. Brexit, the pandemic, a decade of austerity and a broken governing party have crippled Britain’s institutions. One now approaches a variety of basic services, from healthcare to policing, braced for a sort of experience lottery. If you’re lucky, this might be the day that things go smoothly. If not, you’re in for a long wait to be seen – or, on the worst days, a frustrated return home with no help or answers.
But the crisis is not just one of resources, it is also one of culture. Our struggling institutions have also succumbed to a steep fall in internal standards that is directly linked to their failure to deliver. Reports, anecdotal and, more recently, official, tell of bullying, corruption and a lack of accountability. Take the NHS, for instance. The institution symbolises the symbiosis between bad resourcing and bad culture. Vacant jobs at NHS England stand at a staggering 10% of the workforce. Some of that is down to familiar funding issues; unattractive pay, slashed subsidies for expensive nursing training, a limited number of university places to study medicine. Less well known is the fact that those vacancies have not been simply generated to meet increased demand, as the government claims, but also to fill the positions of those who have left because of racism, bullying and lack of support from human resources. This is not to mention the record number of nurses departing the NHS due to stress after the pandemic.
