The state Britain is in

Post-Brexit, Rishi Sunak's Conservatives lead a sick nation stranded on the margins of Europe

Labour isn’t working. The campaign slogan emblazoned on Conservative posters when Margaret Thatcher swept into 10 Downing Street in 1979 caught an essential truth. The nation was heading for systemic breakdown. Britain, allies observed, was the “sick man of Europe”. So it is again. The difference is that now it is stranded on the margins of its own continent.

Historical analogies are invariably inexact. Then Labour was in power. Now, the Conservatives are at the helm. The 1980s Thatcher revolution changed the shape of the economy, replacing heavy manufacturing with service industries. The more recent triumph of English nationalism over Europeanism in the Tory party has redrawn political boundaries. For all that, the echoes of the late 1970s are powerful.

By almost every metric, the economy is again  in deep trouble. Alone among the Group of Seven Nations national income has yet to return to pre-Covid levels. Productivity is badly lagging behind its peers, investment is depressed, incomes are falling and trade volumes are shrinking. Britain is at the top of the European league table for inflation and the bottom for growth. Treasury policy is dictated by nervous financial markets. The nation faces a wave of strikes.

The sorry state of politics speaks for itself. Five prime ministers in a little more than six years; a ruling party riven by factionalism; the habitual sale of honours to wealthy Tory party donors; a blizzard of scandals about ministerial behaviour; a nation that has lost respect on the international stage; and the UK union itself in peril as Scotland agitates for independence.

The condition of the public realm tells the same story. In 1979, the British ambassador to Paris Sir Nicholas Henderson wrote plaintively to London about the stark contrast between the well-being of the UK and that of its continental neighbours. His long lament will be familiar territory for anyone with cause to make the same comparison. 

“You only have to move around western Europe nowadays to realise how poor and unproud the British have become in relation to their neighbours,”Henderson wrote in a valedictory telegram. “It shows in the look of our towns, in our airports, in our hospitals and in local amenities; it is painfully apparent in much of our railway system.”

A contemporary observer in Paris might simply observe plus ça change. Today, ambulances queue up outside hospitals too full to admit any more patients. For the first time in a century the Royal College of Nursing has called out its members on strike. The criminal justice system lacks sufficient judges and lawyers to deliver timely justice. The Home Office does not have enough border officials to make fair assessments of the asylum claims of those crossing the Channel in small boats. 

Citizens face incomprehensibly long waits simply to renew basic documents such as passports and driving licences. The postal system is failing. Un-policed by an under-staffed environment agency, privatised water companies pour raw sewage into the nation’s rivers and across its beaches. As for the railways, on the occasions when trains are running they are blind to anything resembling a timetable. 

In its latest incarnation under Rishi Sunak, the Conservative government would like voters to believe that all this can be pinned on the external shocks delivered by the Covid pandemic and the energy price spike resulting from Russian aggression against Ukraine. Defying all the evidence to the contrary, it refuses to admit the economic damage wrought by Brexit. Leaving the EU was a reckless act of self-harm. Sunak can never admit as much. It’s easier to blame the nation’s present troubles on an upsurge of militancy among public sector trade unions. 

The British malaise runs deep - predating and then amplified by Brexit. Just as the chaos of 1979 marked a decade of decline, so Britain’s present condition mirrors the economy’s performance during the 12 years of Conservative rule. The period since 2010 has been marked by stagnant productivity and weak investment. The hallmarks of Tory economic management have been a determined absence to admit any strategic role in nurturing skills, promoting technological advance or incentivising investment. Instead the government has hollowed out public services, cut the pay of its workers and taken an axe to projects to repair the national fabric. 

The spike in energy prices provided the spark for the present wave of strikes across public services, but the breakdown is structural. It mirrors wilful neglect and underfunding. After the global financial crash, the Conservatives made a political choice to load fiscal austerity on to the public sector rather than to significantly raise taxes. The result is visible everywhere in what Henderson called the poor and unproud condition of Britain’s cities and towns, its schools and hospitals and, yes, its airports and railways. Yet even now the clamour among Tory MPs is for tax cuts.

The nation has been more than a decade in decline. Rebuilding its economic strength and restoring the public realm will take at least as long again. An agreement with the EU to restore a close trade and investment relationship with Britain’s most important economic partner will be a vital ingredient. But the precondition will also be rejection of the ideological delusions about free markets and taxes that have mapped decline. Government has a vital role in supporting productivity and growth. If Britain wants a decent national infrastructure and public services to match those of its European neighbours it will have to pay for them.