The situation for the Conservative Party is worse than you think. The difficulty lies, however, in explaining how serious it is without falling into the language of hyperbole. So, I shall simply list some developments as dispassionately as I can.
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1./ Lifting the UK’s chronically poor productivity has been the goal of successive Tory governments but it has proved elusive.
By the end of 2019, it was 20% below the level it would have reached if it had continued on its pre-(financial) crisis path.
2./ The UK’s great wage stagnation: real wages will still be lower in 2025 than in 2008.
3./ Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak have announced tax rises worth 2% of GDP in just two years – the same as Tony Blair and Gordon Brown did in ten.
Source: ifs.org.uk/publications/1…
4./ The value of outstanding student loans at the end of 2020-21 reached £160 billion. The Government forecasts the value of outstanding loans to be around £560 billion (2019 20 prices) by the middle of this century.
5./ The average house price is 65 times higher than in 1970 but average wages are only 36 times higher.
6./ Record numbers of young adults in their 20s and 30s are living with their parents.
7./ For the first time, half of women in England and Wales remained childless by their 30th birthday.
8./ The IMF is warning that Britain faces the worst inflation shock of all major advanced economies over the next two years.
9./ British households face a record 54% energy bill rise as the price cap is raised.
10./ Comparison between weekly Universal Credit standard allowance in 2021/22 and £70 destitution threshold.
Source: trusselltrust.org/wp-content/upl…
11./ Hundreds of Britons have launched crowdfunding campaigns to raise money for private medical expenses, frequently citing their desperation after spending months on NHS waiting lists.
12./ Britons now pay almost as much as Americans on out-of-pocket healthcare.
13./ In 2008, roughly 1 in 30 of the poorest UK households incurred catastrophic healthcare costs. By 2019, that had doubled to 1 in 14.
14./ Inequality has risen again. The gap between the middle and wealthiest 10% has increased by £44,000 mid-crisis (on top of a £350,000 increase in the pre-crisis decade).
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