John Burn-Murdoch Profile picture
Dec 23, 2022 18 tweets 7 min read Read on X
NEW:

Britain’s grim winter of strikes, falling incomes and a worsening NHS crisis is not some unfortunate series of events

It’s the inevitable result of a decade of Tory austerity that steadily weakened the state’s capacity to respond to shocks

enterprise-sharing.ft.com/redeem/c540270…

Thread:
Let’s start with a straightforward chart and an uncontroversial statement.

British government spending and investment have declined in recent years, both as a share of GDP and relative to peer countries.

But this chart is a little drab, isn’t it. Let’s add some colour...
Here’s that same chart, but now highlighting which party was in power at which point.

The eagle-eyed among you may have noticed something.

When Labour were in power, spending and investment went up 📈

When the Conservatives came in, it went down 📉
Some will say the Tories’ hand was forced in 2010, that most countries had to tighten their belts as they faced off against the global financial crisis.

But the Tory belt-tightening was tighter than what other governments did in any of the UK’s peer countries.
Technically speaking, the NHS budget was protected from the cuts, but with a rapidly ageing and ailing population, merely maintaining health spend has been proven insufficient.

Where Britain’s peers continued to grow health spending as a share of GDP, here it steadily declined.
One very immediate result has been the squeeze on NHS staff pay.

Here’s what happened to nurses’ pay under Labour and Tory governments since 1997.

Nurses’ real-terms pay is now 12% below what it was on the eve of the 2010 election.
It’s also worth taking a closer look at those remarkably deep cuts to healthcare capital investment in the early years of austerity.
That dearth of investment in infrastructure and technology means that despite nominally having more doctors than ever before and more funding than ever before, the NHS finds itself hamstrung by acute shortages of beds and the equipment that gets people out of beds faster.
It’s also worth pausing to note that the assumption implicit in the ring-fencing of the health budget — that the only spending that protects and promotes health is NHS spending — has proved a false economy.
Cuts to housing and communities budgets have left Britain’s dwellings in such a dire state that they are now causing deaths among children theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/n…
So, that gives us:
• Prolonged cuts to overall spending
• Especially deep cuts to capital investment
• A health budget that was protected in name only and which now looks more like a gradual squeeze

What has been the impact?
Let’s start with the most striking: the astonishingly clear association between the governing party, health spending and the functioning of the NHS.

Waiting lists swelled under Major, shrunk under Labour as health funding soared, before climbing again under Tory austerity.
Those mounting NHS pressures and the wider deterioration of public health show up in data on avoidable deaths — deaths that should not occur with timely and effective healthcare — which under austerity flattened off and then began rising after years of steady decline.
It’s a very similar picture with life expectancy.

Although progress here has slowed in many countries over the last decade, under austerity the the UK’s trajectory has flattened off much more quickly than most.
And of course the impacts of a conscious erosion of state capacity extend well beyond health.

Real wages are below where they were 18 years ago. There has not been a single year since austerity began when the average wage has matched the peak under the last Labour government.
You might appear to "get away with" austerity for a few years if you’re lucky, but when your luck runs out you’re going to be in a world of trouble.

Britain is dealing badly with the shocks of the last 2 years because it has been gutted over the last 12
enterprise-sharing.ft.com/redeem/c540270…
In conclusion, Cameron and Osborne are lucky to have escaped the fate of Truss and Kwarteng.

Like Trussonomics, austerity was ideology-over-evidence. Unlike Trussonomics, it was not quickly reversed, and so has gone on to cause enormous, lasting damage.

enterprise-sharing.ft.com/redeem/c540270…
Here’s the full piece again: enterprise-sharing.ft.com/redeem/c540270…

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More from @jburnmurdoch

Aug 29
NEW: Progressives have a birth rate problem

For all the talk of a general fall in births, the drop is overwhelmingly driven by people on the left having fewer kids.

By ceding the topic of family and children to the right, progressives risk ushering in a more conservative world. Image
There’s something of a paradox at play here.

On the one hand, pro-natalism often implies constraining individual liberty and setting back women’s progress. As such, the left’s aversion to worrying about birth rates is perfectly natural.
But: the consequence of this emerging ideological slant in birth rates is that each successive generation gets nudged rightwards, increasing the likelihood that conservative politicians (who want to constrain individual liberty and set back women’s progress) get elected.
Read 12 tweets
Aug 8
NEW: Is the internet changing our personalities for the worse?

Conscientiousness and extroversion are down, neuroticism up, with young adults leading the charge.

This is a really consequential shift, and there’s a lot going on here, so let’s get into the weeds 🧵 Image
First up, personality analysis can feel vague, and you might well ask why it even matters?

On the first of those, the finding of distinct personality traits is robust. This field of research has been around for decades and holds up pretty well, even across cultures.
On the second, studies consistently find personality shapes life outcomes.

In fact, personality traits — esp conscientiousness and neuroticism — are stronger predictors of career success, divorce and mortality than someone’s socio-economic background or cognitive abilities.
Read 17 tweets
Jul 18
NEW:

There’s been a lot of discussion lately about rising graduate unemployment.

I dug a little closer and a striking story emerged:

Unemployment is climbing among young graduate *men*, but college-educated young women are generally doing okay. Image
In fact, young men with a college degree now have the same unemployment rate as young men who didn’t go to college, completely erasing the graduate employment premium.

Whereas a healthy premium remains for young women. Image
What’s going on?

At first glance, this looks like a case of the growing masses of male computer science graduates being uniquely exposed to the rapid adoption of generative AI in the tech sector, and finding jobs harder to come by than earlier cohorts.
Read 14 tweets
May 15
NEW with @KuperSimon

The prevailing narrative around increased injuries and player workload in elite football is wrong.

Players don’t play more football than in the past. What has changed is a sharp rise in intensity of play.

Not more minutes, but each minute exerts more load. Image
Of course, that doesn’t mean a reduction in playing time wouldn’t help. But if one wants to solve the problem, it helps to know the cause.

Fixture schedules are barely busier than in the past, and squad sizes have grown to mean no rise in minutes per player regardless...
...But the recent evolution of much faster-paced gameplay both with and without the ball comes with elevated risk of soft-tissue injuries.

Here’s the full article: ft.com/content/36ebc9…
Read 5 tweets
Apr 11
NEW 🧵

The number of people travelling from Europe to the US in recent weeks has plummeted by as much as 35%, as travellers have cancelled plans in response to Trump’s policies and rhetoric, and horror stories from the border. Image
Denmark saw one of the steepest declines, in an indication that anger over Trump’s hostility towards Greenland may be contributing to the steep drop-off in visitor numbers. Image
Corporate quotes are usually pretty dry, but the co-founder of major travel website Kayak wasn’t mincing his words: Image
Read 5 tweets
Apr 4
NEW 🧵

A quick thread of charts showing how Trump’s economic agenda is going so far:

1) Trump has had the same impact on economic uncertainty as a global pandemic. Image
2) That was just the US version.

What’s particularly impressive is that he’s managed this on a global scale.

Starting to get the feeling that “Trump” annotation is going to be the chart equivalent of a layer of volcanic ash in the fossil record. Image
3) US consumers are reacting very very negatively.

These are the worst ratings for any US government’s economic policy since records began. Image
Read 11 tweets

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