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.
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.
Essential chart from the new mega report on the general election by @Moreincommon_
The vast majority of people — including Reform voters — said the Tories lost because they were incompetent, not because they were too left or right wing.
And to the extent that people thought they were either too left or right wing, equal shares gave each answer.
There’s one very clear message and anything else is a distraction.
When asked what were the biggest mistakes the Conservatives made in government, the common themes are not left or right, but:
• Mismanagement
• Lack of integrity
• Incompetence
• Dishonesty
• Corruption
• “They are chaotic”
The lack of enthusiasm for Labour at this election really is striking.
Among those who plan to vote Labour tomorrow, the party is much less well-liked than in 2019, 2017 or 2015 (no data before that).
Quite a flimsy voter coalition that could unravel in the absence of results.
The Conservatives weren’t especially popular with their backers in 2019 (mainly a vote for Brexit and against Corbyn), and this was a big part of why they fell so far since then, but Lab voters this time are even less enthusiastic about their party than Tory voters were in 2019.
Of course, all that matters tomorrow is winning more seats than the opponents, and Starmer’s Labour will manage that very easily.
But if they don’t start delivering tangible results, it wouldn’t be at all surprising to see Labour start bleeding votes in all directions.
Some people have responded to that chart with "That can’t be right", or "We can’t be worse than America".
I’m afraid the chart is right. 15 years ago the UK’s record on homelessness *was* not too dissimilar to other developed countries, but things have rapidly deteriorated.
There has long been a gap between people’s views of crime locally (not a big issue) vs nationally (it’s terrible out there!), but there are signs this is now happening to economic perceptions too.
My finances? Going okay. The economy? Awful.
What’s going on?
My column this week asks whether the media (both mainstream and social) and its incentives to maximise engagement could be playing a key role ft.com/content/8cd76c…
With crime, it’s widely accepted that the main reason for this decoupling is media coverage.
People’s sense of crime levels is based mainly on what they see on TV and read in newspapers, and much less on what they or the people they know actually experience.
NEW: my column this week is about the coming vibe shift, from Boomers vs Millennials to huge wealth inequality *between* Millennials.
Current discourse centres on how the average Millennial is worse-off than the average Boomer was, but the richest millennials are loaded 💸🚀
That data was for the UK, but it’s a similar story in the US. The gap between the richest and poorest Millennials is far wider than it was for Boomers. More debt at the bottom, and much more wealth at the top.
In both countries, inequality is overwhelmingly *within* generations, not between them.
And how have the richest millennials got so rich?
Mainly this: enormous wealth transfers from their parents, typically to help with buying their first home.
In the UK, among those who get parental help, the top 10% got *£170,000* towards their house (the average Millennial got zero).