When Jeremy Hunt was appointed as the latest new chancellor, he seemed very pleased with himself. As he often does. He always appears to be smiling at some internal joke that he hasn’t got round to sharing with the rest of us yet. Unfortunately, if he gets to carry on in the role, the joke is likely to be very much at our expense and not remotely funny. He is planning another round of public sector cuts. On top of the impact of severe unfunded cost increases.
Inflation is currently running at 10.1% and is worse on food, power, rents and mortgages. Even before Hunt sets to work that means public sector services are facing horrible pressures. Staff are in severe need of a pay rise yet there is little or no new money being provided to pay for one.
Driving down the public sector
If Hunt stays in office, or another chancellor follows his lead, then once again, those staff are going to be asked to take real terms pay cuts. That means managers are going to lose even more of their experienced staff. It is virtually impossible for even the most skilled manager to cope with the loss of so many good staff and maintain service standards.
No one works for the NHS and public sector because they want to get rich quick. The country only has the vast majority of its nurses, teachers and care workers because they believe in their work and want their daily activity to mean something. Fortunately, not everyone is motivated by the same incentives that drive the life choices and the decision making of an investment banker.
Yet there comes a point when loyal staff start to feel like mugs and realise that they have just come off a shift utterly exhausted, during which they were unable to provide anything like the level of service they wanted to. Too many people feel like they are working to shore up a system that is falling apart. Last year a record 40,000 experienced nurses left the NHS. What is it going to be like after a smiling chancellor insists on another round of budget cuts to balance the books?
Smirk of an assassin
The reality behind Hunt’s smile is that it is the smirk of an assassin of public services. Not an open one but a deadly creeping assassin who is going to weaken those services so badly that huge swathes of people will cease to rely on them and the US insurance system will enter our lives by the back door. Provided we can afford the horribly inflated costs that it brings. Those who can’t pay will be left with a demoralised rump service.
To give Kwasi Kwarteng his due, at least he didn’t seem to be quite as pleased with himself as Hunt. He was just far too pleased with his own extreme free market theories and in far too much of a hurry to implement them. As a consequence, a lot of people are paying more for their mortgage than they need, and the cost of imported food and energy took another nasty hit that can’t easily be reversed.
Kwarteng also stands accused of making the public sector cost pressures considerably worse than they otherwise were. Or rather he stands jointly accused. Because Liz Truss discussed every line of his budget with him and the Conservative Party cheered his tax cuts to the rafters on the day they were announced. That is the real problem that the country now faces. They can change the name of the people in office but we cannot escape the deadly intent behind the smiling faces of their propagandists.
Truss and Johnson – both unfit to govern
One of the many other reasons for Truss’s unpopularity is that even before Hunt stepped in and tried to monopolise the smile business, she struggled to provide one.
Has there ever been a more wooden performer than the 44-day British prime minister? Has there ever been someone in high office who spoke so unconvincingly? Has any politician ever made themselves harder to like when they are explaining something important?
By contrast, Boris Johnson could sell snake oil medicine to a qualified physician. He could peddle a lie so convincingly that a lot of people thought he actually meant to provide the NHS with £350mn a week and that he would personally be obeying the Covid rules he so solemnly explained to us. Yet there is only so long that a man can lie and cheat and manipulate before the vast bulk of the public realises they’ve been had. If the Conservatives are daft enough to restore him to power then they are going to really struggle to explain it to the electorate.
Another new leader – another set of cuts
Johnson spoke a lot about levelling up whilst busily levelling down. Truss didn’t even bother with the deception. She went all out for popularity with a narrow base of her own party members by throwing them tax cuts. She demonstrated no warmth and no ability to understand what she was doing to ordinary people’s lives and the consequence was higher mortgages and higher prices in the shops.
A lot of her own party members voted for her silly promises of delivering unfunded tax cuts, but the vast bulk of the British public liked neither her policies nor her personality. They will like it a lot less if her incompetence is followed by a period of drastic austerity and yet another attack on services that ordinary people need.
No one can be certain whether Hunt will still be in office and still be smirking when the music stops and the next set of chairs are pulled away from ministers who have barely had a chance to sit down and make a few decisions. But if it is not him, then there is a high likelihood that the next chancellor will also smile sweetly while telling us that we must repair the recent damage and balance the books via another round of cuts to essential services.
The people running those services weren’t the ones who made the mistakes and neither were the people that use them. The nation needs its public services to function. Even if its government can’t.
