For a political party that likes to claim that it provides a safe pair of hands on the economy the Conservatives have a very sorry record in office. Each new incarnation of their party has made major errors of judgement that have hit the country hard.
Rishi Sunak is currently trying to convince us that the errors of the Liz Truss government simply represented a temporary bout of well-meant overenthusiasm for fundamentally sound policies and that his government is steadily undoing any damage. The truth is that from a bad beginning to a worse end, the Conservatives have presided over a series of appalling economic mistakes and the damage this has done to the country might take decades to sort out.
It started with austerity
They set off by telling us that the only possible way of dealing with the financial crisis of 2008 was a period of serious austerity. In David Cameron and George Osborne’s world view, the important thing was to fix overspending in the public sector. They imposed a decade of cuts both to pay and to per-head real-terms funding of services, which were somehow meant to strengthen the economy and reduce debt levels.
Perhaps the most fundamental flaw in this thinking was the assumption that government had built up debts because of overspending on public services. In fact, the major increase in public sector debt that the Conservatives inherited came about almost entirely as a result of bailing out private sector institutions.
The crash was a failure of extremely free markets and whole swathes of private finance could only be rescued from its own failures by government intervention. The finance sector dumped the cost of its failure onto the public purse. Then it got back to making money whilst nurses, teachers, and the disabled were expected to put up with a decade of cuts to their income in order to cure problems they did nothing to create.
Austerity was the exact opposite of the actions that are usually helpful in the depths of a recession. Cutting down on investment and innovation is never a clever way to help a business or a nation to prosper. Wise governments know that a slow period in the economy is the time to increase investment with the aim of improving efficiency, increasing productivity and revitalising science and business.
Over dependence on dodgy financial capital
The early stages of the Cameron government would have been an ideal time to reposition the UK economy and equip it for a low-carbon future with an active manufacturing sector. Instead, Cameron decided to “cut the green crap” and the country was left heavily dependent on dodgy finance capital and on oil and gas revenues that were never sustainable. Instead of prospering from exploiting North Sea fossil fuels, the country got much of its manufacturing base wiped out and an under-regulated City of London.
That over dependence on dodgy financial capital came back to haunt us with Brexit. Almost none of the financiers of Brexit made their money from running a manufacturing business. When they should have been hanging their heads in shame for the way they their gambling had failed in 2008, many financial traders enthusiastically funded the even greater political gamble of Brexit in the hope that it would help them avoid proper controls over money laundering and taking risks with other people’s money.
Instead of siding with the manufacturers and businesses who warned loud and often of the very real damage that would be done by cutting Britain off from easy access to its main market, Cameron caved in to requests for a referendum and then Johnson used the opportunity to further his own career at the expense of the nation and the truth.
The impact of Brexit and Johnson
From the moment of the referendum result, Britain was landed with a government that was rotten to the core. First, we had Theresa May vainly trying to sell the nation on the idea that a compromise could be struck between economic needs and bonkers ideologies. When that failed, we were led by someone who had profited by telling huge lies to the British public and thought the best plan was to tell even bigger ones. Such as going into an election telling the public that there would be no border checks on goods travelling between Northern Ireland and the UK.
Small wonder that government contracts began to be given out to friends, associates and party donors when the man at the very top didn’t know the difference between personal self interest and the best thing for the country. Or the difference between truth and lies. Or actually have much interest in practical business and economics.
His example convinced many in his party that the way to build a career was to spout whatever nonsense their far-right fanatics wanted to hear. Truss learned that lesson so well that she actually began to believe her own propaganda. We now know exactly what happens when daft right-wing theories are put into practice. The pound collapses. Mortgages go through the roof. We pay more for food and fuel imports.
Sunak’s strikes
That utter disaster is now being followed by another. Sunak has inflicted a damaging wave of strikes on the country. He is gambling that the public will blame the mess we are in on nurses, rail workers, and junior doctors rather than on his choices about who should bear the brunt of funding shortages his predecessors had created.
No one can know for sure whether that gamble will succeed, but one thing we can be certain of is that a country beset by a wave of increasingly desperate strikes is unlikely to be economically successful. Once again, the wrong policies are being imposed by an untrustworthy government.
The NHS provides an incredibly powerful opportunity for this country to be at the forefront of new opportunities in science, medicine, and technology. We are unlikely to be able to capture such opportunities whilst we watch highly qualified professionals leaving the country in droves as our own government crashes yet another vital part of the real economy. We are at very real risk of losing the core strengths of the NHS.
