What a year! I think most of us assumed that after spending so long in lockdown over the two previous years we were due a better time of it in 2022. That’s not entirely how things turned out.
No one who looks at what has happened in Britain with a dispassionate eye could claim that the year has been an unadulterated success from start to finish. Most people would have few difficulties identifying horrible mistakes that have had long-lasting consequences.
Bad things come in threes
Liz Truss grabbed the headlines for the sheer speed with which she proved extreme right political theories to be unworkable. It takes a staggering degree of ideological obsession to convince yourself that it is possible to cut taxes for the richest in society without worrying about how the rest of us would pay for that.
It turned out that just because the prime minister sincerely believes in daft theories about magically increased economic activity doesn’t make them true. The economic consequences of the Truss administration were higher interest rates on government debt, on mortgages, on credit card bills, and on loans taken out to run businesses.
Boris Johnson came with his own price for failure. Abraham Lincoln said that you can fool some of the people some of the time but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. Johnson pushed the limits of that theory for years as he casually told us whatever was convenient for him in that particular moment with all the conviction of an award-winning actor.
Eventually the truth caught up with the practiced liar. Most of the Conservatives who had been so keen to serve in his government then proceeded to tell us that they knew all along that he was lying but didn’t want to ruin their careers by telling the rest of us poor fools.
That makes them entirely suitable to serve in a government led by someone else who kept his silence for a price. Rishi Sunak was, after all, the person who got to be chancellor by selling out Sajid Javid when he showed some backbone and refused to allow Dominic Cummings to have a veto on whom he appointed. It also makes them the right kind of people to serve in a government determined to cover up sleaze as it leads the country into a nightmare collection of entirely avoidable strikes.
Government by the wealthy for the wealthy
Apparently, there is plenty enough money to subsidise the gas bills of the very wealthy. But isn’t enough to increase the pay of nurses by the rate of inflation. There is enough money to let Shell get away without paying any windfall taxes on £26bn. But there isn’t enough to settle the rail workers’ dispute. There is enough money to waste on a stamp duty holiday to keep house prices high. But not enough to get ambulance drivers off picket lines.
We started the year cheering on our wonderful NHS. We are ending it listening to the government tell us that they have to impose a 6% real terms pay cut on to nurses because it insists on using an outdated pay review carried out before inflation hit hard. The economic consequences of Rishi Sunak are turning out to be endless strikes and the collapse of reliable public services.
All this might be less of a problem if being caught out lying, cheating, and pocketing public money whilst being staggeringly incompetent led the entire nation to question exactly how reliable our leaders were when they told us all the wonderful things that awaited us if we voted for Brexit.
It ought to be clear to all by now that there wasn’t a shed load of easy money for the NHS, that we weren’t empowered to trade successfully across the world, and that the British regions weren’t levelled up. What has materialised has been a few bad trade deals, a decision to let the City of London to go back to the gambling that produced the 2008 crash and a determination to let water companies dump raw sewage into our rivers without worrying about pesky regulations.
A nation on the brink
It is remarkable that there are still some people who want to believe in nice politicians’ promises instead of the evidence of the prices in the shops and the size of their own wage packet. Brexit reduced the supply of workers from the EU and helped fuel inflation. Brexit increased costs on imports from our main trading partner and thus helped fuel inflation. Brexit left lorry drivers parked up outside Dover and thus increased inflation.
British exporters continue to report endless problems with Brexit and so the nation is poorer and the government has less money. Yet the largest opposition party in Britain is still so scared of the existence of some people who have a blind faith in the myth of Brexit that they dare not openly challenge it.
Opinion polls show a strong majority of the British population now think the whole thing has gone wrong and yet it is only minority parties like the Greens, the SNP and the Liberal Democrats who feel able to voice the obvious grounds for concern with any clarity. The failures haven’t just been from the Conservatives.
It is going to take a decade of far-sighted government to repair the damage that a decade of lies, sleaze and incompetence has done. It remains to be seen how long we have to wait to get that far-sighted government and how much the next government can be trusted to deliver on what needs to be done.
