The other night my wife and I watched the elegant British film, The Outfit, about a London tailor/cutter who emigrates to the USA and ends up being dominated by the neighbourhood mafia. At one point a local says to the mafia:
“We come here, and we make something of ourselves. And then, as soon as we get big enough, you jerks show up … and you snatch it away. Like a spoilt child who would rather break their own toys than watch somebody else play with them.”
I sat up and said to my wife “this sounds like what happened to the UK when the Conservatives got in. All those toys, those British institutions, got broken”.
Remember 2012? What a year! The UK was levelling out. Gordon Brown had sorted the banking crisis three years earlier, the Olympics were a worldwide sensation and, on that platform, NHS medics danced their way into the hearts of everyone. They were all NHS volunteers, no USA Super Bowl professionals, these. The NHS satisfaction ratings were the highest since the 1950s and the organisation was the most admired health organisation in the world.
All the toys were broken
What did the Conservatives do? They meddled it to death. They introduced the 2012 Health and Social Care Act which foresaw all NHS trusts becoming, or being amalgamated into, foundation trusts. The act also abolished the existing cap on trusts’ income from non-NHS sources and opened the door to privatisation. A lethal blow to the NHS’s performance ability. This fatal privatisation policy went on to cripple the rail service, probation, Royal Mail, water authorities, etc., with terrible consequences for the nation. More ‘breaking the toys’, as their own supporters suffer as a result of the declining performances.
Then, to torment the nation even further, George Osborne, the Conservative chancellor, introduced austerity; but not for the rich. Using the lie that there was no money (there is always money – look at HS2) he hit at the poorest by cutting funding for local authorities and public services generally. The Conservative ranks applauded. As Bertrand Russell once said:
“First, they fascinate the fools. Then, they muzzle the intelligent.”
Muzzling the intelligent
The intelligent are muzzled in the face of this cultish behaviour, wincing as they experience the broken toys and our damaged livelihoods, but continuing to vote for what is clearly not solving the problem, for example the Rwanda policy. Then there are the results. Take the privatisations of the NHS and the railways. These institutions affect so many people across the spectrum and they are ‘breaking’.
The NHS treats around 360 million (yes million!) people a year. Its performance is impacted by social care, where over 1.2 million mainly elderly people are looked after. But care services are struggling. This a result of privatisation – over 80% of care home beds are private, and they cannot all afford to pay a decent wage. A deadly Treasury cocktail of outsourcing and cost squeezing. Today there are 160,000 staff vacancies, good care is almost impossible, and this impacts the NHS because lack of care leads to sicker people who end up in hospital. The increased demand leads to longer waits, especially in emergency care, as the graph below illustrates. Waiting times of over 12 hours to be admitted from emergency care were unheard of when the Conservatives came into power. The figures now stand at over 400,000.
More money spent on worse services
If we look to the railways, in year ending March 2022 nearly a billion passenger rail journeys were made. The government has spent more on privatised rail in 30 years than they did on British Rail in the 60 years preceding privatisation, and the service is dreadful. In the year before it was privatised InterCity handed back £100mn in profit to the government. What happens today? The private rail companies have been given a £75bn subsidy over the past decade, while £409.7mn in dividends was paid to shareholders. Fares are now three times higher than comparable journeys in Europe and the reliability gets worse.
So, when either of these institutions are tampered with by the government, most of the population is affected. The continual botched attempts to fix the unfixable rather than letting them be fully nationalised again is most destructive.
Growing inequalities, crumbling services
Meanwhile, the inequality gap grows. This one area where the government has been ‘successful’, as the graph below shows. The number of people who experience destitution – our British people, in the 6th largest economy in the world – rose by 148% between 2017 and 2022. What a triumph for Osborne’s economic policies! What shame on the government.
The graph says it all; but when did you hear a minister acknowledge the extent of the damage to the British people from their policies? Or express remorse? Chris (failing) Grayling was notorious for his arrogant policy changes, against all advice, and then walking away from the mess he had created: in the prison service, railways and the probation service.
The same applies to most of the ministers. Miscreants include Suella Braverman, Priti Patel and, of course, Boris Johnson. No admission and no contrition seems to be the Conservative mantra. Michael Gove may be an exception – perhaps, now admitting it was a mistake to have cancelled Labour’s £55bn school-building programme just months after taking office as education secretary in 2010. But the arrogance of it in the first place takes your breath away. The financial consequences of corrective building activities will run into billions. Meanwhile teacher morale is tragically low. But why did Gove’s colleagues let him do it? Many said so to his face. This is the cost of cultish behaviour.
A cult led by the Treasury
Who is the leader of this cabal? It is not the PM. He is, in gangster parlance, the patsy. The leader is whoever is the chancellor of the exchequer. Behind this catalogue of misdeeds lies one common factor – cost reduction. This is the Treasury’s weapon of choice, driven as it is by wrong macroeconomic thinking; but thinking that suits the command-and-control mentality of most politicians today.
Every government department is a service organisation – except the Treasury where, as a director general once said to me, “humanity goes to die”. It has no service ethic. Its driving principle is control, and its lever is monetary allocation. This is the wrong way around. The Treasury should be there to find and provide the money the departments and local authorities ask for. It is not for Jeremy Hunt to decide what funds social services or the what HMRC need to carry out their duties. He does not have the expertise. Time to put the chancellor back in their box.
So, how can this confederacy of dunces be neutralised? It can only happen if the community rises up, like some have done against the mafia, and refuses to support or obey them. It is about time we did this, in our tens of thousands.
