Schools are crumbling, the NHS is failing, and taxes are excessive, but too many people no longer expect anything better says Lord David Frost.
As everyone in West London knows, Hammersmith Bridge has been shut for four years – and counting. No end is in sight to the wrangle between central government and the usual, reliably useless Labour London borough.
As so often, the Victorians did it better. The original bridge, from the 1820s, was damaged by a boat in 1882. Within two years, a temporary replacement was up; and three years after that we got the current elegant structure. The same thing obviously needs to be done today, too – but the decision to list the bridge in 2008 has closed it off.
I dwell on this not to share metropolitan woes. I dwell on it because it seems deeply symbolic. As the Roman Empire in the West ended, so people stopped looking after its infrastructure. Aqueducts were repurposed and bridges failed. That’s why I see their modern parallels as the canary in the coalmine for a civilisation that is finding it harder to do the basics.
It doesn’t take much searching to find other examples. We have known of the faults in the concrete in some schools at least since a roof collapsed in 2018. But after five years of dither, it seems easier to tell children to revert to the world of lockdown and be taught online, or put up with going to school in a Portacabin, as people were forced to move into Nissen huts in the aftermath of bombing in the Second World War, than to fix the problem.
Again, as I write, we have another day of Aslef rail strikes. By now we all just shrug our shoulders. If it’s a problem, drive, or travel a day later, or just work from home.
Of course, the Government has a new weapon, in the Act requiring a minimum operation in key public services during strikes, but I am not seeing any signs that it wants to use it.
In the NHS, too, we’ve all given up expecting any routine treatment. What does it matter if doctors’ strikes mean you move from six millionth in the queue to seventh millionth?
I am not saying that such problems are easily or simply solved. They aren’t. But still we have a Government that spends nearly half of all the money in the country every year and employs nearly six million people, so it’s reasonable to expect action rather than inaction.
Without that, more and more of us are going to see our taxes as the average medieval peasant did. When your lord wanted money, you tried to find it, and then got on with your life: you didn’t expect to get anything back for the cash.
So again now: pay the tribute to the government – then buy private health care; go by car rather than train, dodging the potholes; pay for top-up tuition for your children; and accept that you just have less money.
There are many reasons for these phenomena, but I want to single out two: one economic, and one cultural.
The economic one is the now-obvious fact that the country’s tax base can no longer support our aspirations for the public realm. Without economic growth, with output per worker hardly growing since 2008, public services can’t grow at 2-3 per cent a year without eventually placing huge strain on the system.
That strain is now becoming visible in the shabby state of our hospitals, schools and roads, and in the deferral of infrastructure programmes other than the sainted HS2.
Of course, all the clever people in both parties say that, nevertheless, taxes must eventually rise still further. The ageing population and declining public health mean that we can never hope to increase economic growth from our own efforts. Better to keep the immigration floodgates open and push taxes up to keep the show on the road.
As I have argued many times, there is no future in this. Ever-increasing taxes just crush the economy. The only question is when the break point comes.
I don’t expect anything better from Labour, but those Conservative politicians who are fine with it – people who at least purport to believe that individuals spend their own money better than the government and that incentives matter – really should be ashamed of themselves.
Still, this problem can be remedied with clearer thought and a genuine determination to cut spending. The second problem, the cultural one, goes deeper.
It’s what seems to me a very evident decline in the belief in excellence and the growth of the feeling that anything will do and anything is good enough.
We’ve all experienced it and lockdown reinforced it. Whether it’s the “lazy girl jobs” meme on social media, idle public servants, schools that don’t teach facts and knowledge, woeful customer service from big companies, we are getting used to the mediocre.
This reality often seems at variance from the official presentation. The Government points to the improvement in literacy over the past decade. Yet we all deal with people every day who can’t write coherent English and struggle to understand a proposition of any complexity.
Similarly, crime is falling according to the statistics – yet most of us feel the streets are less safe and more threatening.
We are told that renewable energy is cheaper and better, yet the Government is preparing to pay people not to use electricity in case the grid can’t supply it.
The official presentation is becoming like Soviet tractor production statistics, simply out of line with, indeed irrelevant to, the experience of daily life, an experience where no one expects the authorities to try to improve things.
You then get another infallible sign of a country at risk of decline: a ruling class that focuses on protecting its privileges rather than the welfare of the people.
I’m afraid that this is all too visible in Britain today. The NatWest board that tried to protect Alison Rose. George Osborne’s British Museum board that didn’t seem to take seriously the evidence of thefts or want to hold anyone responsible.
The NHS managers in Chester who didn’t face up to the deaths on their maternity wards. It’s no wonder that so many people think the system is rigged. No wonder that so many young people think it would be better to try socialism than continue with the current set-up.
The frustration that so many of us feel with the mainstream political class comes down to a sense that they just don’t get any of this. Boris Johnson, for all his weaknesses, tapped into a spirit of change, a belief that the country could be run in a different way, a voice for the people and places who felt ignored. Few politicians are really offering this now.
Of course, we expect nothing better from Labour, the voice of stasis, of public sector interest groups and even more state diktat. But I’m sad to say that leading members of the current Government also give the impression of thinking that there’s nothing really wrong with the way the country has been run in the past decade or two – or, alternatively, that there is nothing that the Government can do to change things, and all that can be achieved is to keep the show on the road and hang on to their jobs for now.
They aren’t even trying to control immigration, to the obvious frustration of Suella Braverman. They face both ways on net zero and (in the Online Safety Bill) on free speech. They boast of how much is being spent on state provision.
This week’s ministerial changes underline the political strategy of tilting back to the Blue Wall, to those who are still keeping their heads above water, and hoping that fear of the alternatives will get the Conservative Party over the line. It’s a “just about managing” attitude to government for a just about managing country.
I really fear for the future of Britain if we don’t get off this path. When I resigned from the Cabinet, it was because I couldn’t as a matter of principle support another lockdown. We dodged that bullet. But we are now facing another great risk, that we simply fail to rise from our torpor and settle into comfortable decline, with a political class that tells itself nothing else is possible.
I will keep arguing for something better because I don’t believe that the people of this great country are really so fearful of change. We always rise to the challenge when we are faced with it honestly and squarely and we know what must be done. What we need is for our leaders to do the same. To rise to the occasion, to take tough choices – and to lead.
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