Britain has one last chance to steer off this potholed road to perma-decline
I bumped into a former leader of a friendly country the other day. This regular visitor to Britain had just spent a few days outside London for the first time for some years. Their message was simple: “Do you realise how run down your country looks nowadays?”
It’s hard to disagree. Let’s be honest, a lot of Britain looks a bit of a mess. The public spaces and buildings are badly maintained. The roads are potholed. There’s litter and graffiti everywhere. The streets don’t feel safe. Large parts of London outside the south-west Waitrose belt from Battersea to Kingston remind me of the London of my youth in the late 1970s and early 1980s: decaying, poorly maintained, shabby, declining.
Our public services often look the same: our hospitals took tired and our council HQs have nothing of the grandeur and assertiveness of a French hôtel de ville.
This is no coincidence. What we are seeing is what happens when a country has had nearly 20 years of low productivity and low growth. Money gets short for everything and every year it gets harder to maintain things. Repairs and maintenance take a back seat. But the decline is gradual. Very often it takes an outsider to tell us the truth.
Once this problem sets in, politicians have two basic choices. One is to be honest with people: tell them that until we fix our growth problem the situation is not going to get any better and neither salaries nor funding for public services are going to go up much. Instead there will have to be painful reforms, especially in the public sector, which is such a drag on growth, and a serious attempt to hold the size of government down so that the private sector can fill the gap.
That’s one route. The other is to hide the reality. Tell voters that we can carry on as before, adding new tasks to government, pushing up taxes, benefits and the minimum wage, regulating the economy further, and trying to shield people from every shock and every unexpected event.
The strain is then taken by higher taxes, higher borrowing, and cheeseparing in important but unfashionable public services like courts and prisons. All of this makes the underlying problems even worse. There is still never enough money, because there’s only so far you can push up taxes or borrow. But growth is crushed still further.
Unfortunately that is the approach that has been taken over the past decade. There are two problems with it. The first, the obvious one, is that in the end the future becomes the present. Eventually we all look around and think “this country looks a bit of a mess”. We can’t hide the problem from ourselves. Talented people start to leave. We begin to feel the decline day to day.
The second, less obvious, difficulty is that in the end it doesn’t work politically either. You give your opponents an easy attack. That’s what happened to the Tories. Because we were reluctant to tell hard truths ourselves, it was easy for Labour to say to voters “The reason you aren’t getting those good things you want is that those evil and incompetent Tories refuse to give you them.”
Labour told voters that Britain was in a mess because the Tories were bad people who governed in their interest not the country’s. We paid the price for this at the election.
But now the problem swings around. Labour has created a problem for itself too. That is our opportunity.
If Labour now try to say “actually things are really bad after all” then they look dishonest and disappoint their supporters – as it has with its decision to scrap the universal winter fuel allowance. Its constant refrain that the Tories bequeathed a dire set of financial circumstances has fallen flat. Alternatively, if it says “we can do everything you want” then it is back in the same old trap: it has to push up taxes, borrow more, and postpone dealing with the country’s actual problems.
Labour hates having to make serious choices like this. It much prefers childish student gesture politics like Rachel Reeves’s removal of historic paintings from state offices. So instead it does what we have seen in recent weeks: vacillate between the two options. One day it’s doom and gloom, the next it’s splash the cash. And on the third day it’s both.
As this sinks in with voters, it will become ever clearer that Labour doesn’t know what to do. As so often with socialists, its philosophy and actual reality come into conflict. And when that happens under a socialist government, so much the worse for reality. Maybe at some level Labour knows that only market dynamics, the power of incentives, the force of entrepreneurialism can actually help us. Indeed Starmer felt he had to acknowledge the power of competition in his conference speech. But it can’t actually allow itself to act on that conclusion – for then why do you need a Labour Party? So instead Starmer immediately went on to complain that “markets don’t give you control”, and to promise a lot more of that control over the unfortunate British people.
This is not change. It is more of the same and it will have the same result. Starmer thinks that with more control he can solve the country’s problems. He will find that he has just made them worse still.
This is the opportunity for the Right in this country. When voters realise things are getting no better – which we must expect will take a bit of time – then we on the Right must be ready with the alternative.
Getting this alternative worked up, and properly explained and sold, is now the crucial task under the new Conservative leader, and I believe Robert Jenrick is best placed to do it.
This new package needs to include growth-boosting reforms; tax and spending cuts; immigration reductions; government reform; ECHR withdrawal; and much more. And above all it needs to revive the spirit of freedom, which used to be so strong in the Conservative Party, and in Britain; the readiness to tell the man from Whitehall to go away and to get on with our own lives.
This is the only way to turn things around and get the country looking good again. It will take time. But Labour can’t do it at all. The Conservatives can one day – if we prepare properly now.