The inheritance awaiting Britain’s next government

Almost a millennium ago, Alan Rufus, a Breton warlord, helped his kinsman William the Conqueror squish a Saxon rebellion, pillaging and slaughtering across northern England. Today the view from his ruined castle in Richmond is serene, sheep gambolling beside the River Swale as it meanders through North Yorkshire. Richmond is “a lovely, historic, thriving market town”, effuses Colin Grant, a champion of local regeneration projects, as he shows off its 18th-century theatre.

Since 2015 Richmond’s MP has been Rishi Sunak, the (probably outgoing) Conservative prime minister. The constituency is a landscape of dry-stone walls, the blissful Yorkshire Dales, idyllic villages and pubs named after farm animals. To be sure, the locals have grievances, including over agricultural policy and rural transport. “If you look under the surface, life has become harder,” insists Daniel Callaghan, the Liberal Democrat candidate in the general election on July 4th. But there is scant deprivation or crime. What would a pensioner, relaxing in Richmond’s cobbled marketplace, like to change? “Nothing, really.”

At what is likely to be the end of 14 years of Conservative rule—this article was published before the election result was known—there is more than one story to tell about Britain. Up close, life is more nuanced than the headline tale of dereliction and decay. The safest generalisations about a population of roughly 68m may be demographic. Since the Tories were elected in 2010 it has grown by a whopping 5m people; as immigration surged to record levels despite the vows to bring it down, it has become even more diverse. And as all countries are, Britain has been shaped by forces beyond politicians’ control: the death of the queen, a unifying figurehead; the rise of social media.

But another way to summarise the mosaic of modern Britain is to say that its burdens have been shared unequally. Because, in some ways and places, it seems to be falling apart.

The big picture is that public services are crumbling. Begin with the National Health Service, the most vital and cherished. Patients wait dangerously long minutes for ambulances, grim hours in emergency rooms and agonising months for treatment. Hospital performance, judges the Institute for Government, a think-tank, is arguably the worst since the NHS was created in 1948. After peaking in 2010, overall satisfaction with it has plummeted to the lowest recorded level. Meanwhile the courts are overwhelmed and prisons are bursting. Local authorities are going bust; libraries and swimming pools have closed. University finances are precarious.

“There’s a general feeling in the country that nothing is working well,” Sir Vernon Bogdanor of King’s College London says delicately. The farce of High Speed 2, a botched railway project on which tens of billions were wasted, is a handy parable of wider mismanagement. The frequent dumping of sewage in the country’s waterways—including the picturesque River Swale—is another ready-made metaphor. Sometimes, amid a litany of shortages and strikes, Britain seems to be turning into a giant, dysfunctional metaphor for itself.

The public finances, which the Tories pledged to fix, are buckling. As belt-tightening was followed by shocks and splurges, public debt has rocketed. As a share of GDP, tax is at its highest level in 70 years. The economy is limping. In real terms incomes have disappointed since the financial crisis of 2007-09, the worst period of wage stagnation in two centuries.

Little wonder that three-quarters of Britons tell pollsters the country is in a worse state than it was in 2010. The ambient mood, reckons Jack Thorne, one of its best modern playwrights, is of “genuine confusion about why we’re in this mess”.

Unhappy and inglorious

Part of the background is the programme of austerity—deep, fast cuts to public spending—that began in 2010. Poor places, which rely most on state support, were hit hard. The architects of austerity “don’t know what life is like living here”, says Richard McShane, who founded the Phoenix community centre in a derelict library on the Easterhouse estate in Glasgow. “We are the forgotten people.”

Easterhouse is a landmark in Tory thinking. Its deprivation inspired Sir Iain Duncan Smith, a former party leader and welfare secretary, to rethink the causes and costs of poverty. Before taking office in 2010, David Cameron, the first in a run of five Tory prime ministers ending with Mr Sunak, spoke there about what he called Britain’s “broken society”, vowing to replace despair with hope. Part of his remedy was the “Big Society”, a wishy-washy plan to galvanise community groups. Along with “levelling up” and “take back control”, the “Big Society” is among the defunct Tory slogans which, like embarrassing relatives, are no longer much mentioned.

There have been improvements in Easterhouse. “You’ve seen ‘West Side Story’?” asks Stuart Patterson, once a teenage gang member and addict, now the pastor of a church in a dingy local shopping centre. “It was lived out in these streets.” He points out the fields that hosted gang battles in the 1980s and the roads he couldn’t walk down safely. Now the gangs have largely been tamed. A lot of the shoddy tenement housing has been replaced.

“That’s cosmetic,” laments Mr McShane. Many of the underlying problems—ill-health, drinking, unemployment—endure. Easterhouse remains one of the most deprived parts of Scotland. Across Britain as a whole, the proportion of children living in poverty has risen. In 2022, calculated the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, a think-tank, around 3.8m people experienced destitution (ie, a lack of heat, shelter or other essentials), well over double the number in 2017. Reliance on food banks has spiked, especially during the cost-of-living crunch of the past few years. Even before the pandemic, life expectancy was flatlining (see chart 1).

“We will not put the Union at risk,” promised the Conservative manifesto of 2010. Four years later Scotland voted against independence. Yet the union does not look entirely secure, partly because of the other, bilious referendum that followed. Voters in both Scotland and Northern Ireland opted to stay in the EU in 2016; the decision to leave bolstered the argument for divorcing Britain instead.

Brexit was the great political rupture in the rickety Tory imperium. Its causes are debatable; the ongoing consequences are clearer. From Brexit flowed the disgrace of Boris Johnson’s premiership and the tragicomic cameo of Liz Truss’s. Chaos and distraction engulfed politics; a miasma of dishonesty seeped across it. Meanwhile long-term prospects for economic growth and productivity have been damaged further. Investment has suffered.

Paperwork, a smaller talent pool, extra costs on imports and exports, delays: leaving the EU, says David Barnes, a ponytailed IT entrepreneur in Basildon, in south-east England, has been a bureaucratic “nightmare”. In 2016 Basildon was overwhelmingly pro-Brexit, despite (or because of) the fact that it has had little foreign immigration, one of Brexiteers’ main gripes. “It was going to be so wonderful!” a retired Basildon nurse says sardonically of the policy. Instead the country is “on its knees now. Any more and it’d be on its elbows—and your face would be in it!”

In central Basildon, you can see what she means. The liveliest spot is a pie-and-mash café, where the menu—the other option is hot eels—is a clue to the town’s origin as a post-war alternative to London’s bombed-out East End. Boarded-up shops, a recurring sight and complaint across the country, abound. The throbbing capital is 25 miles (40km) away but feels much farther. Kathy Kentish, who runs the regional branch of Citizens Advice, a charity, says steep energy costs and higher interest rates have brought money troubles to locals who hadn’t known them before.

A peculiarly British malaise afflicts many such towns and cities. In part that is a hangover from the pandemic, the other defining rupture of the Tory era. Other problems common to rich countries—stuttering growth, ageing populations, inflation—have contributed. But these have been exacerbated by long-term economic sclerosis, the misjudgments of austerity and Brexit. You could call the whole predicament an exercise of sovereignty, just not the kind the Brexiteers intended.

For instance, because the NHS was creaking even before covid-19, it has recovered more slowly than other European health-care systems. Treatment backlogs, and surging mental-health complaints, have led more people to withdraw from the labour market. Around 2.8m Britons are out of work because of chronic illness (up from 2.2m in 2010).

Young people are among the malaise’s main victims. The pandemic disrupted their education, and continues to: many more pupils are missing much more school than before it. Housing, an even more widespread worry than vacant shops, is prohibitively expensive for many. Amid strangulating planning rules, the average house price in England has risen to 8.3 times average earnings, almost double the ratio at the turn of the millennium. Housing costs are “astronomical round here”, says a 17-year-old in Basildon. According to Ipsos, a pollster, 21% of 18- to 34-year-olds were pessimistic about the economic future in 2010. Now that figure is 55%.

Pointing out the concrete downtown buildings that are due to be redeveloped, Jessica Power, a can-do Basildon councillor, offers a summary that resonates more widely. Too many people and businesses are stuck, she says. As the town is outpaced by glitzier rivals, “People need to realise that, yeah, you can do better.”

That judgment could apply to Britain as a whole. Some countries are forging ahead of it; others are catching up (see chart 2). After receding for decades, says David Kynaston, a distinguished historian, the sense of being a nation in decline has returned. Perhaps the past 14 years will be seen as the age in which Britain subsided into its fate as a “poor rich” country.

Naturally there are bright spots—and not only in the Yorkshire Dales. London’s resilient dynamism is one—though the gap between the metropolis and the rest has stretched when it was meant to shrink. Immigration embarrassed ministers but is also a compliment. Britain, notes Ben Page of Ipsos, “remains one of the most attractive countries on Earth to outsiders”.

Under the Tories, British pupils have risen in some international academic rankings. Renewable energy is more prevalent. Less tangibly, and inadvertently, the country may have found an overdue humility. Henceforth it may be less likely to brag about its health care or armed forces being the “best in the world”; less reflexively determined to “punch above its weight”.

The dogs that didn’t bark

And alongside the woes Britain has faced, consider those it dodged. Despite the efforts of some cynical politicians, American-style culture wars—over statues, history and the like—have fizzled. Britons are just a bit less excitable about that kind of thing. Theirs is still an orderly sort of country. Sir Vernon Bogdanor calls it “profoundly stable, profoundly constitutional and profoundly moderate”. In confounding times, it has once again proved less susceptible to extremism than some others.

At least, it has proved so thus far. For another recurring theme, from Scotland to northern England and the south, is rage against politicians as a caste. “They’re all liars,” spits that retired nurse in Basildon. “They tend to be looking after themselves and to hell with the country,” thinks a farmer in Yorkshire. “All they’ve done is line their own pockets,” says a regular at the Phoenix centre in Easterhouse.

The second world war, notes Mr Kynaston, fostered expectations of state support that lingered in Britain for 35 years. Recent trials, from the financial crash to covid-19 and beyond, have fomented similar attitudes—just as the state malfunctions. That is a corrosive tension which, for its own sake and the country’s, the next government must try urgently to resolve. ■

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