If Britain’s cultural production leads the world in anything, it is in the imagining of grim dystopias which are only elaborated versions of contemporary British life: the line from 1984 to Children of Men is drawn through a particular, grudgingly passive relationship to a smothering Westminster state, in which declining living standards are wearily accepted, and the state’s authoritarianism is veiled by a neurotic, emptily patriotic boosterism.
From 1948 until now: entire British lifetimes could be spent experiencing only decline. That the national mood leading up to this Budget was one of trepidation is not solely the product of the Starmer government’s tin ear for political communications; it simply reflects the reality that Britain’s low-wage, low-productivity economy is the product of decades of political failure, and that there is little immediate prospect of the already wildly unpopular Labour government pulling Britain out of its tailspin. As Tom Hazeldine’s excellent recent survey in the New Left Review of Britain’s political economy underlines, by winning the support of only 20% of British voters at the election, Starmer entered office with “the lowest vote-share that a majority Westminster government has received since the introduction of universal suffrage”. Yet the Prime Minister must already look back on this slender mandate with fond nostalgia: the Budget, squeezing an extra £40 billion of taxes out of Britain’s low-paid workforce to extract — perhaps — 1% GDP growth is not likely to improve it.
The Labour government cannot restore the conditions of post-war social democracy because the underlying basis of that economy, a strong domestic manufacturing base, no longer exists. As Hazeldine’s 2021 book on Northern England, Britain’s economic powerhouse turned welfare sink, observes, the region “has tumbled from a unique pedestal, that of the world’s first industrial region, and fallen further than the world-economic conjuncture demanded. The contribution of manufacturing to national output in the UK has flatlined at just 10 per cent since 2007, barely a third of the figure for Germany and a smaller proportion also than for other comparable economies.” The result is a bizarre anomaly, the nation’s equivalent of possessing a Netherlands or Rhineland and choosing not just to leave it underdeveloped, but to actively un-develop it. The de-industrialisation of the North was a conscious choice made by successive Westminster governments, betting Britain’s future prosperity on a combination of London-centric financialisation and enmeshment in a globalised world economy. Yet the risks of financialisation were shown by the 2008 crash, from which Britain has never recovered; the full price of globalisation, in a now rapidly deglobalising world slipping into conflict between the great industrial land empires, is only now coming into view.
The Trentes Glorieuses, which enabled the expansive welfare state Britain can no longer afford, were a time-limited product of the Second World War, rescuing the British economy, if only temporarily, from the great slump of the Thirties. The great national gamble on financialised globalisation initiated by Thatcher and accelerated by succeeding governments of both parties was itself an attempt to kickstart the faltering economy with which Britain was left, once decades of post-war rebuilding had run their one-time course. It was a drastic form of experimental surgery which the patient is unlikely to survive. Instead of investing in industrial modernisation, Thatcher and her successors squandered natural bounties, such as North Sea oil, on subsidising the selling off the British economy’s essential components to international capital. Scottish nationalists, convinced that they would have invested North Sea oil wealth more wisely than Westminster, are hard to refute: the brief burst of prosperity created was analogous to that of boomers releasing equity from their homes to fund a world cruise, and showed equivalent disdain for their descendants’ chances. The result, as Hazeldine correctly observes, is that Britain is “the worst placed among OECD countries to weather” the coming storms, having “entered a period of marked economic decline compared to other G7 and OECD countries”, a relative decline made tangible to British voters with every foreign holiday.
The results of this decline are now palpable in every aspect of British life: in ballooning healthcare costs somehow leading to declining services, and the attendant national ritual of early morning calls to dismissive receptionists to compete for a narrow window of medical attention — and its corollary, the day-long trip to A&E, a desperate hack of the NHS system which must itself weigh heavily on national productivity.
Britain’s cloud of misery assumes concrete form in provincial high streets of unmitigated gloom, whose shuttered shops are punctuated by vape outlets, phone repairers and cash-only barbers, whose dubious legality are left unexamined by a state desperate for whatever revenue it can take; indeed even Oxford Street is now just another dismal provincial High Street. Our ruling class’s economic model is one so committed to low-wage employment over investment that the Conservative government imported almost 4% of the country’s population in the past two years just to man checkout tills and deliver food on bicycles, juicing gross GDP figures from what has aptly been termed “human quantitative easing”, even as the resulting exactions on housing, infrastructure and societal stability fray what is left of Britain’s social contract.
Indeed, in this grim landscape of tangible decline, where The Telegraph advises the young to emigrate with coldly unarguable rationality, the British social contract is literally a joke. Over the past year or so, friends of otherwise impeccably liberal opinions have forwarded me the “British social contract” meme, the archetypal cultural product of Britain’s younger online Right-wing, in which a hardworking graduate is crushed by taxes to support pensioners in ease and comfort and migrants in social housing. Similarly, friends working in policy report a sudden shift in attitudes in hitherto liberal wonkish colleagues, with their ire focussing particularly on London’s disbursement of social housing to an economically inactive dependent class. Anecdotal though they are, these observations mirror wider social trends. Britain is simply a poor country: 43% of the population earn too little to pay income tax at all. As Britain’s economy withers, the tax burden falls increasingly on a smaller and smaller professional class, its younger members already crushed by student loans and rising housing costs, whose growing sense of despair at diminishing expectations is rapidly curdling into rage against the British state.
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Struggling too so doing my test!
Tax tinkering is perhaps a bit of an understatement. The budget was a disaster; a wrecking ball that will consign what little remains of economic growth in the UK to the dustbin of decline.
There is no point in picking over all of its failings here, but if you wish to encourage growth then saddling business with huge tax rises, ludicrous employment regulations and some of the highest energy costs in the world is probably not the right recipe.
The issue with both Reeves and Starmer is that they are Marxist civil servants, who then became politicians, who then got into power. Neither of them really has a clue how business works, how the market works, how wealth is created, what capital really means. All these things are utterly alien to them. What they do believe is that the state is preeminent and the solution to everything. Sadly, for the country, they are about to discover how wrong and ignorant they are.
“In lieu of other ideas, Labour is committed to recapturing the post-war boom with climate change adopting Hitler’s role as the spur to national regeneration.”
In 1939 the UK was a manufacturing powerhouse and we had an empire
To see an example of high street ghastly grim, visit Croydon.
Approaching by train, this town – dubbed by a German newspaper in the Thatcher era as a DSS gulag – boasts the skyline of Manhattan. When you arrive, despite the apartment towers that continue to grow from vacant plots, it presents like Manhattan without the money. Or with a local economy that probably doesn’t exceed that of Haiti by very much.
The half-empty shopping centre has been vacated by some of the leading high street names. A large premises elsewhere has been abandoned by a supermarket chain, presumably because there are not enough middle class customers who are said to frequent this business.
Despite this, there are notices displayed at the railway station announcing that the town is a centre of culture. There are traces of culture and prosperity. They can be found in the facades of the buildings of yesteryear. In the former department store building that still has stained glass windows in the upper floor, advertising children’s clothes of the period; and in the former bank building on a corner which still has a magnificent art deco clock.
I wouldn’t trust Starmer & Co to build a Lego set. A nation is most definitely beyond their talent level.
There can be no rebuild while adhering to net zero targets. Everyone knows it. It’s a huge green elephant in the room. The very idea of outsourcing the production of our industrial needs to China/India etc and then criticising them for their pollution is beyond hypocritical. It’s frankly disgusting.
I’m already tired of this government. Joyless. Hypocritical. Talentless. I could go on. But why bother.
Is this working?
No; just like the labour government . . .
My proper comment has managed to disappear in half an hour, but at least I can post at all. I couldn’t yesterday.