General   (General discussion, talk about anything.)

Work-shy Britain is sleepwalking into a doom-spiral of decline

The country is in denial about the calamity of zero growth, a broken NHS and a culture of entitlement
Allister Heath, Daily Telegraph.
4 May 2022 • 9:30pm
Allister Heath

Everywhere we look, Britain appears broken, our society, economy, culture and institutions in severe decline, the product of two generations of political leaders who have refused to tell us difficult truths. Maddeningly, the pathologies that are eating away at our prosperity and quality of life – the generalised public and private incompetence, the buck-passing and free-riding, the collapsing NHS, dysfunctional housing market, stagnant economy, decrepit infrastructure and toxic culture-war idiocies – feel increasingly unresolvable, unfixable even.
We are stuck in a vortex of decline, immobilised by warped ideologies and the power of vested interests. We know we need to change, but nobody can pull it off. Even Brexit, a truly revolutionary project which gave hope to millions, has temporarily been neutralised as an agent of change.
Take “our NHS”, the supposed “envy of the world”: there is a taboo, an omerta around admitting how bad and unreformable it has become and how many lives it now ruins. Any politician or senior figure who breaks this code of silence faces immediate cancellation.
The truth is that the NHS as it really exists, rather than in the delusions of fantasists, is a farrago of broken promises, disappointments and failings – a mad bureaucracy that is sucking in ever more money and delivering care that is all too often inadequate. Covid has shattered it permanently: despite Boris Johnson’s massive injections of cash, more than one in 10 British adults are on waiting lists, a national disgrace. Out-of-pocket payments for private healthcare are almost as high a share of national income as in the US, the Financial Times has revealed. Individuals should be encouraged to take responsibility, but this demonstrates that the NHS is failing to provide even a decent safety net.
Another few billion won’t change anything given the imploded structures and imbecilic management: socialism never works. The GP system is beyond repair, doctors and nurses are over-worked, operations keep getting cancelled because of a lack of beds, we don’t train enough health workers in Britain, care costs and the challenge of ageing have yet to be addressed and patients are treated as supplicants.
Labour has no answers: Clement Attlee invented this dreadful system, which relies entirely on the state, rejects the help of the private sector and eliminates all individual autonomy. Labour is also to blame for the greatest lie in British politics: the claim, made whenever the Tories want to reform the NHS, that they are about to “privatise” it, abandon its universal nature and turn it into a caricature of the “American” system. It’s a monstrous untruth and prevents all progress.
Unless some means is found to smash this political logjam and allow a real debate about how healthcare is funded and delivered – I suspect that a radical proposal would need to be followed by a major campaign and be ratified by a Brexit-style referendum – life will keep getting worse for tens of millions, and taxes will keep going up, asphyxiating the economy in the process.
Our absurdly expensive and grossly under-supplied housing market is another ticking time bomb. Attlee also laid the seeds of this debacle with his centrally planned approach, and it all finally went wrong at the turn of the century: until then, prices had risen roughly in line with earnings over time, but stagnant wages, cheap credit, a booming population and smaller households put paid to this.
Far too great a share of our wealth is invested in housing, and not enough in companies, dragging growth down. Britain’s future is as a nation of yeomen and women, of freeholders and mass property owners, not of neo-feudalism, baby-busts and declining relationships and families. Do we really want to push the youth even further into the embrace of nihilistic neo-Marxist movements obsessed with class warfare?
We need a new approach to setting interest rates that takes the need to prevent housing bubbles into account, and we must build a lot more of the sorts of homes people want to live in – overwhelmingly, well-built and pretty houses with gardens – where they want them. The current proposed reforms are either too small-scale, or designed to provoke a political backlash that no government can resist.
Just like with the NHS, progress will require a national debate followed by a bold, revolutionary proposal to release a vast amount of (mainly agricultural) land to build new towns and suburbs and some extra two million homes in record time. It will require another Brexit-style referendum: how else will the tyranny of the status quo be overcome?
Britain’s transformation into an Italian-style low-growth economy is the third major pathology impoverishing our nation. Here, too, political discourse is stuck in demagogic wishful thinking.
The scale of the catastrophe is terrifying. Real incomes are falling, as are real savings. Inflation is at its highest level in decades. Real wages may take until 2025 to return to 2008 levels. Millions are struggling to make ends meet, despite the expansion of tax credits. Productivity growth never recovered after the financial crisis. Private investment is low. The trend rate of growth is far weaker today than it was in the 1990s. Taxes are at their steepest since the 1940s, and spending at its highest sustained level since the 1970s.
Even though our economy has almost stopped growing, we are in denial. Old and young are living beyond their means, working fewer hours, obsessing about work-life balance, interested only in going “green” or enjoying unaffordable triple-locked pensions. We are extracting ever more from the productive sector. We want to decarbonise, but refuse to build nuclear plants. We feel entitled to ultra-cheap loans. Millions act as if they have the right to work from home. The private sector has succumbed to the dead hand of woke capital and a certain kind of HR culture. There has been an explosion of red tape, leading to a massive misallocation of resources. Incentives to work have been eroded, and tax credit welfarism is a major issue. It’s as if we want to be poor. The free-marketeers were right: higher tax and government consumption as a share of GDP reduces growth.
Britain was once a Wunderkind: we reformed our stagnant economy and ended the relative decline of the post-colonial years. All of this is ancient history: the UK is once again on a downward trajectory, and this time we don’t even seem to care.