You know the central conceit of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, of course you do. A lad of sun-kissed beauty is presented with a stunning likeness of himself. Disturbed at the notion that he will grow old while the painting doesn’t, he locks it away – where it is the portrait that ages and uglifies while Dorian stays boyish and beautiful. But perhaps you’ve forgotten what happens next.
The story has come to my mind many times, as the foulness of British politics becomes ever harder to ignore. Genteel liberals wonder how their land of cricket whites and orderly queues could be ruled by a grasping liar such as Boris Johnson and I hear a whisper on the wind: Dorian Gray. The New York Times and Der Spiegel report in bewilderment on a country with pockets of deep poverty and unslaked anger, and again rasps that hoarse voice: the horror was hidden here all along.
Now it’s all out in the open. In one of the richest societies in human history, inhabitants are starting to twig that by 2030 or thereabouts they will earn less per head than the Poles they so recently patronised. Whatever the politicians and pundits may argue, this debacle owes nothing to Jeremy Corbyn or Brexit or any supposedly un-British “populism”. It is homegrown and has deep roots.
Like Dorian Gray, Britain has for too long presented one face to the world while concealing the awful truth. The author of that novel, Oscar Wilde, was the son of an Irish nationalist and a graduate of Oxford, where he became a fine student of the British upper classes and their mellifluous hypocrisy. He would have recognised much of the mess we’re in, because it grew among shadows and cover-ups. From Tony Blair’s Cool Britannia through to George Osborne’s “march of the makers”, our rulers have trumpeted every false success, while ugly facts have been waved away as anomalies: from the former manufacturing suburbs and towns turned into giant warehouses of surplus people, to the fact that 15% of adults in England are on antidepressants. We’re winning the global race, claimed David Cameron, even as the population’s life expectancy fell far behind other rich countries. We shan’t stunt future generations with debt, he boasted, as our five-year-olds became the shortest in Europe.
Or take the housing bubble that politicians pretended was true prosperity – until this week, as the Bank of England hiked rates for the 13th time in a row and the prospect of it bursting began to terrify them. Yet the Westminster classes blew their hardest into that bubble. As soon as estate agents were out of lockdown, Rishi Sunak gave up £6bn of taxpayers’ money for a stamp duty holiday – an act as prudent as pouring petrol on a fire. Many of those he lured up the property ladder will be hardest hit by rising mortgage rates. Analysis done for me by UK Finance suggests that 465,000 house purchases during that tax break were financed with two- or three-year fixed rate mortgages – the very ones running out right now. In other words, nearly half a million households took the chancellor’s inducement; many will plunge into dangerous financial straits; some face losing their homes. They were mis-sold a dream by Sunak. Still, at least the Tories enjoyed a bounce in the polls.
“Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man’s face,” Dorian is told by his portraitist Basil Hallward. “If a wretched man has a vice, it shows itself in the lines of his mouth, the droop of his eyelids, the moulding of his hands even … But you, Dorian, with your pure, bright, innocent face and your marvellous untroubled youth – I can’t believe anything against you.” The picture of Dorian, which would have revealed the grotesque truth, is hidden away. So, too, has the UK avoided admitting its ills. Even now, in a country where patently so little works for people who rely on work for their income, commentators and frontbenchers still blame supposedly all-powerful interlopers: Boris, Nigel, Jeremy. And from Sunak to Starmer, all push growth and jobs as the remedy for what ails us.
Yet growth in this country is falling and not because of Ukraine or Covid or Brexit. Since the 1950s, the growth rate adjusted for inflation has been on a gentle but insistent downward slide. Our economy has become ever more stagnant and dependent on debt. It is fatuous to pretend this is going to turn around through magicking Britain into an AI free-for-all or a jolly green industrial giant. Employment? One in four employees are on low weekly wages – either because the pay is too low or the hours aren’t enough – while the average real wage has flatlined for many years.
Much of this analysis comes from a new book, When Nothing Works, written by a team of scholars. Although specialising in economics and accountancy, what they have produced is an essential text for understanding British government: the polarised politics of a highly unequal and increasingly stagnant society.
Take the issue at the top of today’s agenda: wages. Why can’t you and I take home more money? Because of a lack of productivity, politicians will say. Yet the researchers point to how labour has got a smaller and smaller share of economic output since the 1970s.
If the same share of GDP was paid out in wages today as in 1976, the average working-age household would have an extra £9,744 a year. We haven’t lost that 10 grand a year through laziness at work but because politicians from Thatcher onwards smashed up trade unions, undermined labour rights, and crowed over the result as a “flexible labour market”. What they really created was a low-wage workforce, in a low-growth country ruled by politicians with low ambitions for everyone bar themselves.
“The prayer of your pride has been answered,” Basil counsels Dorian, when he finally sees the portrait and its horrific truth. “The prayer of your repentance will be answered also.” When Nothing Works will inevitably be termed pessimistic, but it is no such thing. Realism comes from facing who we are and dropping the pretence that a growth miracle is just around the corner. Instead of trying to boost “the economy”, it is high time to boost our people: to ensure they have the basics they need to live a life free from indignity and free to flourish. This will come from redistribution rather than growth, from replacing extractive businesses with fair ones. Such ideas will not go down well in SW1, where both Tory and Labour are increasingly hostile to pluralism and brittle in their dogmatism. Self-knowledge is the hardest knowledge, as one of the book’s authors, Karel Williams, says. And self-delusion leads eventually to disaster.
Unable to face his loathsome self-image, Dorian slashes that portrait. He is found by servants. “Lying on the floor was a dead man, in evening dress, with a knife in his heart. He was withered, wrinkled and loathsome of visage. It was not till they examined the rings that they recognised who it was.”
Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist
