Our national malaise is that nothing works and that the country is falling apart. Two recent episodes have captured the gloomy zeitgeist. On Monday, the national air traffic services (Nats), thrown into crisis by the input of a small amount of mismatching data, went down for several hours, spreading mayhem across Britain’s skies, with 1,600 flights cancelled and many others delayed, and the lives of hundreds of thousands of returning holidaymakers disrupted. And on Thursday, days before the start of the new school year, we learned that more than 100 schools are to be closed, all or in part because of fears the light concrete with which they are made could collapse.
These disparate events have common roots: they underline the lack of system resilience of so much British infrastructure and the unwillingness to plan for unforseen contingencies, so that reactions to unexpected failures are ad hoc and on the hoof. And when things do go wrong, the processes for redress and compensation are feeble – in these cases, organised around minimising a duty of care to schoolchildren and parents, and to airlines and passengers. There is a complete lack of accountability. Be sure the same is true for so much else.
Nats says it has established how one rogue, incorrectly completed flight plan – apparently so alarming that it did not want to corrupt its backup systems by triggering their use – disrupted its entire computer network. It promises it will never happen again, and that the systems that manage so many planes using British airspace are the “envy of the world”. It’s the same vainglorious boast of successive Tory ministers as they try to explain away the latest Brexit debacle: anyone who falls back on it must know it is a desperate, surefire signal that we are anything but the envy of the world.
Passengers whose journeys took days longer than expected are rightly furious, as are airlines forced to reschedule flights at a cumulative cost of at least £100m. But little remarked is the scale of the disaster that was so narrowly averted. Planes that don’t take off are at least safe, but those in the air have limited fuel – they cannot circle indefinitely waiting for instructions on when and where they can land. The risk of a crash or collision suddenly becomes very real. It is not good enough to have a backup system that cannot be operated for fear it might become corrupted by the same virus that has hit the frontline operating system. Safe flying demands that the backup system is discrete and capable of taking over the full load of flight information instantly.
Moreover, Nats should not be able to stand aside in the face of claims for compensation: indeed, being able to do so disincentivises it from making the necessary investment – 49% of which will need to be funded by government as owner of 49% of the equity. It is the monopoly provider of a crucial public service. If it fails, it should compensate for the losses incurred. Rishi Sunak’s intervention – he said airlines should accept their responsibility to passengers – was wildly off the mark. That is not the issue. The issues are why it happened, the extent of compensation and governmental refusal to accept accountability. Similarly with the schools, 104 of which have been newly notified that they are at risk of concrete failure and must close for a period. To do this just days before the beginning of a new term is outrageous, and speaks to a lack of duty of care – and poverty of planning for failures. Education, where spending in real terms will still be below 2010 levels by 2024/5, is the last of Tory priorities. It may be true that the concrete used dates back to the 1950s, 60s and 70s, but that only underlines how weak the investment in school infrastructure has been.
Between 1949 and 1978, according to an important paper by Jagjit Chadha and Issam Samiri for the Productivity Institute, net public sector investment averaged 4.5% of GDP. It then fell precipitately in the Thatcher years to zero, before climbing under New Labour from those depths to nearly 3% of GDP in 2010. Austerity prompted another steep fall, since when it has bumped along at about 2% of GDP.
Overall, the rate of public sector investment from 1979 to 2021 has run at less than half the rate of the previous 30 postwar years. Cumulatively (even allowing for privatisation), that means the evisceration of our public services – from schools that are unusable to weak backup systems at Nats.
In France, arch-representative of the economic EU corpse to which Brexiters claim we were shackled, public investment has run at levels half as high as ours again for the past 20 years. As a result, the country works – from its high-speed train network to mandatory enrolment of three-year-olds in nursery schools. A generous welfare system and sector-wide collective bargaining arrangements mean it has much less poverty than Britain – and the investment in research and development is paying off too, with France registering twice as many patents as we manage. It has more companies in the global top 100 than any other European country. True, the tax to GDP ratio is 45% and social conditions in some run-down suburbs are execrable, but in terms of levelling up, its four new battery gigafactories in the depressed north-east stand in stark contrast to our paltry efforts. But, as France’s six out of Europe’s 10 richest billionaires (more than any other country) would concede, the overall approach leads to economic success. In the 21st century, the route to prosperity is not lower but higher taxes, which buy infrastructure, fairness, R&D and high skills.
Reacquainting myself with Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations over the past few days, I have been intrigued to read how the father of political economy would have been unsurprised at France’s success. He favoured strong universal education, progressive taxation and “combinations” (trade unions) that raised labourers’ wages – he thought inequality a scourge. Indeed, Conservatives in the 1790s thought his ideas were dangerously radical – a man who favoured the new commercial society shaking the foundations of the old feudal order as much as Tom Paine, Rousseau or Voltaire. He would have hated being appropriated for the Conservative cause.
The remedy for our decline stares us in the face. Do the exact opposite of what almost every conservative commentator and politician urges. Reread Adam Smith, copy France, borrow from the Keynesian 30 years up to 1979 and invest in ourselves. It’s not so hard.
• Will Hutton is an Observer columnist
