Last Tuesday Rishi Sunak stood behind a lectern outside Downing Street and issued a grave warning. The country, he said, was in the midst of a profound economic crisis, which would mean “difficult decisions to come”. But lest anyone worry too much, he was also at pains to portray himself as a guardian of the public good. “You saw me during Covid, doing everything I could to protect people and businesses with schemes like furlough,” he said. “There are always limits, more so now than ever, but I promise you this: I will bring that same compassion to the challenges we face today.”
The exact mathematics of the government’s fiscal gap are a matter of conjecture. A fortnight ago, the reversal by the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, of most of the tax reductions proposed by Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng clawed back about £30bn, leaving a hole estimated at £40bn. Midway through last week, there were reports that things were looking slightly less dire. Then, amid continuing whispers about government departments being instructed to come up with cuts of up to 15%, rumblings from the Treasury suggested that Hunt and Sunak are “exploring” tax rises and spending savings worth £50bn a year, while hoping they could avoid economies on quite that scale. Whatever the spin, bullshit and expectations management preceding Hunt’s medium-term fiscal statement on 17 November, one thing remains clear: there will be cuts.
Out in the real world, there already are. For the councils who deliver some of our most basic public services, the austerity that began in the aftermath of the financial crash of 2008 has never really gone away, and is now biting with renewed ferocity. Whatever the details of the fiscal statement, local authorities are already having to deal with a trying combination of inflation, increased energy prices, and the rising need for adult and children’s social care. Because of the eternally Westminster-focused ways of our politics and media, the resulting local crises get far too little attention, but they are a big part of why Britain now feels so anxious and exhausted.
Kent county council is facing a £70m annual “overspend” and warning of deep cuts. In Lancashire, the gap is £84m. Wirral councillors have been told to “prepare for the worst”, and get to grips with a financial hole of about £50m. There is a similar picture in Birmingham, Norfolk, Hampshire and countless areas besides. In Sheffield, the city council is set to cut services by £18m, and is floating proposals for monthly bin collections, and the closure of libraries and recycling centres.
Tellingly, voices warning of a deepening disaster include those of prominent Conservatives. The Tory leader of Surrey county council, Tim Oliver, is the current chair of the County Councils Network. Last Thursday, he said that, over the next two years, £3.5bn will be added to the costs borne by 40 of England’s unitary and county councils, which threatens to be “devastating for local services”. His message to his Tory comrades in Westminster was plain: “With inflation causing multibillion black holes in our budgets, we need more help, not less.” Here was proof of the profound disconnection between fiscal economics and the state of society: the best that can be hoped for, it seems, is limited cuts, but what most places need is increased spending.
Millions of people are familiar with what this means as a matter of lived experience: parents of children with special educational needs, disabled adults who get ever-shorter care visits, families with no hope of making it to the top of waiting lists for social housing. Meanwhile, just about all of us put up with a more ambient kind of austerity – parks with broken swings, potholed roads, endless litter. The decline of local amenities and services blurs into our view of other parts of the public sector: we have increasingly low expectations of the police, a shared presumption that schools will be crowded and under-resourced, and an increasingly ingrained view of the NHS as something best used only in an absolute emergency. This is the essence of the public mood right now, a weary disengagement from a state that no longer provides.
A better government would understand that as a sign of unsustainable decay, and rethink. If they were not locked into a view of the world that events are shredding, the prime minister and chancellor could rule out spending cuts and embrace a very different approach: increase inheritance tax, look at broader forms of wealth taxation, reinstitute Boris Johnson’s so-called health and social care levy, or simply put up income tax, not least at the top. The fact that they won’t is a vivid demonstration of the limits of their “compassion”, and two key aspects of the modern Conservative mind. In the thinking of Tory technocrats such as Hunt, public duty now seems to boil down to the idea that holding high office is all about “tough decisions”, a belief that one’s political fibre has not been proven unless human need has been judged to be less important than “efficiency”. This dovetails with that eternal Tory view of public services as flabby, wasteful and always deserving of cuts and savings.
The public, it seems to me, is now starting to understand that such thinking has led to disaster. Beyond Johnson’s misrule and the calamities created by Liz Truss, that realisation looks like one of the key reasons for the Tories’ vertiginous drop in the polls – though running alongside it is a very British kind of pessimism: a belief that, after 12 years of Tory rule, stagnation is the natural order of things and hoping for anything else is a mug’s game. Which of those views wins out will decide our political future. It is a measure of the Conservatives’ predicament that a grim acceptance of more austerity and decline is one of the few things that might give them a flickering hope of recovery.
A fortnight ago I spent four days in Grimsby, the former fishing town in Lincolnshire that voted overwhelmingly for Brexit – and three years later, returned its first Conservative MP in 74 years. Walking around its back streets, I met a man who had just closed the gym he had been running, due to impossible electricity bills. As we walked past shuttered-up shops, he talked about his sense that life now simply amounted to one crisis after another. “It’s like everybody’s waiting, waiting, waiting,” he said. “I’ve stopped looking forward to things being over now: I’ve just started to accept that you have to be happy, and deal with the situation.” What he meant was that refusing to believe that things might get better was the best way of staying sane. But here, perhaps, was proof of one of the Tories’ most underrated political assets – that phlegmatic, fatalistic, very human kind of resilience that makes things far too easy for the stubborn donkeys who lead us.
John Harris is a Guardian columnist
