When Vicky forgets to buy food, she doesn’t eat. Autism means she often can’t manage day-to-day tasks: from cleaning the house and remembering to wash to doing the weekly shop. “I can’t cope with being outside for any real length of time,” she says. “And sometimes it can take me four days to complete one online shop.”
Her medication goes the same way. When Vicky doesn’t order her antidepressants, she can’t sleep. Without her painkillers for her arthritis, she struggles to move. Rising bills on top of low benefits have only added to the distress. Vicky is now £1,600 in debt to her energy company, but her disability means she can’t call them.
Social care – on paper, at least – is the safety net meant to help Vicky feel secure and well, but after applying this year to her local council, she was rejected. “Because I have no support, I’m constantly overwhelmed and on edge of a meltdown,” she says. “Sometimes I get out of bed and even before I dress I’m in tears.”
On her worst days, Vicky has suicidal thoughts. On the morning she found out she had been turned down for a care worker, she self harmed. It had taken her 10 years to get the courage to apply. “I feel so alone and helpless,” she admits. “Like I have no real future. I’m barely existing, not living.”
When Jeremy Hunt pledged a wave of tax cuts last month – and with it triggered what could be an austerity drive of tens of billions of pounds to pay for it – it’s unlikely he was thinking about Vicky.
After the coalition government ushered in sweeping cuts to councils post-2010, spending by local authorities fell from 7.4% of GDP to 5%. The Office for Budget Responsibility estimates this will now drop to 4.6% by 2028, even as demand – for everything from social care to special educational needs – continues to grow. If it’s hard to imagine what that will look like, council leaders in England are calling it an existential threat – the sort of budget cuts that will reduce councils to an emergency service, and put marginalised people at even greater risk.
The phrase “there is nothing left to cut” is not hyperbole. Cash-strapped councils in England have already sold off 75,000 public assets since 2010 – from youth clubs to playing fields – to survive previous funding raids. “Discretionary” services, such as children’s centres and museums, have closed or been left threadbare in many areas. As ever, the wealthiest were cushioned; the poorest councils have suffered cuts nearly three times higher than the richest over the last decade.
It is not as though “core” services – the parts of life councils must legally provide – are running smoothly, not least because wider austerity has made the population sicker and poorer just as local safety nets were shredded. Budget cuts are much like a virus: they spread. When central government shrinks benefits, local councils are forced to pay for more temporary accommodation because more people are homeless. When family support services are gutted, councils’ child protection bills soar and more children needlessly go into care.
The advice under a Conservative government used to be not to be ordinary, not to fall ill and not to grow old, but even that no longer feels sufficient. Whether it is an everyday pleasure – say, a playground for your grandchildren – or an ordinary crisis – say, legal aid for a bad divorce – the fact is that the best strategy for living in Britain now is simply to have the good luck to never need anything.
It is a heavy weight, realising that the arms of the state – or at least the state as we’ve always known it – are no longer there to catch you. In many ways, the national mood is one of fatigue or nagging unease. It is worrying that there won’t be a hospital bed for your elderly mum when she has a fall again; to be counting the remaining slices of bread in the packet and wondering what your children will have for breakfast when they run out. It wonders why nothing in this country works any more and how exactly – if ever – it can be put back together.
More than a decade of austerity, Brexit and the pandemic has seeded chaos throughout our political institutions, social fabric and economy. The same hubris and indifference currently on display at the Covid inquiry has vandalised large swaths of this country. The irony of 13 years of conservatism is that it can be defined by recklessness: with public money, public trust and public services.
What is often forgotten, amid the punditry and the Westminster manoeuvres, is that there are real – human – consequences to this recklessness. Just look at how Hunt’s tax cuts are said to be simply a cynical means to wound the next Labour government. Even the fact that flagship blue county councils could go bankrupt just as next year’s election is called is being framed not as devastating to those who use local services, but as an inconvenience for the Tories’ electoral fortunes. Forget a wheelchair user without a care worker left to sit in their own faeces; the real victim is the ex-Conservative MP forced to take a job in finance.
Last month, Nottingham city council became the latest to effectively declare itself bankrupt. It won’t be the last. By 2024/25, soaring inflation and demand mean local authorities will have to find an extra £15bn just to stay afloat, even before any further cuts kick in. Keir Starmer, meanwhile, assures voters that Labour won’t “turn on the spending taps”.
The public, it seems, are expected to accept this with the weary sigh of a beaten electorate. There will not be rioting in the street. No inquiry is coming to put austerity’s architects in the dock. And yet at some point more and more of us will surely notice what is missing. The ambulance that doesn’t come on time. The meals on wheels that no longer arrive.
The death of public services does not come with one loud bang but a million little moments. It is the sound of disabled people like Vicky crying at an empty cupboard and having no one to call for help. Some of those responsible for this state of affairs may be held accountable at the next election, but the damage they have caused will far outlast them. Vandals do not care about their destruction. It is the rest of us who must live with the wreckage.
Frances Ryan is a Guardian columnist
This article was amended on 8 December 2023 to remove a reference to libraries being a “discretionary” service; they are a statutory requirement.
In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
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