We all get distracted, as Twitter or daydreaming makes us less productive than we would like to be. That might be suboptimal, but it’s not you or me getting distracted that should really worry us. It’s Britain.
Ours is a country where workers are stuck with wages at the same level they were as we went into the financial crisis of 2008. Productivity growth – the key driver of rising living standards – has all but ground to a halt. Last year there was a 37% rise in food bank use compared with the year before and in the past few weeks one in 20 adults reported having run out of food and being unable to afford more. Temperatures and NHS waiting lists are hitting record highs, while pupil absence rates at secondary school are 50% higher post-pandemic.
Problems that need addressing are being added to our national to-do list far quicker than our politicians are managing to cross them off. But it’s the slow pace of addressing them, rather than their inevitable arrival, that should give us all pause for thought. What is increasingly clear is that British politics, and our public policy debates more generally, are too easily distracted.
Last week it was debating scrapping inheritance tax – just the latest tax cut to be floated. There’s only one problem: Britain in the 2020s is in the tax-rising not tax-cutting business, thanks to the rising cost of government debt, the legacy of austerity and our ageing society. The tax take averaged 33% of GDP over the 2000s and 2010s, but is now on course to approach 38% by 2027-28 – a rise of £4,200 per household. The pretence that tax cuts are around the corner, most famously from Liz Truss, has distracted us from the real task: ensuring we improve the quality of our taxes not just their quantity.
Our tax system largely pretends the electric vehicle revolution isn’t happening while discouraging firms from investing and people from moving. Council tax has become as regressive and hated as the poll tax it was created to replace, and the wages workers sweat for are taxed more heavily than almost every other form of income.
If only that was it – across the biggest challenges Britain faces, our policy and politics opt for distraction over action. On net zero the most immediate challenge is to decarbonise our home heating, largely by replacing gas boilers with heat pumps. The government is committed to 600,000 being installed a year by 2028. But just 70,000 were fitted last year, in part because politicians have been distracted by the idea that pumping hydrogen through our existing gas network might provide a technologically exciting alternative. The winners? Highly paid hydrogen industry lobbyists but not Britain, which despite needing a huge rollout of heat pumps is installing the least per capita among 21 European countries, according to the Committee on Climate Change.
Distractions don’t just stop us addressing the problems we face, they also mean that we miss Britain’s very real strengths – both present and potential – that provide the answers we need. Dreams that the UK will become a centre for global chip manufacturing distract us from the reality that we are a service-exporting superpower, and from the need to prioritise the high-value manufacturing – from automotive to chemicals – that we already have but is under threat.
Our great second cities, from Birmingham to Manchester, are the plausible route to turning levelling up from rhetoric into reality. But rather than doing the hard yards over decades to support those cities to prosper (requiring significantly more change and investment than is being contemplated by either main party), we get distracted by the idea that Manchester, for example, is already too successful and risks leaving its neighbouring towns behind. The truth? Residents of Manchester remain the poorest in Greater Manchester.
We have a Conservative government, so the distractions from policy answers on the right are more visible for all to see, from culture war nonsense to a return of imperial measures or dreams of royal yachts. But they exist on the left, too, not least the widespread focus on “degrowth” – the argument that growth isn’t even desirable – after 15 years in which the lack of growth has left workers’ wages stagnant and our public finances under strain.
We can’t just blame our politicians – our wider public policy debate has caught the distraction disease. The 2010s saw never-ending discussions of the theoretical risk that robots might take all our jobs, while back in the real world employment hit record highs. That might have helped some people sell books, but it was no use when the real problem was Britain seeing far too few robots installed – or business investment of any kind (firms in France, Germany and the US have invested 20% more on average since 2005 – a gap that has cost the UK economy 4% of GDP, and workers £1,250 a year in lost wages).
When it comes to poverty, our debates seem more focused on PR than progress. Every six months the issue is rebranded: from period poverty to broadband poverty. The words change but do nothing to solve the underlying problem – poverty itself. People who are on lower incomes in Britain simply have too little money, being a staggering 22% poorer than their counterparts in France.
Britain has become a distraction nation. Things become the focus because they sound interesting, not because they’re important. Too much time is spent rebranding a problem rather than solving it. And we often let wishful thinking about magical solutions get in the way of doing what blindingly obviously needs to be done. Britain, in short, needs to get a grip.
• Torsten Bell is chief executive of the Resolution Foundation. Read more at resolutionfoundation.org
