The NHS is in its worst crisis since its foundation. Overcrowded, underfunded, short on staff, long on waiting times and in the middle of yet another giant re-organisation. There are queues of patients on hospital trolleys and the spiral of decline isn’t improving – it is getting worse each year.
Schools are so short of cash that even academies are telling the government that they can’t deliver the service for the cash they are being provided. After ten years of real terms pay cuts there is a shortage of teachers and the government thinks it can fix it with an advertising campaign. In many parts of the country the service is being propped up via illegal requests for top up payments from parents. In poorer areas it is just spiralling downwards into a crisis of overcrowded classrooms.
The welfare system remains mired in the biggest failed re-organisation in history. Few people object to the principle of simplifying the system and combining benefits. Yet the Universal Credit system isn’t a simplification – it is a smokescreen for massive reductions and we are now seeing terminally ill patients spending the last few weeks of their lives battling with phone lines that no one answers to try and keep payments that they clearly need. Rarely has any system changed been handled with less skill and with more insensitivity and bullying behaviour.
Housing keeps getting harder for young people to obtain. In many parts of the country you have to borrow ten times your salary to buy a house. Social housing is incredibly hard to obtain and we’ve seen the horrible disaster of Grenfell Tower created by deregulation of building standards. More and more people are being forced onto a private rented market where they are at risk of losing their home every six months and at the mercy of sky high rents. Instead of building for need the government is destroying the green belt to allow building developers to go all out for profitable building but ignore the needs of those on low income.
Security of employment has been removed for 4 million people via zero hours contracts and false self-employment. These people are employees who get no pay if they get ill. They can be dismissed in an instant if the company has a slow week or their supervisor takes against them. Horrible insecurities that we thought had gone for ever a hundred years ago have come back with a vengeance and been normalised. The entire workforce is on lower wages than it was ten years ago in real terms and work has got a lot more intense.
The transport system in the country has become over priced and chaotically organised. Commuters down south are crammed in to trains that they are charged a fortune for. Commuters up north are trundling slowly along ancient tracks. Rail franchises are a nice little earner for private owners or simply handed back to Mr Grayling if the contract isn’t profitable enough. Money is being wasted on an ideological fantasy that you can have private competition when only one train goes down the track at any one time and customers don’t have a choice.
Incredibly all this is taking place not at the depths of a recession – when you might expect times to be hard. This is taking place ten years into the recovery from the last financial crash. Economic growth across the globe last year was close to 5%. If the government can’t deliver basic services efficiently at this point in the economic cycle when unemployment is at record lows then when will it be able to do so?
There is still a major government spending deficit in the middle of the economic upswing. There is still a horrible gap between what Britain buys from abroad and what it sells despite a decline in the pound.
The country is in a fragile state. The government is utterly divided and weakly led. The most basic services are simply not functioning properly. And sooner or later the economic cycle will turn. In recent days some stock markets have fallen like a stone. Which could easily be a simple blip. Or could be a sign of something more serious. The bubble that has been created by printing money and feeding it into the financial system whilst starving the real economy of support has to break eventually.
The British economy is in no kind of state to survive the next crash. And on top of all those problems we now have a decision that the country is going to abandon the EU single market and put up customs barriers with its biggest market.
What could possibly go wrong?