An obvious example is the National Health Service, which has repeatedly been on the verge of meltdown since I started paying careful attention in 2013. Covid made that worse, but even before the Tory strategy was to keep core institutions at the level of "barely good enough to get by." The NHS is uber-popular here because it represents equal access, that is service not (for once) graded by wealth and privilege. Naturally the Tories have been bleeding that example.
The Tories have made mediocrity the de facto standard of public systems, with actual collapse a perpetual shadow. UK infrastructures are not competitive in the 21st century. The Tory UK is weaker in 2022 than it was in 2010 when they took over. Neither the media nor much of the voting public ever focus on these core issues. They are less important than another issue, which we'll get to.
Another example of "making worse" is the government itself. Starting in 2015-16, Johnson and his Tories have turned public discussion in the country upside down. Everything has been about Brexit, everything has been about the people leading it--Johnson, May, Gove, Davies, Frost, et al. generating now seven years of nonsense about everything. Real British issues like climate disaster, entrenched poverty, deindustrialization, poor national health, faltering education, the worst productivity gains in the rich world, political corruption--all these were drowned by the nonstop Brexit roadshow.
Brexit got fired up five years into the Coalition and then Conservative austerity reign, which was clearly going nowhere. Over the decade, the BBC, the country's only internationally-respected institution (hate to break the news) was cut 30 percent, and councils, which sustain local quality of life, were generally cut around 50 percent. This forced cuts that hurt essential services (after school youth programs, sidewalk de-icing, rubbish collection, everything), making most of this stuff, even in my well-off borough of Islington, pretty crappy. Simple repairs (a hole in a sideboard allowing squirrels into the building walls) would take months and months, and then not be done well enough to last more than a few weeks. Councils also ramped up side businesses like moneylending and accompanying risks. The fatal decision to put flammable cladding on Grenfell Tower was stupid and insane on its face, but very much a part of this austerity-mediocrity ethos that has degraded Britain.
Actually there is another internationally-respected British institution, universities, and the Tory-led Coalition government entered by whacking them too, cutting central teaching funding to near zero for most fields, then later cutting maintenance grants for students, then still later eliminating the London cost allowance, all after tripling the fee level and creating a student debt (and also public debt, don't ask) crisis and then freezing fees for years which has pushed many universities into fiscal crisis--you get the picture. The entitled, casual fucking around with really complex institutions that took decades and the life-work of millions, well, it is very very hard to understand.
Behind the "great trading nation" rhetoric, the implicit Tory plan is to make everyday life for most people a little bit worse, year after year. The Tory offer to builders, bankers, and property owners is clear. But they offer nothing material to the general population: they certainly have no plan for economic grandeur of the kind associated with the lost empire, because--short of re-colonial conquest-- that would require massive investments in public and behaviorially-evolved stuff--research, advanced education, sustained managerial effort that goes beyond coercion and bullying, and also long-range, sustained thinking.
When they get into trouble, as they have now, Tories first think to wreck some more. Hence their absurd culture minister's plan to freeze and then defund the BBC, the home office minister's plan to sic the Navy on refugee rafts, the likely pushing of more patients into the NHS by lifting all Covid restrictions before Omicron has been contained, and so on. There's just nothing constructive coming out of the party post-Brexit, which was the pointless, damaging culmination of their first 10 years of post-Thatcherite rule.
So the question is why do these Tories rule? One answer is that the Labour party today offers nothing much either. It presided over many Tory cuts on local councils in the famous red wall regions, and its post-Corbyn alternative is basically nonexistent. What rebuilding would Labour actually do? Their shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, used a Financial Times interview to promise fiscal discipline, Tory style.
A better answer comes from Nesrine Malik this week in the Guardian--it's kind of the only thing you need to read on the subject (though see also Aditya Chakraborty). Malik rightly claims that Tory supporters aren't going to dump Johnson so easily (though they will happily beat him up enough to make him more compliant with Thatcherite conservatism).
Johnson is a contracted private service provider – as long as he delivers, then as clients, his supporters don’t really care what he gets up to outside of the tasks he has been hired for. Those tasks are broadly Brexit and a shiny, prosperous country where jobs and funds have been cut or confiscated from those less deserving.
She then helpfully translates:
Those two tasks, at heart, are about contempt for communal rule of law, and limiting sharing resources with others. They are about making our own minds up regarding which laws we would like thank you very much, and creating two classes of people. ... It is no wonder Tory supporters are not storming the gates of Downing Street.
So the Tory offer to the nation is English exceptionalism. This has two components, one financial and one cultural, read racial.
The sub-clauses in the contract that flow from these two headline items all, one way or another, are about preserving the financial and cultural assets of Conservative voters. Maintaining an economy built on protecting private capital and property values, shifting the blame for low wages and unemployment on to immigrants rather than poor regulation of employers, and forging a synthetic supremacist national identity through relentless culture war posturing on colonial history, statues, flags and national anthems.
Basically Malik has captured the whole story of English Conservatism today. There is nothing else to say. "As long as the Tories hurt only who they 'need to be hurting,' no frivolity or recklessness will be terminal." They have no other goals, or other ideas.
There. UK politics is explained. And, if Tory superdominance stays intact, so is the inevitability of English decline.
