As Britain staggers out of lockdown with the worst Covid-19 death rate in Europe, neoliberal orthodoxy over public spending is in retreat.
Savage cuts in the UK public sector over the last 10 Tory years left England short of 10,000 doctors, 40,000 nurses and 110,000 adult social care workers, fatally damaging the battle against the coronavirus, especially in care homes, which suffered £7.7-billion cuts.
Austerity, Tory ministers told us repeatedly before and after 2010, was unavoidable because of high levels of debt and borrowing after the 2008 banking crisis. But after World War Two, with gargantuan levels of national debt and borrowing to defeat Hitler – much higher than after 2008 – Keynesian policies led by both Labour and Conservative governments rebuilt the country. The National Health Service and a welfare state were created.
Like President Ramphosa, the UK government is under pressure to get the economy back to normal and quickly, or risk lasting damage. Our dependence on key workers throughout the economy – many of them dismissed by Tory ministers as low skilled and low paid before the crisis but lauded as essential workers now – also means there can be no going back to the status quo ante. What went before was a way of running our affairs that delivered a massively unfair deal to millions of British citizens and left the economy ill-equipped to face the future.
Tory Finance Minister George Osborne used to boast that he had squeezed the UK economy tighter than any in the advanced world, and that’s exactly what he did, leaving Britain grossly unprepared for precisely the kind of pandemic crisis that the government was warned about in 2016 by Exercise Cygnus but ignored.
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