On Thursday, voters in the UK will render their verdict on fourteen years of Tory rule. It is expected that the Conservative Party will receive an electoral clobbering of note. Some polls predict that the party may even be relegated to third place, behind both Labour and either the Liberal Democrats or Reform UK, the new kid on the block of Brexit provocateur and Trump-wannabe Nigel Farage.

Five successive Tory prime minister have turned the UK into a nation of food banks, thrift shops, and gig jobs that fail to pay a living wage. The party of ‘small government’ pushed the tax intake to its highest level in over seventy years and simultaneously swelled the national debt to a record £1.8 trillion, an increase of well over eighty percent. Meanwhile, income growth has been negligible in real terms since 2009. Britons have suffered the longest period of wage stagnation in over two centuries.

Tax hikes and heavy borrowing notwithstanding, the country’s infrastructure and public services are crumbling. Privatised water companies dump vast volumes of raw sewage in rivers and streams; an estimated 14,000 patients die each year whilst waiting for medical attention in hospital emergency rooms (according to the Royal College of Emergency Medicine); and some four million children go to school on an empty stomach. Food insecurity affects more than a quarter of all minors in the UK, prompting the Red Cross to provide emergency relief and the United Nations to issue repeated warnings.

This then is what fourteen years of institutionalised incompetence, often cloaked as ‘austerity’, begets: a nation in terminal decline that is singularly unable to shed its funk, find its mojo, or stop digging its hole.

From the over-confident David Cameron to the otherworldly Rishi Sunak via a Thatcherite clone, a fact-free clown, and a weird libertarian, the UK has been thoroughly humiliated, thrashed, pulped, and reduced to a mere shadow of its former self. And then to think that some feared for the integrity, and indeed survival, of the European Union after Great Britain had shown how to quickly grow and prosper outside the bloc.

If the UK did provide a service to Brussels, it showed that exiting the EU is not a good idea, if not a recipe for disaster. Consequently, Geert Wilders in The Netherlands, Giorgia Meloni in Italy, Marine Le Pen in France, and even Hungary’s Viktor Orbán have quickly changed their mind: nobody wants to leave the union for fear of turning into a basket case much like the UK.

Always Cash Hungry

It remains somewhat of a mystery what successive Tory governments did with all the money they raked in. The National Health Service (NHS) was showered with cash but also with external consultants who charge outrageous sums for their worthless advice. The armed forces are likewise not starved for cash. The UK still manages to spend about 2.5% of its GDP on defence, but a sizeable portion of that is wasted on a dysfunctional procurement regime and an outdated military strategy that appears grounded in Victorian times.

As a result, the Royal Navy cannot keep either one of its aircraft carriers operational for a lack of personnel, planes, and escort ships. They also leak profusely and reportedly run on crash-prone Windows Millennium Edition. The former ruler of the world’s oceans is also unable to launch missiles from its nuclear submarines, neutering the country’s nuclear strike capability. The missiles either go astray or splash into the water just a few hundred meters from the boat instead of hitting a distant target.

The army, much shrunken, has trouble with the Ajax armoured fighting vehicle – a sort of ‘tanquette’. It turns out that these ‘little tanks’ rattled so much that crew members become unwell – no foe needed. After a great many upgrades and updates, and after 34 years of development and incessant testing, Ajax may yet enter service.

In 2010, the incoming Tory government cancelled the Air Force’s Nimrod MRA4 programme for the replacement of its long-range patrol aircraft after spending £3.8 billion. It went on to spend an additional £3 billion on buying American-made off-the-shelf airplanes.

Cancelling projects after spending big money has become a Tory specialty. The high-speed HS2 rail line connecting London to the north of England has turned into an opera buffa of sorts with costs ballooning even as the branch lines to Leeds and Manchester were axed. The length of the line was slashed by half to about 225 kilometres and will now have its terminus at Birmingham.

Enduring Myth

In the closing days of the election campaign, Tory candidates from the prime minister down have been issuing warnings to voters about impending tax hikes in case Labour gets into power. It takes a special kind of cynic to even dare make such a suggestion after the conservatives pushed the tax burden to a height not seen in peacetime.

No matter how much you juggle the statistics, Labour has a much better track record of minding the exchequer than the conservatives do. For each postwar year they spent in office, Tories borrowed almost twice as much as Labour governments did. The latter also repaid the national debt in one out of every four years whilst in power against one in ten years for the conservatives.

Lest there remains any doubt: Labour paid down five times as much debt as the Tories ever did – even after allowing for inflation. The icing on that cake comes from the fact that even though Tory governments raised significant amounts of cash by selling off state-owned enterprises, this windfall did not improve their otherwise dismal fiscal performance. The ‘toffs’ just cannot be trusted with money.

Whenever a Tory candidate or supporter starts a well-rehearsed refrain about fiscal prudence and good government, he/she ought to be put to shame – if not hit in the proverbial face – with these indisputable facts (supplied by the Office of National Statistics and the House of Commons Library).

Cover photo: Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt.

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© 2023 photo by Number 10