There’s a poignant epigraph in Hilary Mantel’s final book, The Mirror & the Light. “Brother men,” it reads, “you who live after us, do not harden your hearts against us.”
Right now, it feels particularly difficult not to harden our hearts to the governments of our recent past. Layer upon layer of political failure has consolidated into a deep rock of mismanagement which grows more obdurate by every passing generation. Britain is just so bleak: the sense of decay and neglect is palpable across the country. Everyone knows something is fundamentally off; that things are out of kilter.
Was anyone really that surprised by the report published earlier this week which found parts of Birmingham and the North East are now among the poorest places in Europe? You only have to walk around these places to know they are profoundly poor.
During my last trip to Birmingham, the city of my birth, I watched a group of Bayern Munich fans wandering aimlessly through the town ahead of the match against Aston Villa. What were they making of our second city as they compared it with their German home-town? Britain must have seemed so much poorer. This wasn’t because of anything dramatic — boarded up shops or jarring poverty — just an unmistakable feel.
The city’s problems run particularly deep, of course: failures of local government exacerbating failures of national Government. I’ve been reading David Lodge’s Nice Work, set in the depressed Birmingham of the Thatcher years. What is so striking about that novel, written almost four decades ago, is just how relevant it remains. That sense of decline and neglect captured by Lodge in 1988 has, if anything, only become worse.
Governments have come and gone, new ideas have been tried, grand promises made. And yet, here we are, Birmingham among the poorest places in Europe, a failing city at the heart of England: once Tory, then Labour and then Tory once again, but now, potentially, Reform. It should be no surprise that Nigel Farage chose the city for his party’s “BIGGEST Event Yet” last night.
But as deep as Birmingham’s problems go, they are far from unique — and it is this which goes at least some way to explain the national popularity of Reform in the polls. Even in London, which cannot be said to be a failing city in any real sense, there is now a sense of listlessness and decay in the air. As someone recently said to me, “It feels defeated.” London gambled on globalisation before 2008, and now, like the rest of the country, seems lost.
Everything here seems to be out of sync. What were once seen as basic life expectations have become aspirational luxuries; three-bed semis, family doctors, functioning A&Es, pleasant town centres and simple family holidays. Those jobs that once guaranteed a comfortable standard of life and status, no longer do: teaching and medicine, social work and military service. A friend of mine calls this the crisis of the “downwardly mobile professionals” — the DMPs or dumpies. These are not the “left behinds” of lore, but the quietly seething dumped upon, unsure who or what is to blame, but aware that something is wrong.
Who should the dumpies blame? In one sense, it’s easy: the Tories. There is a strong empirical case that the government from 2010-2024 was the worst in Britain’s post war history; a period of rule almost entirely without merit. Not only did the Conservative Party leave office with taxes at record highs but public services were at record lows and people’s living standards had barely improved since they took power. The country’s prisons were full, its military power reduced, its police forces cut and utility companies disgraced. Heathrow was not given its third runway, HS2 was not finished, the Northern Powerhouse was abandoned, and old-age care left to rot. The failure is almost impressive in its totality. Not a single prime minister or senior figure from this period emerges with credit: from David Cameron to Rishi Sunak via Theresa May, Boris Johnson and the Liz Truss moment.
Such is the Tory record, it is fanciful to think Badenoch might have turned things around in the short time she has been limply in charge of the party. Yet, brother man, for the sake of honesty, we should not harden our hearts too much. The Tory record is disastrous, but it was book-ended by crises beyond even its own ineptitude. No one serious can account for the years of Tory failure without acknowledging the crash of 2008 and the pandemic of 2020. We continue to live with the seismic consequences of those two events, as well as the stains of the 2016 Brexit crisis, which Cameron, May and Johnson cannot so easily wash from their hands.
But things go even deeper. It is not possible to travel around the UK without seeing not only the failures of the last period of Tory rule, but also the failed promise of the Blairite years of plenty before that, and the epoch of upheaval under Thatcher before Blair and Major. Andrew O’Brien, from the Council for National Resilience, has calculated that in 1975, when Thatcher became Tory leader, the country was spending around £19 billion a year in today’s prices on support for nationalised industries and employment programmes. Today, we are spending £41 billion on unemployment assistance alone. We have few nationalised industries ensuring that the essentials of advanced economic life — like steel — are produced in Britain.
Given our current predicament, O’Brien believes it would be sensible for the Government to abandon decades of Treasury orthodoxy and begin subsidising British industry all over again. That we are even contemplating such things is telling. Old answers no longer make much sense. The country today is walking around in a daze, like those Bayern Munich fans, dimly aware that something isn’t right, but unaware how to fix it.
All certainties are gone. In the Conservative Party, the children who worship at Thatcher’s feet have suddenly found their assumptions turn to dust. The transatlantic alliance, which was the alternative to Europe, is crumbling along with America’s commitment to free trade. What, then, is supposed to take its place? The Labour Party, meanwhile, has inherited a state which does not work in the way it assumed; it is unable to deliver either the improvements in public services or the economic growth necessary to begin to shift the malaise which is powering Reform into contention at the next election.
And yet, even Reform — Westminster’s disruptors — still cling to old Thatcherite orthodoxies which no longer make sense in a world where Trump and Putin hold sway and national resilience is the key, not just nationalism.
The failures of four decades have combined in this moment of profound national malaise. But Mantel’s plea for the compassion of future generations, contains a profound truth about life — and politics. It is too easy for us to pass judgement on those who made decisions in the past. Who, though, has the political bravery to try something new today? We should not harden our hearts to those who fail, only to those who never bother trying.
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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/
