Britain is already in the grip of a deep malaise – what happens when zero growth bites?
Far from the madding jubilee crowds, I spent the May half-term holiday doing a long sponsored walk in Cumbria with my two kids. I intentionally tuned out of the news, but even so, reminders of politics and the state of the country were sometimes unavoidable.
In the crowded town of Keswick, I discovered that the cash-strapped council had closed the local swimming pool. There were also clear signs of post-Brexit labour shortages in the hospitality trade. And when we finally began our journey back home, the inevitable happened: our first train was delayed in Crewe by a “mechanical issue”, and on the second leg of the journey, the collision of hordes of weekend travellers with a measly number of carriages meant whole families squatting in corridors. Here, yet again, was proof of what all the flags and mad parades couldn’t cover up: a country in the grip of an increasingly deep malaise, where life seems to regularly hit the buffers, to the sound of that very British apology: “Sorry for any inconvenience caused.”
As excitement builds around two upcoming byelections, in Wakefield and Tiverton and Honiton, this is too easily forgotten. So far, the government’s plunge in popularity has been almost exclusively seen in terms of Boris Johnson’s character and the horrors of Partygate. But clearly, there is much more that is frustrating and angering people: most notably, raging inflation, and a crisis in the NHS manifested in sometimes fatally long waits for ambulances, imploding A&E departments and the near-impossibility for many people of seeing a GP or dentist. Outside London, public transport is too often erratic and expensive. One other aspect of our current national condition is rather overlooked, and centres on what more than a
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