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Before you next vote, you must read this from The New Yorker

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By STEVEN DOWNES

If you live in an old country, it can be easy to succumb to a narrative of decline. The state withers. The charlatans take over. You give up on progress, to some extent, and simply pray that this particular chapter of British nonsense will come to an end. It will. Rishi Sunak, the fifth, and presumably final, Conservative Prime Minister of the era, faces an election later this year, which he will almost certainly lose. But Britain cannot move on from the Tories without properly facing up to the harm that they have caused

If you’re not familiar with The New Yorker, you really should be. The magazine has been a go-to source of the best in global journalism and fiction for almost a century.

I don’t subscribe to the automatic notion that “the Americans do it better”, quite the opposite. But as an example and up-holder of the principles of good journalism, and fine writing, The New Yorker has been a constant reference point.

After all, what’s not to like about a magazine that publishes Truman Capote or Roald Dahl, Ernest Hemingway and Stephen King, Alice Munro and Vladimir Nabokov, Dorothy Parker, Philip Roth, JD Salinger, James Thurber and John Updike?

There’s an admirable class and cleverness to everything it does. The New Yorker just looks smart. An article from the end of 2022 by Jill Lepore, a full-time academic and a full-time New Yorker writer, called Is Mick Herron the Best Spy Novelist of His Generation?, about the author of the Slow Horses series of books, was like reading a Le Carré novel in its own right.

And for us Brits, with our biased and partial press and broadcasters (yes, it’s the best free press money can buy), The New Yorker offers a useful perspective, and outside-looking-in objectivity.

Which is why I commend to you a piece published this week, by British-born, London-based New Yorker staff writer Sam Knight. A sample of Knight’s essay, What Have Fourteen Years of Conservative Rule Done To Britain? is at the top of this page.

In Britain, “ordinary people” have all become fed-up and disillusioned (but only sometimes angry) with the political classes for the sheer damage that they have inflicted on us all. Politicians of all parties. Knight’s article manages to crystalise Britons’ subdued rage, and many of the reasons that lie behind it.

Knight’s not old enough to have experienced the full horrors of Thatcherism as it happened, but in focusing on the years since 2010, he has captured some of the impact of what 40 years of NeoCon governments have done to this once proud, kind, welcoming and prosperous country. The charlatans have truly taken over.

One stat he includes almost sums it all up: since 2011, NHS prescriptions for antidepressants in England have doubled.

These observations are surely right, but I worry that they obscure two basic truths about Britain’s experience since 2010. The first is that the country has suffered grievously. These have been years of loss and waste. The U.K. has yet to recover from the financial crisis that began in 2008. According to one estimate, the average worker is now fourteen thousand pounds worse off per year than if earnings had continued to rise at pre-crisis rates—it is the worst period for wage growth since the Napoleonic Wars. “Nobody who’s alive and working in the British economy today has ever seen anything like this,” Torsten Bell, the chief executive of the Resolution Foundation, which published the analysis, told the BBC last year. “This is what failure looks like.”

Thatcher, Blair, Cameron, Johnson, Truss, Farage, Starmer, Sunak.

Barwell, Ottaway, Reed, Philp, Newman, Ali, Perry, as well as Negrini, Lacey and Kerswell.

“This is what failure looks like.”

Well-sourced: Knight interviewed ex-MPs, ministers, Chancellors and the former Governor of the Bank of England

They have all conned us. They promise much, they offer initiative after policy change. They deliver little, except acts that cause massive harm. And yes, Knight writes about austerity and Brexit in his essay, too.

He also gives as an example the government-commissioned work of Michael Marmot, a renowned epidemiologist, who in 2008, when Gordon Brown was Prime Minister, was asked to come up with ways to reduce England’s health inequalities.

“Marmot made suggestions in six policy areas, including better access to child care, walking and cycling programs, social-security reforms, and measures to improve people’s sense of agency at work,” Knight writes. Marmot presented his report to the in-coming Tory-LibDem coalition in 2010. They accepted his findings. “I thought, Wow, this is great,” Marmot told Knight. “The problem was they then didn’t do it.”

And then Knight delivers this blow straight to his (British) readers’ solar plexus: “Ten years later, Marmot led a follow-up study, in which he documented stalling life expectancy, particularly among women in England’s poorest communities—and widening inequalities. ‘For men and women everywhere the time spent in poor health is increasing,’ he wrote…

“According to Marmot, the UK’s health performance since 2010, which includes rising infant mortality, slowing growth in children, and the return of rickets, makes it an outlier among comparable European nations. ‘The damage to the nation’s health need not have happened,’ Marmot concluded in 2020. He told me, ‘It was a political choice’.”

There’s a long weekend coming up. Do yourself a favour and set aside half-an-hour and go away to read What Have Fourteen Years of Conservative Rule Done To Britain?

Then think about it the next time someone asks you for your vote.

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