How did Britain get here? It's as simple as ABC

It doesn’t require much insight to work out why Britain is in the parlous state it is today. Even Boris Johnson could cope with the challenge, if he could find the energy to rise to it. So could anyone who can master an ABC.

An ABC we can quickly run through here.

Austerity, Brexit, Covid. And Boris Johnson caught, in the middle,
making it all far worse

A is Austerity. Britain’s had ten years of constant cuts in public services. Back then, both the Conservatives and their supporters claimed that such austerity was almost a moral obligation, in order not to leave a massive debt to our children. Curiously, those people have gone completely silent on the subject today, since despite all that austerity, the national debt is now double what it was back then.

Meanwhile, key services have been strangled. More money has gone into the NHS, as Conservatives keep assuring us, but nothing like enough to keep up with the impact of an ageing population and the increasing costs of treatment, as new therapies emerge for conditions we were previously unable to cure.

What’s more, a succession of Tory or Tory-dominated governments has maintained pressure on NHS staff income and numbers, so that healthcare professionals are being paid less for doing far more.

The result is that Britain has ended up with 254 hospital beds for every 100,000 people, compared to Germany’s 800. The picture in intensive care is still worse, with the United Kingdom having just under 7 ICU beds per 100,000, against Germany with nearly 39.

So when a serious epidemic hit both countries, Germany had the resources to cope, and Britain didn’t.

Since we’ve already mentioned the pandemic, let’s skip to C for Covid. The same Conservatives who gave us all-pain, no-gain austerity, gave us an epidemic out of control. At first, the government denied the seriousness of the problem, losing precious time as a result. It then made a series of promises it couldn’t keep, on testing, on the provision of Personal Protective Equipment for care workers, on combating the disease in Care Homes.

The result was a performance that may have been the worst in Europe, and was certainly amongst the worst. Not just in the immediate effects of the disease, in numbers of infections and deaths, but in the economic impact it has had, which may have been the worst of any advanced economy.

Which takes us finally to B for Brexit. The very same Conservatives of Austerity and poorly controlled Covid have been giving us reckless Brexit. They, and their friends in the right-wing press, have been trying desperately to blame the slowness of negotiations, and the increasingly probable outcome of a no-deal Brexit, on the European Union. But we’ve now had the government openly admitting that it intends to break international law over Brexit, by unilaterally flouting the terms of an agreement, although it had made it and signed it itself.

It had triumphantly presented that agreement to the electorate as evidence that it was the right team to ‘get Brexit done’. That helped it to its present maority in Parliament. It’s now clear that, although it had been told what the implications of the agreement were at the time – an internal trade border within the United Kingdom, between Northern Ireland and Britain – it had either deluded itself into believing it could duck those implications, or it had never had any intention honouring its commitments in the first place.

Either way, having shown itself to be an untrustworthy partner, one who can’t be relied on to stick to any agreement it makes, it can hardly expect to be taken seriously in its ongoing negotiations with the EU. Blame the EU for the breakdown of negotiations? You might as well blame it for Johnson’s handling of Covid.

Covid has plunged Britain into recession. Any Brexit will make things harder still. As for a no-deal Brexit, that would be even worse than the epidemic.

Still, some may argue that Brexit isn’t on us yet. It’s a pleasure still to come. Its effects we have still to suffer (or enjoy, if you’re a Tory and that way inclined) in the early part of next year.

In which case, let’s have a different B, if you prefer. B for Boris. After all, he’s so closely involved in the continuing disaster of Covid, or the disaster of Brexit to come, that he deserves to figure in our ABC. 

Austerity-Boris-Covid will do for now. When Johnson takes us into Austerity-Brexit-Covid next year, it’ll almost certainly be him inflicting that new ABC on us. A new triumph for him to add to his others.

Either way, its cause will remain as simple to understand as any ABC.