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FOR SUBSCRIBERS JANUARY 25, 2023

It’s in a state of serious decline, and not just

In December, as many as 500 patients per week were dying in Britain because
of E.R. waits, according to the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, a figure
rivaling (and perhaps surpassing) the death toll from Covid-19. On average,
English ambulances were taking an hour and a half to respond to stroke and
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 heart-attack calls, compared with a target time of 18 minutes; nationwide, 10
times as many patients spent more than four hours waiting in emergency rooms
as did in 2011. The waiting list for scheduled treatments recently passed seven
million — more than 10 percent of the country — prompting nurses to strike.
The National Health Service has been in crisis for years, but over the holidays,
as wait times spiked, the crisis moved to the very center of a narrative of
national decline.

Post-Covid, the geopolitical order has been thrown into tumult. At the
beginning of the pandemic, commentators wondered about the fate of the
United States, its indifferent political leadership and its apparently diminished
“state capacity.” Lately, they have focused more on the sudden weakness of
China: its population in decline, its economy struggling more than it has in
decades, its “zero Covid” reversal a sign of both political weakness and political
overreach, depending on whom you ask.

But the descent of Britain is in many ways more dramatic. By the end of next
year, the average British family will be less well off than the average Slovenian
one, according to a recent analysis by John Burn-Murdoch at The Financial
Times; by the end of this decade, the average British family will have a lower
standard of living than the average Polish one.

On the campaign trail and in office, promising a new prosperity, Boris Johnson
used to talk incessantly about “leveling up.” But the last dozen years of
uninterrupted Tory rule have produced, in economic terms, something much
more like a national flatlining. In a 2020 academic analysis by Nicholas Crafts
and Terence C. Mills, recently publicized by the economic historian Adam
Tooze, the two economists asked whether the ongoing slowdown in British
productivity was unprecedented. Their answer: not quite, but that it was
certainly the worst in the last 250 years, since the very beginning of the
Industrial Revolution. Which is to say: To find a fitting analogue to the British
economic experience of the last decade, you have to reach back to a time before
the arrival of any significant growth at all, to a period governed much more by
Malthusianism, subsistence-level poverty and a nearly flat economic future. By
all accounts, things have gotten worse since their paper was published.
According to “Stagnation Nation,” a recent report by a think tank, there are
eight million young Brits in the work force today who have not experienced
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 sustained wage growth at all.

Over the last several decades, first the China boom and then the world’s
populist turn have upended one of the basic promises of post-Cold War
geopolitics: that free trade would not just bring predictable prosperity but
would also draw countries into closer political consensus around something like
Anglo-American market liberalism. The experience of Britain over the same
period suggests another fly in the End of History ointment, undermining a
separate supposition of that era, which lives on in zombie form in ours: that
convergence meant that rich and well-governed countries would stay that way.

For a few weeks last fall, as Liz Truss failed to survive longer as head of state
than the shelf life of a head of lettuce, I found myself wondering how a country
that had long seen itself — and to some significant degree been seen by the rest
of the world — as a very beacon of good governance had become so seemingly
ungovernable. It was of course not that long ago that American liberals looked
with envy at the British system — admiring the speed of national elections, and
the way that new governing coalitions always seemed able to get things done.

Post-Brexit, both the outlook for Britain and the quality of its politics look very
different, as everyone knows. But focusing on a single “Leave” vote risks
confusing that one abrupt outburst of xenophobic populism with what in fact is
a long-term story of manufactured decline. As Burn-Murdoch demonstrates in
another in his series of data-rich analyses of the British plight, the country’s
obvious struggles have a very obvious central cause: austerity. In the aftermath
of the 2008 global financial crisis, and in the name of rebalancing budgets, the
Tory-led government set about cutting annual public spending, as a proportion
of G.D.P., to 39 percent from 46 percent. The cuts were far larger and more
consistent than nearly all of Britain’s peer countries managed to enact;
spending on new physical and digital health infrastructure, for instance, fell by
half over the decade. In the United States, political reversals and partisan
hypocrisy put a check on deep austerity; in Britain, the party making the cuts
has stayed steadily in power for 12 years.

The consequences have been remarkable: a very different Britain from the one
that reached the turn of the millennium as Tony Blair’s “Cool Britannia.” Real
wages have actually declined, on average, over the last 15 years, making
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 America’s wage stagnation over the same period seem appealing by comparison.
As the political economist William Davies has written, the private sector is also
behaving shortsightedly, skimping on long-term investments and extracting
profits from financial speculation instead: “To put it bluntly, Britain’s capitalist
class has effectively given up on the future.” Even the right-wing Daily
Telegraph is now lamenting that England is “becoming a poor country.”

Of course, trends aside, in absolute terms Britain remains a wealthy place: the
sixth-largest economy in the world. Its G.D.P. is now smaller than that of India,
another of its former colonies, but it still boasts some of the world’s finest
research universities, and can claim partial credit for the generation’s greatest
practical scientific breakthrough, the Covid mRNA vaccines. And while the
deluded promises of Brexit boosters obviously haven’t come to pass, neither
have the bleakest projections: food shortages, crippling labor crunches or
economic chaos.

Instead, there has been a slow, sighing decay — one that makes contemporary
Britain a revealing case study in the way we talk and think about the fates of
nations and the shape of contemporary history. Optimists like to point to global
graphs of long-term progress, but if the political experience of the last decade
has taught us anything, it is that whether the world as a whole is richer than it
was 50 years ago matters much less to the people on it today than who got those
gains, and how they compare with expectations. Worldwide child mortality
statistics are indeed encouraging, as are measures of global poverty. But it’s
cold comfort to point out to an American despairing over Covid-era life
expectancy declines that, in fact, a child born today can still expect to live longer
than one born in 1995, for instance, or to tell a Brit worrying over his or her
economic prospects that added prosperity is likely to come eventually — at the
same level enjoyed by economies in the former Eastern Bloc.

Can Britain even stomach such a comparison? The wealthy West has long
regarded development as a race that has already and definitively been won, with
suspense remaining primarily about how quickly and how fully the rest of the
world might catch up. Rich countries could stumble, the triumphalist narrative
went, but even the worst-case scenarios would look something like Japan — a
rich country that stalled out and stubbornly stopped growing. But Japan is an
economic utopia compared with Argentina, among the richest countries of the
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 world a century ago, or Italy, which has tripped its way into instability over the
last few decades. Britain has long since formally relinquished its dreams of
world domination, but the implied bargain of imperial retreat was something
like a tenured chair at the table of global elders. As it turns out, things can fall
apart in the metropole too. Over two centuries, a tiny island nation made itself
an empire and a capitalist fable, essentially inventing economic growth and
then, powered by it, swallowing half the world. Over just two decades now, it
has remade itself as a cautionary tale.

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