DAt the beginning of August, a British journalist posed a simple question to Jacob Rees-Mogg, then Minister for Brexit Opportunities and now Minister for Economic Affairs and Energy: “What is working well in the UK right now? Can you name a public service that works well? » In a strange pirouette, he replied tit for tat: “Our cricketers have been doing pretty well recently”the England cricket team having just won an important match.
It was an attempt at humor, but the case speaks volumes. Even a man who has been a minister for three years struggles to name anything that works well in the UK. For months, the country seems to be sinking into the doldrums, the problems following one another at an impressive pace.
This summer saw the largest strike movement in thirty years, with walkouts of trains, postal workers, garbage collectors, lawyers and even dockworkers… The NHS, the health service, has 6.5 million patients waiting treatment, three times more than in 2008. Water companies dumped millions of liters of untreated sewage directly into the sea during the summer. On July 20, London came close to a power cut, having to urgently import electricity from Belgium, at fifty times the normal price. Inflation reaches 10%. Against the dollar, the pound sterling fell on Monday, September 26 to the lowest level in its history. The country has been in recession since April, albeit narrowly (recession in GDP of 0.1% in each of the second and third quarters).
The little background music goes up, ever louder: “Nothing really works in the UK. » It’s a sentence that we say between friends or between colleagues. June 11, The Times headline: “Why is nothing working in this broken UK? On September 5, Keir Starmer, the Labor opposition leader, echoed it: “People across the country are struggling to pay their bills, worrying about being able to pay for their weekly groceries or fill up their cars. There is a general feeling that nothing really works anymore. »
Thatcher’s method
The accusation is partially unjust, of course. The United Kingdom remains the world’s fifth largest economy. In a large part of London or the south-east of England, the crisis seems distant. But the discomfort is real. It is explained by the conjunction of two phenomena. The first is old and dates back to the Thatcher period: the United Kingdom has been the most unequal country in Western Europe for forty years. The second is more recent: since 2008, it has experienced very weak growth, around 1.2% on average per year. “Together, these two challenges represent a toxic combination”, analyzes the Resolution Foundation, a think tank. In a report published in July, he points out that the United Kingdom is gradually falling in the rankings: in 2018, the average income of a British household was 16% below that of Germans and 9% below that of the French, whereas it was higher in 2007.
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