From the archive: Is society coming apart?
We are raiding the Guardian Long Read archives to bring you some classic pieces from years past, with new introductions from the authors.
This week, from 2021: Despite Thatcher and Reagan's best efforts, there is and has always been such a thing as society. The question is not whether it exists, but what shape it must take in a post-pandemic world
By Jill Lepore. Read by Kelly Burke
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Telegraph
4 hours ago
- Telegraph
Reeves's choices will make Britain poorer
The French statesman Pierre Mendes-France once said that to govern is to choose, and it was a maxim repeated often by the Chancellor in her spending statement to the Commons today. 'I have made my choices. In place of chaos, I choose stability. In place of decline, I choose investment. In place of retreat, I choose national renewal. These are my choices. These are this Government's choices. These are the British people's choices.' This might have sounded like a nice rhetorical flourish – an ironic echo of Mrs Thatcher quoting Francis of Assisi in 1979 – but what does it tell us about the Government's priorities? It is to continue spending money we do not earn and do not have because Labour is unwilling to take the difficult decisions necessary to reform the areas that cost the most to sustain, namely welfare and the NHS. The Treasury ostensibly spent months conducting what is called a zero-based spending review, testing budgets against whether they meet the Government's objectives and priorities. But who decides what they should be? An increase in defence spending has been forced on Labour and will be paid for from raiding the overseas aid budget. In a rare moment of candour the Chancellor admitted the 2.6 per cent of GDP would include spending on intelligence, not just the military. But Nato has asked for core spending of 3.5 per cent plus an additional 1.5 per cent for associated budgets. Labour will be nowhere near the requirement. That is their choice. Another priority is to allocate an extra £30 billion to 'our NHS' on top of the £22 billion already handed over when Labour took office last year. But where are the commensurate reforms that will ensure this is not wasted as so much money has been before? Wes Streeting has yet to unveil his masterplan for the NHS so we don't know; but history tells us to expect little in the way of change. Indeed, a renewed commitment to the nationalised ethos of the NHS, first set out in 1948, was cheered by MPs. That has ensured another decade of decline. Surely, with debt so high, the whole point of examining eye-watering levels of government spending is to try to bring it down, not tinker at the edges of departmental budgets while the overall amount balloons. But that is what we are seeing. The only savings she announced involved the closure of some public buildings, cutting back office costs and other 'efficiencies'. How often have we heard this before? Ms Reeves, who claims to have inherited a broken economy, has within the space of 12 months apparently so transformed its fortunes that she is able to splurge. She still believes that growth will provide the revenues even though her policies are inimical to economic expansion. Figures this week show the number of people in jobs has slumped at the fastest rate since 2014 directly as a result of the Chancellor's increase in employer National Insurance which took effect in the spring. How has that helped boost the economy? Ms Reeves made much of giving the go-ahead to extra investment in national infrastructure, such as roads, regional airports and local transport, which is undoubtedly needed, even though day to day spending will fall. All her hopes for growth rest on kick-starting major projects, including a swathe of social housebuilding schemes underpinned by a £39 billion investment over 10 years and reforms to planning laws to limit the scope for objections. But the industry says a serious shortage of skilled workers makes such promises impossible to fulfil. Moreover, will 'affordable housing' be filled by illegal immigrants ejected from hotels? The biggest issue is how to rein in spending on programmes that are spiralling out of control. Reforms of personal independence payments (PIPs) are in the pipeline but will they really go ahead? Labour Left-winger Richard Burgon said during Prime Minister's Questions that party backbenchers will not support the £5 billion cuts in a vote expected later this month. Scores of Labour MPs have signalled opposition and while Sir Keir Starmer stuck to his guns, this week's U-turn on the winter fuel allowance shows how he can buckle under pressure. The biggest problem facing the country is unsustainable debt, now around 100 per cent of GDP and record levels of taxation. Just paying the interest costs more than the defence budget and yet borrowing continues to grow. Nothing the Chancellor announced will reduce debt and everyone knows that she will have to raise taxes in the autumn or risk a market backlash. She keeps saying this is all being done to help 'working people' but they seem not to include the people who pay most tax, many of whom are already leaving the country. Net emigration among higher earners has reached its highest level since the financial crash. Like Labour chancellors of yore, she is spending money she does not have and will need to take more from wealth creators to fund it. Another French statesman, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, once said: 'The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing.' The Chancellor has made her choice – not to pluck the goose that lays the golden egg, but to kill it.
Daily Mail
20 hours ago
- Daily Mail
ALEX BRUMMER: If this is a fixed economy, I'd hate to see a broken one
Nearly half a century has passed since Margaret Thatcher skewered the incumbent PM James Callaghan at the 1979 election with her famous ' Labour Isn't Working' poster, which showed dole queues stretching across the horizon. We are not quite there yet. But after years of low unemployment in Britain, Rachel Reeves and Sir Keir Starmer have brought chaos – in just 11 months – to what was one of the strongest labour markets in Europe. Last October's Budget and its central and perhaps most hated policy – an increase in employers' National Insurance to 15 per cent – added no less than £23 billion to bosses' wage bills. And for all this Government's promise not to raise taxes on 'working people', it's now clear that this misguided and self-defeating pledge is having a vicious impact on jobs. Companies are proving reluctant to take on new workers, are deliberately not replacing colleagues who move on and are taking the opportunity to cut costs by making people redundant. The only silver lining is slowing wage increases, at least in the private sector, should make it possible for the Bank of England to lower interest rates by a further 0.25 per cent this summer to 4 per cent – making mortgages and borrowing cheaper. The public sector is another matter, of course, and has enjoyed lavish raises at the expense of the productive part of the economy – to say nothing of its far more generous gold-plated pensions, paid out of direct taxation. But overall the picture is dire. The National Insurance increase, along with a hugely generous rise in the minimum wage – now one of the highest on the planet – surging fuel costs and rising business rates, have shattered business confidence. Companies are shedding jobs at an alarming rate. Figures collected by HMRC show that 55,000 jobs were lost in April alone and numbers 'were notably weaker' than expected, according to bankers Goldman Sachs. Vacancies are tumbling, too – these stood at 736,000 in the three months to April, down from 760,000 in the previous period, and were at 1.4 million as recently as 2022. The unemployment rate, which was 3.6 per cent of the workforce prior to the pandemic, has now zipped up to 4.6 per cent. And the worst part? There's more to come. Businesses are steeling themselves for socialist firebrand Angela Rayner's beloved Employment Rights Bill, currently grinding its way through Parliament, which will make hiring new workers even more expensive. To peals of outrage (and a front-page Daily Mail headline: 'Deluded'), this week Sir Keir claimed to have 'fixed' our public finances, thus making possible his Government's U-turn on snatching the winter fuel allowance from millions of pensioners. Well, if this is what 'fixed' looks like, Sir Keir, I'd hate to see the economy 'broken'. Rising unemployment is a menace. It inevitably raises the cost of Britain's already gargantuan welfare bill – and it simultaneously reduces Government revenues due to lower income tax and National Insurance receipts. In 1979, unemployment stood at 5.3 per cent – and, despite the Iron Lady's famous poster, it rose to a staggering 11.9 per cent by 1984 on her watch. We are a long way from those days. Yet as I have said before, Ms Reeves – with last year's £40 billion tax-raising Budget, locked Britain into a doom loop of plummeting business confidence, rising unemployment and reduced job choices. Yesterday's multi-year public-spending review will splash the cash on investments in nuclear power, science and technology, roads and railways. As helpful as all that may be, it will mean more Government borrowing and debt that will take years to pay off. Expect unemployment to keep on rising until the Government changes course.
The Guardian
2 days ago
- The Guardian
UK may have failed to protect wild birds with environmental laws, watchdog finds
The government may have failed to protect critical wild bird populations by neglecting to implement environmental law properly, the environmental watchdog has found. Wild bird populations are declining across the UK. Under the EU certain parts of Britain's landscape were designated specially protected conservation zones when the UK was still a member state. They include estuaries, coastal areas and peatlands, as well as wetland areas where wading birds live, and places birds of prey prefer to nest. However, according to the Office for Environmental Protection (OEP), the government has failed to ensure adequate protections for these areas and as a result, wild bird populations are declining. Concerningly, ministers are currently passing the planning and infrastructure bill, which would deregulate these specially protected areas and would put more than 5,000 of England's most sensitive, rare and protected natural habitats at high risk of development, according to a Guardian analysis. The OEP was set up after Brexit to hold the government to account under the Environment Act 2021, which was passed to replace EU law. It has sent information notices to the government laying out the issues and giving it two months to respond. Helen Venn, chief regulatory officer for the OEP, said: 'Government has a legal obligation to maintain populations of wild birds and ensure they have enough suitable habitat. One way in which they do this is through special protection areas, which are legally designated sites that protect rare and threatened wild birds.' She added that the government appeared not to be meeting its legally binding plans and targets to halt and reverse the decline of species abundance. Recent government data shows that overall, bird species have declined in number UK-wide by 2% and in England by 7% in the five years since 2018. Faring the worst are farmland birds, which have declined in number severely – by about 61% over the long term (since 1970) and 9% in the short term (the five years between 2018 and 2023) – and woodland birds, whose numbers have fallen by about 35% over the long term and 10% in the short term. 'However, wild bird populations continue to decline across England … Our investigation has found what we believe to be possible failures to comply with environmental law relating to the protection of wild birds and we have therefore decided to move to the next step in our enforcement process, which is to issue information notices setting out our findings.' Sign up to Down to Earth The planet's most important stories. Get all the week's environment news - the good, the bad and the essential after newsletter promotion A Defra spokesperson said: 'Britain is a proud nation of nature lovers, and we are taking bold action to reverse decades of decline. This includes £13m to improve our protected sites and better strategic approaches to restore native species and habitats. 'We will continue to work constructively with the OEP as they take forward this investigation.'
