Last week, the actor Gary Oldman was talking about his friend David Bowie, and everything that has happened since the music icon passed away in January 2016. “Don’t you feel that since he died, the world’s gone to shit?” Oldman asked. “It was like he was cosmic glue or something. When he died, everything fell apart.”
The death of David Bowie was not one of the options when the More In Common think tank asked 20,000 people if they thought Britain was on the wrong track, and if so, what had put us there.
Sixty per cent of voters agreed that we were heading the wrong way (just 22% said we were on the right road). Overall, Brexit (29%) was the option blamed by most, followed by the Covid-19 pandemic (18%), the election of Tony Blair (14%) and the election of Margaret Thatcher (7%).
More in Common’s research showed that right wing voters (26% of Tories and 35% of Reform voters) think that everything wrong with the country can be traced back to Blair’s win on May 1, 1997 (I’d guess they blame him for the start of high migration). The left and the central left (40% of Labour voters and 49% of Lib Dems) say the rot set in with the referendum on June 23, 2016.
But while leaving the EU has done savage and lasting harm, I think we are missing the elephant in the room.
Only about 5% of voters in all parties name the 2008 financial crisis as the moment when everything went to pot – a crazily low figure given how much it has overshadowed everything that has gone on since. In part, this must be because there has been a conspiracy of silence about the crash – for Labour, it was a deeply embarrassing end to its time in power; for the Tories (with their Lib Dem allies) it offered a chance to slash the state, a disastrous policy from which we are all still suffering.
The sequence of events is really quite obvious to those who can stand back and look at the dominoes tumbling. Since the credit crunch, we are all poorer and the state is smaller and less capable as a result. Productivity, on which nearly all real economic wealth growth depends, is still in an appallingly bad state and has never recovered to pre-crunch levels.
Successive Tory governments tried to balance the books by slashing and burning our defences, our law and order system, our education and training, investment, the NHS and benefits. As a result, angry and desperate voters felt and were far worse off, and were persuaded that Brexit was the answer, that it was the EU that was holding us back.
As a result, we held a referendum that has left us another 4-5% worse off; with the poorest suffering most.
When I was at the BBC and reporting on the credit crunch, I was nicknamed Jonty Gloom. In fact, I was far too optimistic. I thought that once the banks had been saved, the economy would bounce back to normal.
But 17 years on, it still hasn’t.
Seventeen years on, people are still blaming immigration, Blair, Trump and Covid for Britain’s ills. We will continue on the wrong track until we realise that the target must be to return to pre-credit-crunch levels of growth.
The first step to doing that must be to reverse Brexit. Without it, things can only get worse.