Slicing Up the Safety Net

Since 2010, the UK has existed in a state of near-permanent austerity. Each government has either actively pursued cuts to investment and public services or has failed to invest the amounts necessary to reverse the damage wrought by earlier rounds of cuts. The end result has been the decimation of our commonwealth: the physical and social infrastructure upon which we all rely to survive.

This trend is very clear when it comes to the UK’s transport infrastructure, much of which is in a state of disrepair after years of falling investment. Annual investment in the UK’s capital stock has been on average 4 percentage points lower than that of other G7 economies since 1990. For investment, Labour is now turning to the private sector, which has a history of delivering lower-quality projects at much higher costs.

The NHS, too, has been in crisis for years. Nearly 42 percent of patients are waiting more than four hours in A&E in England, and last year a shocking 1.5 million patients waited for more than twelve hours. The proportion of cancer patients waiting less than sixty-two days for treatment has fallen to around 65 percent. The average wait time for an ambulance for a category 2 (e.g., suspected heart attack or stroke) 999 call is now over ninety minutes, compared to a target of eighteen minutes.

Children’s social care is also in crisis, as rising rates of deprivation increase demand just as local authority budgets are stretched to breaking point. The total number of children in care has increased by 27 percent since 2009–10, and 46 percent of councils have overspent on their children’s social care budgets. The strain that the sector faces has resulted in numerous shocking failures of care for some of the most vulnerable children in our society.

The combination of an ageing population, rising rates of disability, and cuts to local government budgets has also created deep problems in adult social care. To care for older and vulnerable adults, local authorities are increasingly relying on private providers, many of them owned by extractive private equity corporations. The aim of these companies is to maximise their profits by cutting costs and squeezing staff — the result of which is a dearth of qualified carers and declining standards of care.

Schools are stretched too. Teachers have faced an average real-terms pay cut of 16.5 percent since 2010, and many have left the sector as a result. Strained school budgets and a lack of teachers — alongside rising levels of poverty — have compromised outcomes. There was a 6 percentage point fall in the number of children at the expected standard in KS2 reading, writing, and maths between 2019 and 2023.

The crisis of our commonwealth is having a profound impact on the health of British people and our society as a whole. People are losing the sense of security and belonging that comes from knowing they can count on support from one another when things get hard. For many, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that they are completely on their own.

In fact, the UK is experiencing an epidemic of loneliness. In 2022, 50 percent of adults reported feeling lonely, with 7 percent feeling lonely ‘often or always’, up from 6 percent in 2020. Chronic loneliness is associated with a number of mental and physical health issues; it increases the risk of early mortality by 26 percent.

So-called ‘deaths of despair’ have been on the rise in the UK, and particularly in the North of England. One study in The Lancet found that there were at least 46,000 deaths of despair in the UK over 2019 and 2020 — equivalent to forty-two deaths each day. Deaths of despair were defined as ‘patterned causes of death encompassing drug and alcohol misuse and suicide’, which are ‘strongly associated with economic disadvantage’.

Twice as many people lost their lives due to deaths of despair in the North East of England as in London. Of the twenty local authorities that have the highest rates of deaths of despair, sixteen are in the North. None of the local authorities with the lowest rates are in the North.

Millions of people across the country are experiencing poverty and economic insecurity — particularly in the regions. They know that the people in power cannot be trusted to deal with these problems on their behalf. They rightly do not trust elites to act in their interests. They see those at the top exploiting their power for personal gain, while everyone else is left to fend for themselves. But they are taking out their anger on those even more marginalised than them.

Suffering Alone

The far right has always been adept at exploiting people’s despair and insecurity. With politicians from mainstream parties too focused on machinations in Westminster, their far-right counterparts have been able to embed themselves in struggling communities by providing a simple explanation for the widespread suffering: ‘migrants and scroungers are taking what’s rightfully yours.’

Aided and abetted by a media that continues to promote and platform hatemongers, politicians like Nigel Farage have preyed on people’s insecurities to encourage them to punch down. The anger that people feel towards those at the top has been warped into a rage at politicians deemed woke and too busy importing migrants and placating benefits claimants to care about the problems of people like them. This is modern Britain: the enemies of the people are those who are the most powerless and marginalised people in our society, and those who support them.

But why is punching down so much more satisfying than punching up? Why have decades of austerity, greed, and corruption fuelled anger at migrants rather than anger at political and economic elites? Because people feel too powerless to attack those at the top, so they direct their anger at the easiest target instead.

This sense of powerlessness is the legacy of neoliberalism. In the past, people have responded to a sense of injustice by coming together to fight for their collective interests. Knowing that neither bosses nor politicians can be trusted to represent them, workers formed themselves into unions to fight for higher wages. Campaigners took to the streets to fight for peace and equality. And families fought side by side to protect their communities from government cuts and deindustrialisation.

In working together to fight for their futures, these groups formed bonds that gave each of those involved a sense of purpose and belonging. In joining a union, you weren’t simply fighting for your interests, you were fighting for those standing alongside you. You were fighting for a better world.

These forms of collective organising have become much less common as our society has succumbed to neoliberal individualism. Workers’ rights to organise have been dramatically curtailed, and they have been taught to compete with each other rather than cooperate to resist their exploitation. The right of citizens to protest has been undermined, meaning they’re left with little choice other than to pick between politicians belonging to two parties, neither of which they trust. Many communities have been so hollowed out that they can no longer rely on local services or even mutual aid to support them.

In an individualistic society like ours, if your wages aren’t keeping up with inflation, you’re encouraged to blame yourself for failing to work hard enough or for spending too much money. You might take out a payday loan just to make ends meet. When your repayments spiral out of control, you’ll castigate yourself for your financial incompetence. You might look at the finance gurus and career coaches you see on social media and think, ‘Why can’t I be more like them? Why am I such a failure?’

These feelings of despair and worthlessness come from confronting injustice as an isolated individual. Everyone knows that the economy isn’t working for most people because the rich are getting richer at the poor’s expense, and that politicians can’t be trusted to solve the problem because they’ve been bought off by the wealthy. But since you’re not part of a union or a political party or a movement that could fight back against these injustices, you experience them all on your own.

In this context, it is hard not to feel like it is you against the world. The whole system is corrupt and no one is coming to help. You have to fight to protect yourself.

But what about those who can’t fight? What about children, the disabled, those without wealth or connections to fall back on if they lose?

In a competitive, individualistic society, any form of interdependence is seen as weakness. Any human being who has to rely on someone else to care for them is considered somehow defective. If you lose your job or your health or your home, then, you’ll feel like you’re a burden on those around you, ultimately suffering profound feelings of shame.

These feelings of shame will be exacerbated by the disdain you might experience at the hands of those with power over you and your life, from your boss to the council worker managing your application for social housing. And without a collective structure to help you challenge them and their superiors, the disdain you experience you will learn to pour in heaps on those below you.

Fear and Loathing

In a world marked by profound injustice, in which elites can’t be trusted, and in which you can only rely on yourself, there is plenty of room for vigorous competition and, ultimately, violence. Indeed, this is precisely why our societies were constructed as they were — to encourage, or force, us to compete with each other.

A rational competitive person does not seek to outcompete those with more power than them. They seek to take what they can from those who are weaker. This is exactly what happened during the riots this year.

The riots took place in the poorest parts of the country: places where people are experiencing despair over poverty and fear over economic insecurity. Places from which Westminster is very far removed, where people do not trust politicians to help them solve their problems. Places where care is hard to come by, where solidarity is a distant memory.

The riots weren’t a simple response to economic insecurity. They were an explosion of rage from people who feel weak, scared, and helpless in a society that treats the powerless with nothing but contempt. The contempt they had experienced they poured in turn on the weakest and most marginalised people they could imagine — Muslims, migrants, and refugees.

There are many people in our society — from the poorest to the wealthiest — who derive a sense of agency from seeking to dominate those less powerful than them. But for those near the bottom of the social hierarchy, escalating feelings of insecurity, mistrust, and powerlessness are driving higher levels of violence than would be expected in a healthy society. When you grow up in a world that tells you that you have to fight to survive, the more you’re struggling to survive, the harder you’re going to fight.