Andrew Fisher compiles a damning indictment of 14 years of Conservative rule.

Since the banking crash, the UK economy has grown by just under 1% per year.

To put that in context, in the 1970s – often described as a decade of turmoil – the average economic growth was 3% and in the 15 years before the banking crash it was 2.6%.

Last year the UK economy flatlined. The US economy grew by 2.5%.

This isn’t normal. It’s the longest period of stagnation since at least the 18^th century.

Our wages are lower today in real terms than they were in 2008. It’s an unprecedented squeeze on wages. According to the Office for Budget Responsibility, our overall living standards are still likely to be lower in 2028 than they were pre-pandemic.

Our public services are facing their worst crisis on record. The NHS has a waiting list of over 7.5 million. Even before the pandemic, it had increased from about 2.5 million in 2010 to 4.5 million in 2019.

Not unrelated to that point, there are over 100,000 vacancies in the NHS, fewer fully trained GPs than there were ten years ago, and over 150,000 vacancies in social care.

Last year the Chancellor Jeremy Hunt announced that he wanted the UK to be the next Silicon Valley. Last year the Government recruited just 34% of its target for computing teachers. Hunt’s dream seems just that – and it’s not just in IT: the Government has missed its teacher recruitment target for three years running now.

Around the country, councils are going bust – from my own Croydon to Birmingham, from Thurrock to Woking – and dozens more are on the brink of collapse, desperately cutting services.

The social security safety net has been progressively dismantled through years of benefit freezes, the household benefit cap, the two-child limit, the real terms reductions in housing allowance since 2010, the abolition of the social fund – and an ever more punitive system of sanctions.

According to figures from the Department for Work and Pensions, 600,000 more children are in poverty compared to 2010. Rough sleeping is nearly twice as high as it was in 2010 and last year more children than ever spent last Christmas in temporary accommodation, without a home to call their own.

Destitution is back – a word that should have died out in the Victorian era has been made relevant again by this Conservative Government. Research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found 3.8 million people in the UK were destitute last year, including 1 million children.

They define destitution as, “when people cannot afford to meet their most basic physical needs to stay warm, dry, clean and fed.” It’s sobering to know that over 5% of the UK population, more than one in 20 of us, lived like that last year. According to JRF, destitution has increased by 148% since 2017.

There is now more food bank use than ever – people in Britain relying on charity to eat. In the last year 3 million emergency food parcels were distributed by food banks in the Trussell Trust network alone (and there are many independent food banks across the country too).

This is a damning indictment of 14 years of Conservative rule. But it’s wider than that. It’s a failure of politics – especially when the likely next Government is opining and whining that it won’t be able to do good things.

That is a choice. One of best phrases used by the previous Labour Opposition not long ago was “austerity is a political choice not an economic necessity.”

That is as true today as it was then. But we also need to borrow another popular phrase from that era: we need to “Take Back Control”.

The Leave Campaign used that phrase – Take Back Control – but the lie was where our control has gone: a combination of deregulation, liberalisation and privatisation means our powers had been handed over to boardrooms, not Brussels.

And it’s getting worse: in a year in which people’s living standards declined, The four biggest banks in the UK – Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds and NatWest – collectively made pre-tax profits of more than £44 billion in 2023. That’s around four times more than they did in 2020.

Energy companies are ripping us off – British Gas profits rose tenfold this year – as are the water companies to whom we pay 40% more in real terms post-privatisation, and which hiked their bills by 5% this year. The privatised Royal Mail has hiked prices well above inflation, and we have the most expensive railways in Europe.

Across the country we see landlords hiking rents, and the rise of corporate landlords with ever great property portfolios concentrates property wealth.

Their profits are from our incomes.

So no, Jeremy Hunt tax cuts are not the priority when destitution is rising.

And no, it’s not true that there is less money around. According to the Sunday Times Rich List, the richest 250 families in Britain increased their wealth by £44 billion last year.

And no, to the current Labour Opposition, whining that they won’t be able to do good things because of the state of the public finances.

The money is there. We just have to take it back. That means taking back control from the corporations, the landlords and the profiteers.

The crisis is the reason for change, not a reason to delay.

Andrew Fisher was the Labour Party’s Executive Director of Policy and Research from 2015 to 2019. This article is an edited version of a speech he gave this week at a Claim the Future panel discussion in Portcullis House, entitled “A permanent cost-of-living crisis?” which was organised and chaired by John McDonnell MP.

Image: https://www.publicdomainpictures.net/en/view-image.php?image=2023&picture=economic-downturn by liftarn. Licence: CC0 1.0 DEED CC0 1.0 Universal