Public Services: A Funding Crisis: Both Political Threat and Electoraral Opportunity

The future of the May government does not depend on Brexit, or Trump or Trident, although a big crisis in any of those areas could bring it down. But if it survives until its sell by date, May 2020, it will stand or fall on its record over public services. Its political narrative will be that we have a strong economy, the fastest growing in the G7 and only the Tories can be relied upon to deliver future prosperity.

Yet there is a crisis brewing, or in some cases spilling over, in social care, the NHS, education, flood prevention, children’s services and mental health care, in which, however you express it and whatever efficiency savings are made, there is not enough money being provided by central government to properly fund modern day demand. In other essential pillars of a civilized society such as public transport, especially railways, prisons and offender management, the police service, the energy market, public utilities and affordable housing, there is an awful lot of talk and has been for ages, but very little outcome.

If the government goes to the country with the majority of these problems unresolved, or with a sticking plaster fix to carry it through the election campaign, it will be defeated. It will not matter if Brexit is a success, trade deals with the US, Turkey and China flourish and the top ends of society are coining it in.

Churchill won the war and lost the subsequent election spectacularly, because he and his party thought victory was everything that mattered. The country thought that what mattered was the quality of life in the new era of peace and that Labour had the better plan.  May too will lose after a Brexit triumph, which leaves hospitals in crisis, trains overcrowded and late, students in debt and housing costs in orbit.

Provided Labour has a plan. A dynamic plan for a complete reboot of the economic model and a complete reconstruction of the taxation process, so that both bring hope and opportunity to all those abused areas of neglect and under funding which cause so much difficulty in the lives of ordinary people.