Augustus Starbelt 🌷✨ retweetledi
People have been telling me I’m being overly negative about this country. Too pessimistic. Too doom-laden.
I thought I was holding back. So let me lay it all out.
Welcome to the age of compounding crises.
Housing. Average home costs 8x the average salary. A generation locked out. Prices can’t fall without crashing the banks. Can’t rise without locking out more people.
Water. £85 billion extracted in dividends since privatisation. £70 billion in debt loaded onto companies sold debt-free. Victorian pipes leaking billions of litres. Raw sewage discharged for 3.6 million hours in a single year. Bills rising 36% by 2030.
Energy. Net importer. No sovereign strategy. One Gulf crisis and it costs the taxpayer £78 billion in emergency subsidies.
Pensions. One of the worst state pensions in the developed world. Trillions in unfunded public sector liabilities off the books. Median private pot £32,700. You need ten times that. 43% undersaving. The triple lock ratchets costs up automatically with no mechanism to bring them down.
NHS. 7.25 million on the waiting list. Staff leaving. Buildings crumbling. Cancer targets missed. Social care barely exists. A two-tier system emerging. A demographic wave about to make it all worse.
Transport. HS2: £66 billion for 140 miles. Spain built 2,500 miles for $70 billion. We pay 8.5x the European average and deliver a fraction of the result. Roads falling apart. The North still waiting.
Local government. Over half of councils expect bankruptcy within five years. Funding cut 29% in real terms since 2010. Libraries, youth services, social care… gone or going.
Public finances. Debt approaching 97% of GDP. Interest payments exceed the defence budget. Taxes at their highest since the 1940s. Spending plans include cuts the OBR says may be undeliverable.
Productivity. Flat for eighteen years. Worst record since the Industrial Revolution.
Economic inactivity. 1 in 5 working-age people not working. 2.8 million out sick, a record. The only G7 country with lower employment than before the pandemic.
Food. We import 48% of what we eat. 83% of our fruit. 12% of households are food insecure. One supply chain shock and the shelves thin out. We’ve seen it twice already and fixed nothing.
Education. School buildings crumbling. Teachers leaving. £267 billion in student debt, most of which will never be repaid.
Defence. Procurement Parliament called “broken and repeatedly wasting billions.” Equipment plan £19 billion short. A war in Europe and no money to respond properly.
Prisons. 72% overcrowded. Hit 99.7% occupancy. Nearly 40,000 released early because there was nowhere to put them. 23,000 cells don’t meet fire safety standards. Cost to fix: £2.8 billion. Allocated: £520 million.
Car finance. Biggest mis-selling scandal since PPI. 12 million agreements with hidden commissions. £7.5 billion in expected compensation. Another bill landing on an industry already stretched.
Regional inequality. London pulling away from everywhere else. A country where your postcode determines your life expectancy, school quality, job prospects and access to healthcare.
Underneath all of it, the same pattern. Sell the asset. Load it with debt. Extract the value. Defer the maintenance. Hand the bill to the next generation.
None of this is unfixable. This country has the talent and the people to turn every one of these around. But that requires a political class willing to be honest about the scale of what’s broken. What we have instead is a political class that would rather keep us fighting each other than confront the structural failures staring them in the face. Because fixing them is hard, unpopular, and takes longer than an electoral cycle. So they commission a review, blame the last lot, and nothing changes.
I’d love to be more optimistic. And the history and people of this country still make me somewhat hopeful. But our politics needs to drastically change if we’re going to get anywhere.
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