Too fat, too poor, too unequal: Britain in 2022

There are more food banks in the UK than McDonald’s fast-food outlets. If you include pop-up food distribution centres, there are more of these than McDonald’s and KFC combined: over 2000 of them.

Britain also has the second highest obesity rate among rich nations, after the US. We are both too fat and too poor. But this doesn’t apply to all of us. Like income, obesity is unevenly distributed between the poorest and the richest parts of the country. The rich get richer while the poor get fatter. It’s a familiar and bleak paradox.

Britain is said to be going through a cost of living crisis. That’s an inadequate description. A crisis is a passing storm. It has a beginning, a middle and an end. For millions faced with soaring bills and falling real incomes over the past 13 years, this is the new normal. For many it has become a matter of survival.

Elsewhere things work fitfully as most of us find in our daily lives: railways, ports, airports, water. And it’s getting ever more expensive to live as soaring inflation eats away at shrinking pay packets. Who can afford £4,000 a year to heat their homes when they’re also paying nearly £2 for a litre of petrol?

It’s about to get a whole load worse: the Bank of England is forecasting a recession which will last at least to the end of 2023.

Our leaders are unequal to the task of dealing with this defining moment. That much is clear. For the most part government has pretty much ground to a halt. Nothing illustrates this better than an indolent Prime Minister jetting off on a European holiday, twice, in the middle of a national emergency, in the space of a month, a fortnight before he leaves office. He is giving us the finger. In doing so he is, at least, being consistent.

Brits, by and large, are understated folk. Susceptible to boosterism and wishful thinking, we nevertheless tend to be level-headed in a crisis. British sang froid has got us out of a pickle before and it will again.

But cool heads are only useful if they help you see things clearly and if the remedies you reach for are rooted in the real world and not some ideologically driven fantasy. Politics, as we’re witnessing in the dismal, pork-barrel campaign that is the Tory leadership race, is one thing. The real world quite another.

Britain is not unique. Other nations are in economic trouble. But we haven’t made things easier for ourselves. Hit by a triple-whammy, we are peculiarly vulnerable in the face of storm-force headwinds. Added to a decade of austerity and a crippling pandemic, the Brexit hit has made it harder to deal with consequences of the first two.

Where we find ourselves is not, of course, merely the result of the past 13 years of economic logjam or the last six years of government-by-wishful-thinking.

But the problems are real and enduring and they are catching up with us fast: a failing NHS; railways that cost too much and deliver too little; water companies that pour oceans of excrement in our rivers while leaking a quarter of their supply; underinvestment; falling real wages for most; rising inequality; the fragility of the union; falling exports and a weakening pound.

The Goldilocks economy – not too socialist but not too capitalist — has proved ephemeral. Poorly managed, state-owned public services have been replaced by poorly managed, rapacious privatised ones.

Companies must make a profit to invest. Shareholders are risk-takers and must be rewarded. But how do you justify English water companies, in effect monopolies selling a commodity that costs them nothing to buy, paying out £57 billion in dividends over three decades and trousering £58m in pay and bonuses over the past five years, while spending less than half that fixing the pipes?

Then there’s Brexit. Decoupling from a single market of 400 million people may make those who still think it was a good idea feel good, but it isn’t delivering. At least not yet. Granted, the pandemic has thrown a great big spanner into everything. But two-and-a half years on we’re still waiting for the Brexit dividend and the omens are not good.

The war in Ukraine grinds on mercilessly lowering over Europe and beyond, a constant and unpredictable threat to supply lines, energy prices and peace itself. Will we reach a point this winter when we’re watching oil and gas prices spike and wonder whether saving Ukraine is worth the candle?

Many, many people face a grim winter: food or heat? If you have never been in this predicament, you can’t imagine what it does to the fabric of family life. Faced with such precariousness people need stability more than anything else. You can’t plan for the future if you don’t know where your next meal let alone your next pay packet is coming from.

An important study by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation into the lives of 14 struggling families over five years made an interesting discovery: for the majority of people the collapse into poverty was not a constant. As opposed to the always-poor, most low-income families fluctuate from “getting by” to “not coping”. We see this in my local food bank.

What these working families need is steady work, adequate health benefits, secure and affordable housing and decent childcare. Those that struggled to stay afloat were faced with unstable work, poor health, inadequate childcare and poor housing. Most families switched from one group to the other. But the state picks up the bill one way or another.

What does this tell us and why is it relevant?

Countries, like their smaller components — communities, families, people — flourish when things are stable. Companies can plan. Families can budget. Individuals have enough to get by on and those who can, live the dream. That requires nuance and a spirit of collaboration

The Conservative leadership brawl between Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, vying for the votes of 0.2 % of the electorate (all Tories) is a terrible way of choosing our next Prime Minister. It’s a bit like an American caucus without the primary or the election. Handing such power to around 150,000 Tory is about as consensual and democratic as picking the winner at Crufts.

The point here is not that Tory members choose the next Prime Minister. Labour does pretty much the same. The point is that it turns the contest for the highest office in the land into a divisive, Who-is-the-Most-Conservative-of-them-all beauty pageant, aimed at a miniscule slice of the electorate.

Truss, like Johnson, is an alumnus of the Lynton Crosby school of wedge politics: protect your base at all costs, ignore those will never vote for you, turn on the charm for the undecided. It has become, says expelled Tory and ex-Lord Chancellor David Gauke, almost Trumpian. It’s not sustainable because Brits are not by nature zealots.

Truss’s threat to kneecap unions fighting for a better deal for their members in the face of soaring inflation, to take just one example, is out of step with the mood of most working people in the same boat.

We have been living in a weird post-Brexit illusion, a kind of simulated reality a bit like The Matrix, created to distract us from what we have in common by focusing on what divides us.

What Britain needs now is a serious, grounded debate about how to craft long-term solutions to chronic problems. This requires an understanding of the importance of bringing the country together as a cold, hard rain approaches. It doesn’t look like we’re going to get one.

A Message from TheArticle

We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one that’s needed now more than ever, and we need your help to continue publishing throughout these hard economic times. So please, make a donation.