At the beginning of August, a British journalist asked a simple question to Jacob Rees-Mogg, at the time Minister of Brexit opportunities and, today, Minister of Economic Affairs and Energy: ” What is currently working well in the United Kingdom? Can you quote a public service that works well? “In a strange pirouette, he replied from the tac:” Our crickers have rather successful, recently “, the Cricket England team actually winning an important match.
It was an attempted humor, but the case speaks volumes. Even a man who has been minister for three years has struggled to cite something that works well in the United Kingdom. For months, the country seems to sink into the slump, the problems succeeding at an impressive pace.
This summer has seen the largest movement of strikes in thirty years, with debraying of trains, postal workers, garbage collectors, lawyers or even dockers … The NHS, the health service, has 6.5 million Patients awaiting treatment, three times more than in 2008. The water companies have poured millions of liters of untreated wastewater directly into the sea during the summer. On July 20, London came close to the power cut, having to import Belgium electricity urgently, fifty times the normal price. Inflation reaches 10 %. Faced with the dollar, the Sterling book fell on Monday September 26 at the lowest level of its history. The country has been in recession since April, certainly narrowly (decline in GDP of 0.1 % to each of the second and third quarters).
The little background music rises, always stronger: “Nothing really works in the United Kingdom.” It is a sentence that we say with friends or colleagues. On June 11, The Times titled: “Why does nothing work in this broken United Kingdom?” On September 5, Keir Starmer, the Labor Opposition leader, took it back to his account: “A Throughout the country, people cannot pay their bills, they are worried not to be able to pay their races of the week or fill up on their car. There is a general impression that nothing really works. “
Thatcher’s method
The accusation is partially unfair, of course. The United Kingdom remains the fifth world economic power. In a large part of London or south-eastern England, the crisis seems distant. But the discomfort is real. It is explained by the conjunction of two phenomena. The first is old and dates back to the Thatcherian period: the United Kingdom has been the most unequal country in Western Europe for forty years. The second is more recent: since 2008, it has experienced very low growth, around 1.2 % on average per year. “Put together, these two challenges represent a toxic combination”, analyzes the Resolution Foundation, a reflection group. In a report published in July, he points out that the United Kingdom is gradually falling into the rankings: in 2018, the average income of a British household was 16 % below that of the Germans and 9 % in Below that of the French, while it was superior to them in 2007.
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