Toynbee / Walker The Only Way Is Up

How to Take Britain from Austerity to Prosperity
Main
ISBN: 978-1-80546-267-5
Verlag: Atlantic Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 288 Seiten

'The kind of brilliantly written polemic that Toynbee's many fans have come to know and love...a terrific book' Stephen Bush, Financial Times Labour have won their most decisive victory in decades. But what damage has been done to the country and how do Labour fix it? Political change has arrived. But the new Westminster government's inheritance looks grim. We're all in it together, the Tories used to claim, but they left behind sharper social divisions and vastly greater inequality with widening gaps in class, wealth and income. Collapsing public services at home, coupled with threats from a scorching earth and war in Europe, have left our country with gaping unfulfilled commitments. The Only Way is Up gives us a ready reckoner on how to repair the damage and set the UK on the path to sustainable growth. Combining the latest data with expert analysis across health, children's services, the economy, environment, policing and defence, Polly Toynbee and David Walker tell the story of what went wrong during the Tories' wild ride and what must now be remedied.

Polly Toynbee and David Walker are co-authors of The Verdict and The Lost Decade. Polly is a columnist for the Guardian and her latest book is An Uneasy Inheritance. David Walker is a former director of the Audit Commission.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Toynbee, Polly

Walker, David

Leseproben

1

Children: A Case of Neglect

NOT A GREAT time to be a child. Bliss it wasn’t in that dawn to be young. This generation was the least physically active generation ever, said a despairing Children’s Commissioner. Exploited and intimidated online by unregulated social media companies, waiting 94 weeks for an autism assessment, never even having the chance of visiting a local library to borrow a book or disc because, as in Birmingham, two thirds had been closed, this was not a country for young people.

But consolation was at hand. Every school in England was given an oak-framed portrait of King Charles, to complement the King James Bible sent them by education secretary Michael Gove. That name rings out across the era, stamping his authoritarian seal on children’s lives, as if unprecedented volumes of mental distress and later pandemic lockdowns weren’t enough. His first act had been to lop children, schools and families from the title of his department, moving to abolish Every Child Matters and Sure Start, Labour programmes wrapped around the whole child.

Perhaps it was only to be expected that children were neglected. Unless their parents are affluent, they are not of much interest to markets, hence to a market-oriented government; many Tory MPs sent their own children to the private schools where they themselves had been. But Gove had missionary zeal, stemming from his partisan fear and contempt for educators as a vector for liberal and progressive politics. He shared with his cabinet colleagues an ideological rejection of the interventionist programme pursued by Labour, embracing child poverty, the Child Trust Fund and early years schemes. But Tory voters had children at state schools, which explains why educational resources, despite the Liberal Democrats’ token pupil premium for poorer areas, were redistributed to schools in more affluent areas.

Laying out all the Tories’ child-unfriendly actions, one after another, is shocking. Surely all governments put children and the future first? More children were living below the official poverty line, 4.2 million of them excluded from an ordinary quality of life. That was up from 3.6 million in 2010. Poor children tend to become poor and underperforming adults. In Chapter 4 we cite a Tory adviser bemoaning neglect of housing, warning that as a society we had fallen out of love with the future.

That things were not going well for children in the other UK nations serves only to remind us of a profound and banal truth. Children are posterity. Fail to cherish them, let their schools crumble, increase their class sizes, deprive them of joy and happiness as well as a solid grounding in the skills and aptitudes we need, and society will decline. Little wonder, COVID aside, that school absence was at ‘crisis levels’ by 2024.

Joyless

Joy was off the curriculum. Trips and outings became rarities. Municipal parks were shut, sold or left unattended; playgrounds closed and hundreds of community football pitches disappeared, along with school playing fields and swimming pools – 400 of them shut down between 2010 and 2023. Nearly 800 libraries closed their doors, those havens for children and families on winter days. Youth services disappeared; more than 4,500 youth work jobs went, with 760 council-run youth centres closed in the 10 years since 2010, said the YMCA. Labour had left a Connexions service in place, offering careers advice; it was largely abolished. The national careers service that replaced it was online only, failing confused or drifting teens who needed encouragement and support.

The 2012 Olympics generated tremendous enthusiasm for all ages, amid high hopes that success in the arena would boost involvement, stimulate children and improve their well-being. But when auditors investigated, they found participation in sport had fallen in the three subsequent years ‘and the government’s commitment to the sporting legacy had waned by 2016’. What a wasted opportunity.

It became more dangerous to be young. Infant mortality rose for two years in a row to 2018. The last time there was such a trend was 1939–41; it was hard to find any other cause than austerity. The fate of children drove the distinguished paediatrician Al Aynsley-Green to write a passionate denunciation when he stood down from the role of Children’s Commissioner for England. He lambasted the denial of fact by the propaganda machine in the Department for Education – such as the increase in the number of four- and five-yearolds arriving in reception classes still wearing nappies. As of 2024, one in four children starting school were not toilet-trained, worsened since the pandemic’s loss of nursery years.

Death and disturbance

The number of child deaths had hit record levels, including those who died because of abuse and neglect, suicide, perinatal and neonatal events and surgery. In 2023, the death rate rose by 8 per cent over the previous year. More than a third were officially declared to be avoidable. Camilla Kingdon, president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, knew the reasons why. Most deaths were in deprived areas and ‘the clear driver is rising child poverty. Figures such as these in a nation as rich as ours are unforgivable.’

Previous progress on stopping expectant mothers smoking and raising rates of breastfeeding reversed. Something bad was happening in children’s lives, increasing mental distress. Even before 2010, GPs and psychiatrists were seeing more; then an explosion, a doubling of referrals of under-18s between 2017 and 2022. Numbers with probable mental health problems rose sharply from 12 per cent in 2017 to 20 per cent in 2023; waiting lists ballooned as one study found a quarter of sixth-formers had sought mental health support in the previous 12 months but many (a third) were still waiting; numbers and waits were worse in deprived areas.

One reason was COVID, which increased depression, girls suffering more than boys. Another was money: children living in households struggling with unpayable bills had higher rates of mental illness. Tory governments can’t be held responsible for all the causes of this wave of distress, which included exposure to harmful social media, online bullying and intolerable peer-group pressures. The charge against them is twofold. One was austerity: more than a quarter of children with a probable mental disorder had a parent who did not have enough money to let their offspring take part in activities outside school or college. The other was a failure to react, to mobilize, to put this burgeoning distress at the top of all priorities. This government forsook them. A 2021 review of children’s social care put the annual cost of not addressing the needs of all children who had ever needed a social worker at around £23 billion. Here was one of those calculations regularly dismissed by blinkered Treasury civil servants. How to calculate the costs of acting, intervening, providing adequate services? It was possible to work it out: over a lifetime, failure to help children and young people resulted in hospital admissions, early withdrawal from the labour market, lower productivity and economic loss. The NAO concluded that the problems of children and adolescents ‘may become entrenched and require intense and expensive support to reverse or mitigate any harm. For the individual, consequences could include mental health difficulties, periods not being in education, employment or training, or contact with the criminal justice system. Different outcomes often overlap, for example around three quarters of children sentenced in 2019–20 were assessed as having mental health concerns.’

Parents were desperate: schools, social workers and the NHS were failing them. Waits for diagnoses, let alone treatment, stretched into years. The causes of flaring numbers of children who might be autistic were multiple: more parents were concerned about their kids’ behaviour, diagnostic criteria had broadened. But also shrunken school budgets, fewer educational psychologists and teaching assistants, and for those Tory ministers were responsible. Along with, as we see in Chapter 6, a cynical heaping of responsibilities onto councils at the same time as their grants were gutted. Autism demanded a wide strategic response; it was piecemeal.

Despite lobbying by ex-deputy prime minister Nick Clegg after he became a stooge for Facebook, the government did pass online safety legislation allowing Ofcom to detect and remove child sexual abuse material (though that would depend on the regulator’s capacity and willingness, which was more doubtful once a complacent Tory peer had been parachuted in as its chair). Had the UK still been in the European Union, digital services legislation would already have been in operation.

Birth

A country hostile to children? It sounds extreme, but prospective parents seemed to think so. Births plummeted at an alarming – and economically damaging – rate, with (in England and Wales) a 12 per cent reduction in the annual tally between 2012 and 2019. Decline continued and 2022 saw the lowest number in two decades, 605,479. People had not turned against parenthood; this was no rebellion by mothers. On the contrary, women told pollsters they were sad to have fewer babies than they wanted. Child-rearing had become unaffordable to age cohorts now worse off than their parents had been at the same age. They had far higher rents and mortgages, if they could even find a place to live, with lower earnings and heavy student debts. Young families now were...