Listening to Keir Starmer announce this morning that he is going to abolish NHS England can only make the Conservatives wonder at what might have been. It should have been a Conservative prime minister making this sort of speech, declaring the civil service to be ‘flabby’ and cutting out masses of duplication in public administration.
Indeed, the Conservatives made a good start in increasing the efficiency of public services when they returned to office in coalition with the Lib Dems in 2010. Civil service numbers were cut by more than a fifth, from 492,000 in 2010 to 384,000 in 2016. But then something went desperately wrong, and Whitehall was allowed to run to fat again. In the last months of Rishi Sunak’s government, the civil service – at 513,000 – exceeded even the bloated blob that Gordon Brown left behind.
It is hard not to look at the U-shaped graph of civil service numbers over the past 15 years and compare it with the graph of the number of people on out-of-work benefits. It shows a similar shape, falling steadily until 2017 before jerking upwards again until it exceeded the levels that the Tories inherited from Brown.
What the coalition and then the standalone Conservative government achieved in the years between 2010 and 2016 was then steadily undone over the next eight years of Conservative government. By 2024, then, it was perfectly reasonable to wonder whether we had a centre-right government at all.
Brexit shares a lot of blame for the party losing all focus on what should be one of its biggest strengths
What happened? There is a very large, proverbial elephant trampling around here – and I don’t mean by that an unkind description of Theresa May, but the Brexit referendum.
Any successor to David Cameron might have struggled to maintain focus on domestic issues during the long, painful process of negotiations to leave the EU. Part of the rise in civil servants was even justified – temporarily – by the need to set up a Department for Exiting the EU and the extra work other departments need to do.
But the massive loss of concentration on the control of public spending outlived both the Brexit negotiations and the subsequent pandemic. Bloated Whitehall departments carried on sucking in extra recruits between 2022 and 2024. The language of cuts seemed to disappear from the Tories’ lexicon during the time of Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak. Truss’ failure to propose spending cuts to match her tax cuts was especially bizarre – and cost her any trace of fiscal credibility.
It was as if the four Conservative prime ministers who succeed Cameron feared having the charge of ‘austerity’ shouted at them and decided that cuts would be electoral suicide. Starmer – if he really carries through what he has been proposing this week, for which there must be some doubt – may now go and prove the opposite: that controlling public spending by trimming the public sector is actually quite popular with many voters.
This was certainly the conclusion of Jon Cruddas, Labour MP for Dagenham, whose report into the party’s failure to win the 2015 general election concluded that the Tories won not in spite of ‘austerity’ but because of it: voters wanted a balanced budget. Yet two years later, Theresa May’s chief of staff Gavin Barwell concluded that austerity was what caused her to lose her majority. Soon afterwards, the then Chancellor, Philip Hammond, announced in his budget that austerity was over – somewhat undermining his predecessor, George Osborne, who would have said he was simply trying to balance the books.
Brexit has been blamed for the Tory in-fighting that brought the party to its knees, but it shares a lot of blame, too, for the party losing all focus on what should be one of its biggest strengths: responsibility with the public finances.
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