There’s a Reason Britain’s in the Doldrums — but We Don’t Talk About It

Britain’s Covid hangover is wrecking courts, schools, NHS and wallets – and nobody’s really talking about it, says Josh Glancy in the Times. Here’s an excerpt:

As a society we have done our best to forget the pandemic, a trauma about which it is almost impossible to tell an interesting story. Yet with almost every dominant issue of today – from welfare spending to court backlogs, NHS waiting lists, school absenteeism and the national debt – the pandemic’s aftershocks are at or near the heart of the matter. …

Unless we stare back into the abyss of the pandemic, we miss something important about our current predicament. Covid did not create most of our problems, but it put rocket boosters under almost all of them, amplifying and accelerating longer-term trends.

Just look at the numbers. At the end of 2019, the backlog in crown courts was 38,000. By 2021 this was more than 60,000. It is now touching 80,000 – which is why some jury trials are now on the chopping block.

Persistent absence in British classrooms doubled during the pandemic, a problem that has now become chronic. Last week, Ofsted revealed that about 39,000 children in England are now entirely absent from education and a further 166,000 are “severely absent”, meaning they miss more than half their classes. …

The impacts of Covid were also everywhere during the recent tax-raising budget, and yet barely mentioned. To pay for joys such as the test-and-trace scheme, Britain borrowed almost £300 billion more than usual. National debt as a percentage of GDP ballooned from 80% in 2019 to more like 95% by the end of 2021, where it has remained. As a result, we are paying £10 billion or so a month just to service the interest on it.

The soaring cost of disability benefits is perhaps the most alarming Covid aftershock. According to the Office for Budget Responsibility, the number of people newly claiming personal independence payments rose almost 100% from 2019 to 2022, from 175,000 to 348,000. New claims for incapacity benefits rose by even more in the same period, 111%, from 252,000 to 533,000. As of February of this year, 4.4 million people were claiming some kind of sickness benefit. …

During Covid, comparing ourselves with other countries became a national obsession. So it is also worth noting that some version of all the trends noted above has affected our international peers too. But on balance it seems Britain came out of the pandemic slightly worse off than them. Why?

Covid revealed that our state was in poorer shape than we had acknowledged, riven with co-morbidities and built on a vulnerable just-getting-by model; the NHS went into the pandemic with one of the lowest rates of hospital beds per capita in the developed world. …

There are two paradoxical conclusions that can be drawn from Britain’s Covid hangover. One is that we left our country far too vulnerable to external shock. The other is that we have become excessively attached to safety and too afraid of risk. …

Despite the pandemic’s continuing effects, it stays firmly lodged in our collective unconscious. But we should not leave it there. To paraphrase Carl Jung, until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life — and you will call it fate.

Worth reading in full.