Einstein famously said insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Plans from Reform UK to bring back austerity are exactly this: insanity.
This week, Nigel Farage laid out Reform UK’s plans for the British economy. The long and short of it was that they’ve realised the scale of the issues facing the UK and that sweeping tax cuts they had previously pledged would be disastrous.
So, they rowed back on tax cuts and now Reform want to bring back austerity.
In no uncertain terms, Farage said Reform would slash public spending and welfare, railing against the “bloated state” and an “over-diagnosis” of disabilities.
But if almost a decade of such policies under the Tories hadn’t quite convinced you how disastrous austerity is, then here’s a few stats you should be aware of.
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Hundreds of thousands more deaths
It’s impossible to start anywhere else – austerity means more people will die. Numerous studies have shown that austerity policies resulted in hundreds of thousands of excess deaths in the UK.
One 2022 study led by the Glasgow Centre for Population Health found that austerity measures had resulted in 335,000 additional deaths across Scotland, England and Wales between 2012 and 2019.
Meanwhile, research from the International Inequalities Institute last year found that austerity spending cuts “cost the average person in the UK nearly half a year in life expectancy between 2010 and 2019.”
Unemployment up
In the early years of the austerity implemented by David Cameron and George Osborne, unemployment rose to levels not seen in years. An Oxfam case study titled ‘The True Cost of Austerity and Inequality‘ highlighted how in 2012, unemployment hit 7.9%, the highest level since 1996. By August 2013, some 2.51 million people were unemployed.
Schools and hospitals crippled
A return to austerity under Reform would be a disaster for our national health and education. According to a TUC report in 2023, years of pay caps and freezes left health and social care understaffed. Between 2010 and 2020, the number of nurses per capita in the UK grew by less than one per cent – despite demand for care rising by one-third and the OECD average of nurses per capita rising by 10%. By 2019, the average NHS worker was earning £3,000 less in real terms than in 2010.
Over the same ten years, school funding per pupil was cut by 8.3% in England, 6.4% in Wales, 2.4% in Scotland and 10.5% in Northern Ireland.
Local services slashed
Few in the country won’t have noticed the devastating impact of austerity on local services either. Central government cuts led to a 17% fall in council spending on local services, with grant funding for English councils reduced by £16bn. According to UNISON, this resulted in the loss of
- 859 children’s centres and family hubs
- 940 youth centres
- 21% of public toilets
- 32% of council-subsidised bus routes
- 738 council-run libraries
GDP strangled
The whole logic behind austerity is that all the state cuts mentioned above end up having a real-world economic benefit. But this didn’t happen. In fact, the opposite was true. A 2019 report claimed that ten years of austerity had cut GDP growth in the UK by almost £100bn, just over £3,600 per household.
The bottom line is this: we’ve tried austerity, and it didn’t work. Not only did it not work, but our country is worse off for it. As Rachel Reeves stated in her speech on Tuesday, austerity is one of the main reasons the UK finds itself in the economic malaise it does currently.
The chancellor said austerity policies under previous governments were a “hammer blow” to the UK’s economy and “gutted” the country’s public services.
Austerity 2.0 under Reform is not the answer.