Hitched to the Good Times

If you ever want to understand why Britain lurches from boom to bust like a tipsy deckhand on a rolling swell, look at how we fund our public services. We treat the NHS, schools, courts and social care as if they were seasonal pop up shops. When the sun shines, the Chancellor cuts the ribbon. When the clouds roll in, down come the shutters. Everything is hitched to the good times, as if demand for healthcare politely takes a holiday whenever GDP dips.

Meanwhile, countries with proportional representation simply get on with the boring business of governing. Denmark, Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands, Germany... all those places we like to dismiss as grey, technocratic and unexciting. They create multi year baselines, lock in funding that actually meets demographic and cost pressures, and then stick to it. Shocking behaviour. No sudden lurches, no emergency Budgets every five minutes, no political theatre. Just predictable investment so that hospitals do not collapse, teachers are not fleeing to work in recruitment agencies, and courts do not take longer to process a case than it takes to age a whisky.

It is not that PR magically produces saints. It simply forces governments to behave like adults. Coalitions cannot indulge in the usual fiscal machismo, because the guy on the other side of the table has his own constituency to reassure. So they compromise, plan, and build frameworks that survive beyond the next election. Dull, yes, but effective. The irony is that we admire their outcomes while refusing to adopt the systems that deliver them.

Compare that with Britain, the land of first past the post, where every government arrives convinced it alone has been blessed with divine economic wisdom. The result is austerity one decade, unfunded tax cuts the next, a brief flirtation with libertarian set fire to the markets idiocy, and now Labour nervously tiptoeing around the crater, terrified of spooking the bond traders again. It is not a strategy; it is a nervous twitch.

The grown up solution is obvious. Establish a baseline for public services that does not melt away the moment the economy hiccups. Treat day to day spending separately from long term investment, and stop pretending that capital projects should be funded like a weekend supermarket shop. Add a stabilisation fund so that downturns do not become an excuse for yet another round of cuts that cost far more in the long run. In other words, copy the countries that are outperforming us rather than lecturing them about British exceptionalism.

Of course, this would all require Westminster to relinquish its addiction to drama. It would also require voters to accept that decent public services are not a free optional extra that can magically be switched on and off according to the Chancellor’s polling numbers. And it would require an admission that the system itself encourages short termism, because first past the post rewards noise over competence.

But until we grasp that, Britain will continue to run its state like a badly maintained classic car: thrash it in the good times, starve it of oil in the bad, then act shocked when the engine seizes. Other countries look after their machinery. We wait for it to fail, then hold another press conference.