Driverless cars are the chancellor’s vision. He promised to ride one – but yesterday backed off: someone warned him driverlessness was a bad look on budget eve. If he is trying to mimic Harold Wilson’s 1964 “white heat of technology”, it may not be as popular. Few yet yearn for robots on the roads – certainly not the million professional drivers fearful of joining the unemployed, even if Philip Hammond wrongly claimed on Sunday that the unemployed don’t exist.
But it’s a faithful image nonetheless. There was never such a driverless cabinet, crashing daily as its members split and split again like Trotskyite groupuscules. You might think the great fault line between Brexiteers and remainers was enough. But no. Michael Gove and Boris Johnson’s astonishingly aggressive letter to their prime minister called for her to cut out fellow Brexiteer David Davis and impose on the civil service Matthew Elliott, Brexit campaign architect and founder of the libertarian Taxpayers’ Alliance. Davis was reportedly “on the brink of resigning”.
It won’t end there. Only plaster holds Johnson and Gove together: they will re-rat in their desired leadership contest. Note two full pages attacking Johnson in Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Times this weekend. Murdoch favours his minion, Gove. I’m told Murdoch’s wife, Jerry Hall, is heard at dinners hymning Gove’s praises – “I just love him! He’s so clever!” – just as Gove (with his unrevealed master in the room), hymned Donald Trump in his exclusive interview.
Surely remainers should be super-glued together? But no. Just when Theresa May most needs a strong phalanx of them, she undermines her chancellor, as others join the bullying. When craven former remainers such as Jeremy Hunt and Liz Truss bend in recantation, vowing they’d now vote Brexit, Hammond stoutly refuses. But too few in the cabinet pull on the other end of the rope against the Brextremists. We now know less about what May thinks, tugged this way and that, opaque on her Brexit plan, with futile acts of submission to ward off her enemies’ intended assassination. Watch them pick off every remainer, one by one. Expect torrential abuse when the Brexit divorce sum is revealed.
This multidimensional Tory civil war will never end, except perhaps in the final destruction of the party. When the calamitous effects of Brexit become evident, watch the obsessives claim, like old Communists, that the full, hard, walk-away, Singapore-on-Thames, tax haven, red-tape-free Brexit was never really tried. At least, we can only hope it will never be tried. Non-Tory remainers, observing this wretched shambles of a government, are left in the peculiar position of praying May and Hammond hang in there, for fear of something much worse.
But economically, what could be worse? In their eighth austerity budget tomorrow, see the screw turn yet again – whatever fake offerings sugar the pill. Good if housing is a beneficiary – but check how much money is to be spread over how many years, because no new money is the Treasury’s abiding mantra. Expect more of the same medicine that has brought us low, as cuts propel us into an ever downward spiral.
The Brexit fantasy is that we are held back by moribund Europeans, chained to a corpse in a burning building. One bound will free us to stretch our wings. Do they avert their eyes from the OECD’s latest graphs? Four days’ work by the French takes our workforce five days. Hammond’s talk of our “world-leading” robotics looks plain delusional when you see the graph showing us last – yes, bottom – in robots per manufacturing worker – with Slovenia, Slovakia, Italy, Spain and everyone else miles ahead. The Tory manifesto pledge on minimum standard broadband connectivity to all has just been threatened with a three year delay. We are the zombie state.
The OECD’s clinical analysis of the UK shows just how fantastically awry is the vaunting, nationalistic arrogance of our politicians and press. Growth, near the bottom of the league, may see forecasts lowered tomorrow, again. Our under-30s are near the bottom for technical qualifications, with low literacy and numeracy, while our research and development falls below the OECD average. Our low corporation tax encourages companies neither to invest – they sit on shedloads of capital – nor to upskill.
Eurostat shows UK companies invest half as much as the EU average in training. Apprenticeships fell by over 60% last year, and investment in skills by 9% in the decade. Failure in early years education is just one more glaring error stressed by the OECD, while 54% of schools offer no computer science GCSEs. If you can bear any more reality, there’s plenty. No wonder John Redwood advises investors to flee the UK for Europe.
Yesterday we learned that lucky Amsterdam had gained the 900 scientists of the EU Medicines Agency from the UK, and all the economists of the European Banking Authority are to leave our shores for Paris. Is it good riddance? As Gove says: “The people of this country have had enough of experts.”
Hammond mocks ministers threatening Armageddon if he doesn’t find new money for their departments. But his Treasury orthodoxy ignores other debts built up since 2010: first is household debt caused by tax credit cuts, falling wages and rising inflation. Beyond that are equally real debts owed to plundered public services, more pressing for repayment than any on his balance sheets. The NHS is owed £4bn, with social care close behind: as Four Seasons’ 17,000 care beds teeter towards administration, the Treasury will be in hock. Schools are cut by £1.7bn, further education far worse. What of debts to the thinned-out border force and police, or social work, council services and public servants’ pay?
If this is the future and these public service debts will never be repaid, then as the NHS head, Simon Stevens, said bluntly: admit it and start rationing openly. Stop pretending there’s “more for less”. Politics will prevail as voters rebel against less of everything for ever, in the name of growth-killing fiscal rectitude. Labour still lags in economic credibility, but when even the Institute for Government calls for annual capital investment of much the same as John McDonnell’s £25bn, and former Tory ministers want an end to austerity, the tide of opinion is on the turn.
Hammond will tomorrow promise – probably repeatedly – to “build a country fit for the future”. So do we laugh, or do we cry?
• Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
• This article was amended on 22 November 2017 to remove an incorrect reference to BT Openreach.
