The lost decade: the hidden story of how austerity broke Britain
What happened in the UK between 2010 and 2020 will scar us for the rest of our lives. David Cameron's Conservatives, only just victorious in the 2010 election, sold austerity as a necessary response to the 2008 financial crash. The exact social consequences of these cuts were spelled out last week in Michael Marmot's report for the Institute of Health Equity: for the first time in a century, life expectancy has stopped growing and for women in poor areas actually fallen.
We should never stop reminding ourselves just what an astonishing decade we have lived through. In the aftermath of the crash, employment climbed and stayed remarkably high. But these new jobs paid badly and it took until two months ago for earnings to reach where they were before 2008. It is no surprise that debt is mountainous: each household owes on average 15,385, not counting their mortgages. The gap between rich and poor has widened; the young are now worse off than their parents at their age; home ownership has declined steeply - families are stuck in life-long and precarious private renting.
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