Brandon To is a Politics graduate from UCL and a Hong Kong BN(O) immigrant settled in Harrow
Black paint had been thrown across the walls and windows of several homes in Harrow.
This was not a bit of graffiti on a council building. These were people’s homes. Residents were hiding inside and desperately calling 999 when the gang was attacking. Surely, I thought, this was the sort of thing the police would at least want to know about.
But the residents told me they were given a very different response. They were told the police simply don’t “have the capacity to deal with it” and were “not interested” in hearing more.
I was devastated. Not just because of what had happened to these residents, but because of how dismissive the police sounded.
And for the first time, I found myself asking a question: have we cut the wrong budget?
For years, “austerity” has been treated almost like a swear word. Mention it, and you will receive a harshly worded mockery on Facebook that reminds you of the public service cuts and the political damage inflicted on our party.
But I think we have learnt the wrong lesson.
Austerity itself was not the mistake.
We didn’t cut too much. We cut too stupidly.
The basic principle of fiscal discipline is not controversial. A government cannot spend money it does not have forever. Even Labour appears to have discovered this rather belatedly.
Keir Starmer talked about abolishing NHS England to eliminate duplication and bureaucracy. It is pursuing billions in welfare fraud and error. Apparently, cutting unnecessary government spending is no longer an exclusively Conservative concept.
Good.
But then we need to ask the question that should have been asked all along: what exactly should we cut?
Because a pound is not simply a pound.
A pound spent unnecessarily on administration is not the same as a pound spent on a police officer. A pound paid to put illegal immigrants in 4-star hotels is not the same as a pound paying for another prison officer or another prison place.
The consequences are different.
And the evidence from the Coalition years should make Conservatives uncomfortable.
Between 2010 and 2016, funding to police and crime commissioners fell by around 25 per cent in real terms. Police officer numbers subsequently fell by more than 21,000.
The Ministry of Justice was also left unprotected. Its budget was around 29 per cent lower in real terms in 2016 than in 2010. Prison officer numbers fell from roughly 25,000 in 2010 to around 18,000 in 2014, with more than 100 magistrates’ and county courts closed during the Coalition’s court estate reforms.
Some of these changes were sensible. But there is a difference between making the state more efficient and shredding state capacity until it can no longer function.
A police officer catches the criminal. A prison cell locks them up.
Sounds simple right? But they are the backbone of our justice system. They dictate whether crime has consequences. And when we remove capacity from all of them, eventually someone has to pay the price.
That someone may be the poor kid crying under the table when the gangs attacked their house.
Or the victim and their families whose attacker is released early because there is nowhere else to put them.
This is why I find the current debate about prison overcrowding so depressing.
It is easy to laugh at Andy Burnham when the Labour Government is forced to decide who can be released early. To some people perhaps there’s even a certain political satisfaction.
I don’t.
Because behind every prisoner released early is potentially a victim who does not get an early release from what happened to them. One criminal’s relief is another family’s grief.
And if we have reached the point where the state is choosing a “lesser of two evils” to release from prison because it failed to maintain enough capacity, that is not a victory for either side of British politics.
Which brings us back to the fundamental problem:
We didn’t cut too much. We cut top-down and hollowed out the bottom.
Look at the Civil Service as another example.
The number of Grade 6 and 7 civil servants, the middle-management grades immediately below the Senior Civil Service, actually increased from 36,630 to 39,530 between 2010 and 2015. Their share of the total workforce grew from 7 per cent to 9 per cent. Meanwhile, the junior administrative grades (AO and AA), the people handling operational processing on the front line, were slashed from 47 per cent of the Civil Service down to 40 per cent.
In other words, we achieved little to no savings on the budget, but with more people sitting in their offices setting “strategies”, and fewer people to execute them.
That’s what I mean by cutting stupidly.
Cut bureaucracy harder. Cut duplication harder. Cut welfare fraud harder. Cut waste harder.
But never again cut the things the state exists to do in the first place: frontline police, prisons, courts, borders and national security.
And to make this case to the country, Conservatives must first do something political parties traditionally hate doing: admit we got parts of it wrong.
We cannot pretend we’ve done well, when voters vividly remember the tax hike while local police stations are closing down and courts are falling apart. If we want the public to trust us with the economy again, we must prove that we have learnt from our mistakes.
Besides, the competition is hardly setting the world on fire. Look at what happens the moment to our political rivals. Reform just hiked council tax In Worcestershire by 9 per cent all while committing £500,000 to external management consultants despite their promises to cut waste.
This is where our new Shadow MHCLG secretary, Katie Lam, and Conservative-led councils, have a huge role to play before the next general election.
When Reform hikes council taxes and Labour toys with wealth tax, Conservative local government should be the ultimate proof of concept. Cut the endless consultant fees. Sack the diversity officers. Scrap the performative celebrations for non-British festivals. Keep council tax down while keeping the streetlights on and the bins collected. Then, select candidates who made great progress slashing the council budget, and prove to Britain we are the real party of efficiency.
That is how we rebuild our brand. Not by pious denial, but by showing them we finally understand the basic rule of government: keep the state lean, but never, ever compromise on the basics.