British Living Standards Are Going Down and the Conservatives Only Have Themselves to Blame

It was announced on Thursday that the U.K. entered recession during the latter half of 2023, using the definition of two consecutive quarters of negative growth. According to the ONS, GDP fell 0.1% from July to September and then fell another 0.3% from October to December. Labour has predictably dubbed this “Rishi’s recession”.

More concerning than the headline GDP figures, though, are the data on real GDP per capita – which is after all what we care about. They show that British living standards, adjusted for inflation, have fallen for five out of the last six quarters. In other words, they haven’t grown since the first quarter of 2022. There hasn’t been a run of negative growth this bad since the Great Recession of 2008.

What’s more, the level of GDP per capita was higher in the fourth quarter of 2017. Which means that Britons are worse off than they were six years ago. I don’t need to remind you that the ‘Conservative’ Party has been in power throughout this period.

Back in October of 2022, I wrote a piece for the Daily Sceptic titled ‘The Tories Should Call a General Election’. My argument was simple: things are going to get worse before they get better, so the Tories ought to cut their losses. Quoting myself:

The best strategy for the Tories is to call a General Election, pass the baton to Labour, and then blame the country’s economic problems on them. Lose the battle to win the war, so to speak… An election now would be a bloodbath, but if the Tories hold off another two years they could be out of power for a generation.

It looks like I was right. The Tories are no better off in the polls than when I wrote that piece but the economy has deteriorated further. What’s more, the Reform Party is now nipping at their heels, with a solid 10% in the polls. So rather than just a terrible result in the next General Election, the Tories may be facing their worst result in history!

A seat projection published on February 14th predicts that they’ll be left with just 80 seats in the House of Commons – substantially fewer than the 156 they won in their disastrous 1906 defeat. Meanwhile, Labour will enjoy a massive majority of 256 – larger than the one Tony Blair received at the historic 1997 election.

In another piece for the Daily Sceptic, this one written in November of 2022, I identified three causes of the then-imminent recession, which I dubbed Britain’s “liberal technocratic recession”. The first was lockdown, during which supply chains broke down and the Government paid people not to work. The second was the Europe-wide decision to let oil refineries shut down without building any new ones. The third was the self-harming sanctions against Russia, which led to Europe splurging €1 trillion on gas.

When it comes to the decline in living standards, a fourth cause may be added: mass immigration. Since the middle of 2021, Britain has seen the highest levels of immigration in its history, with the net figure running at 745,000 in the year ending December 2022. This means the total population is now larger and average living standards correspondingly lower.

Lockdown, the energy crisis, mass immigration – these were all policy choices by the party in power. So it’s hardly surprising the public want a change (not that Labour will be any better). The writing was on the wall by October of 2022 and the Tories should have read it.