Public services are the canary in the British political coalmine—the Tories should take note

According to data from pollsters Ipsos Mori the British people’s satisfaction in public services went up between 2014 and 2016. With 2015’s sentiment-eroding general election—widely remarked upon as one of the most negative campaigns in recent history—one might expect this not to be the case.

We should not be surprised, however. One of the most interesting aspects of recent governments’ public spending policies is how resilient satisfaction with public services has been. The Institute for Customer Service recently noted that satisfaction with public services has risen faster in recent years than any other sector. Even NHS satisfaction is comparable with the level seen during the Blair and Brown years.

Yet, I believe forces are aligning which put this stability at risk. If Theresa May’s government isn’t careful, it could begin to decline.

The first question is why has satisfaction remained relatively high over a period of squeezed public spending. This is partly down to a general perception, seeded during the Brown years by the Conservatives, that there was waste and inefficiency in public service under Labour. There was a grain of truth in this—Ed Miliband also believed public services had become too unresponsive to people’s needs. But hearing hysterical claims about the impending “destruction of public services,” voters weighed the rhetoric against reality and found the latter to be pleasantly surprising.

So why could this be in danger of changing now?

When it comes to satisfaction with public services, rarely does a single failure act as both light and touch paper. Rather a slow accumulation of frustration and disappointment finds voice in a sole incident, becoming totemic of something deeper.

Take the portentous quality of the Grenfell Tower fire. On its own a tragedy and failure, but meshed with the open wound that is Brexit, a cowed minority government, weak Prime Minister and energised opposition, commentators have press-ganged it into use as a symbol of a wider breakdown in society, government and services. Suddenly the stories of monthly bin collections, micro-charging in schools and GP waiting times aren’t discrete local matters, but part of a pattern of decline.

And a tendency toward declinism is a British trait, part of our collective and individual psyche. Only last year Britain was noted as one of the world’s most pessimistic countries. We have an acute sense, to paraphrase William Hazlitt, of being able to see the difference between what things are and what they ought to be. Perhaps the most significant change in recent years which puts satisfaction with public services at risk is the emergence of an opposition with an ability to connect with people. And the job of an opposition is connect the dots of failure, in turn saying something about the state of the nation and how it would be different.

Labour’s success in the election earlier this year was because it offered the voters a choice, not an echo. Right now, the only things standing in the way of Jeremy Corbyn orchestrating a fall in public service satisfaction, and the broader implications that follow, are competence and ideas. Can he and his party hold a line for long enough? Do they have a credible alternative? Truthfully, I suspect neither, but the British people are listening and waiting.

The Conservatives haven’t been completely blind to this threat either. Moves to lift the 1 per cent public sector pay cap stands testament. Similarly does the push for an intellectual renewal of the party by people such as George Freeman. But neither will be enough to arrest the biggest concern, a sense that the government simply doesn’t have the right priorities. That Brexit is the alpha and omega of the Conservative party and if you care about something else, you should probably vote for someone else.

My sense is there is an acknowledgement of this problem in Tory ranks, hence the reported desire to make this year’s Conservative Party Conference about a renewed domestic agenda. But, as with so much in politics, at present it exists solely in the realms of platitude. We haven’t yet gone beyond the ‘just about managing’ or ‘left behinds’ to knowing precisely who and how this government wants to help.

A huge part of this comes down to services provided by the state. If the public has no confidence in what you’re doing currently, it’s unlikely they’ll have much in your ability to do more. Satisfaction in public services, therefore, is an important early warning signal of impending political trouble. The Conservatives should take note.