Fourteen wasted years, 2010–2024
The Conservative Party governed Britain for 14 years, first in coalition with the Liberal Democrats and then alone. It is a long enough period to judge. There were mistakes that even Tory supporters came to acknowledge.
The Coalition inherited a deficit that demanded attention. Gordon Brown’s spending spree had ensured that. Compared to other large economies that suffered similar increases in borrowing after the financial crash, what was distinctive about the British approach was that consolidation was delivered predominantly through spending cuts rather than a mix of cuts and tax rises.
The results were poor: although the aim was to reduce debt, government debt rose anyway, from 55% of GDP in 2010 to 100% of GDP by 2023. Lower growth meant lower tax revenues, which necessitated higher tax rates, which suppressed the private investment the strategy was meant to unlock. It was a treadmill, not a recovery.
The NHS received just 0.1% real-terms increases to its funding each year until 2015, far short of the 4% average it had received annually since its establishment and the 6% it averaged under the previous Labour government.
The NHS waiting list had almost doubled from 2.5 million in 2010 to 4.6 million by the end of 2019, that is before COVID, before the strikes, and before anyone could blame subsequent governments.
The Conservative failure in housing was comprehensive and cuts across every administration from Cameron to Sunak. The party produced strategies, white papers, and housing ministers in rapid succession. In 2019 the Tories promised to hit a housebuilding target of 300,000 new homes per year, but failed to achieve it.
Help to Buy inflated demand without addressing supply. Planning reform was attempted and then abandoned under lobbying pressure from Tory backbenchers anxious about their constituencies. The consequence was unaffordable housing for the young, intergenerational wealth inequality locked in, and a generation priced out of ownership. This is arguably the single most damaging domestic legacy of these years.
Cameron's overall majority in 2015 meant that he had to deliver on his manifesto promise of a referendum on EU membership. He lost, and resigned the morning after the result. Michael Gove’s decision to stand against Boris Johnson led to the three-year zombie parliament under Theresa May.
A party that called itself Conservative, that claimed to believe in individual freedom and the minimal state, spent 14 years building up a repertoire of interventions that undermined personal responsibility and choice.
The Cameron government introduced plain packaging for cigarettes in 2016, requiring all cigarette packets to be a standard colour with brand names shown in a standard font and no other branding on the packet. The government thus confiscated intellectual property built up over decades on the grounds that customers must be protected from the aesthetic appeal of their own preferred product. The irony was that this same government was simultaneously celebrating the free market.
The sugar tax followed. In 2018 the Conservative government introduced the Soft Drinks Industry Levy as a mechanism to address increasing prevalence of obesity by reducing sugar consumption. The Levy was criticised in Parliament as overly interventionist, lacking a sufficient evidence base, and regressive, since price rises disproportionately impact lower-income households.
Conservative MPs objected. The government had spent years resisting such measures under the banner of individual choice, then introduced them when it judged the political weather had shifted. This was not principle. It was opportunism dressed up as public health.
The Johnson-era obesity strategy introduced calorie labelling, restrictions on buy-one-get-one-free promotions for certain foods, and a ban on junk food advertising before the 9pm watershed. The party that once mocked such policies as nanny statism simply implemented them when focus groups moved on.
One of the more audacious political sleights of hand of the period was George Osborne's announcement in 2015 of a ‘National Living Wage.’ The announcement was seen as a political coup because the opposition Labour Party had proposed only that the national minimum wage rise to £8 per hour. Osborne simply announced a higher floor and called it something grander. It was calculated from median earnings rather than the cost of living. It was a straightforward government intervention to set prices in the labour market, the kind of thing that, when Labour proposed it, Conservatives had historically resisted on perfectly sensible grounds about employment effects and market distortion.
The Office for Budget Responsibility estimated the policy would result in 60,000 fewer jobs. A Conservative Chancellor mandating wage floors while simultaneously cutting tax credits was not a coherent philosophy.
“Eat Out to Help Out’ deserves attention because it captures so neatly how the instinct to be seen to be doing something can override the obligation to think carefully about the consequences. Rishi Sunak, then Chancellor, announced the scheme in July 2020, with 50% off meals in restaurants, Mondays to Wednesdays throughout August.
Politically, it was brilliant. Epidemiologically, it was catastrophic. A 2021 academic study concluded that the scheme may have contributed to indirect economic and public health costs that vastly outstripped its short-term economic benefits. England's Chief Medical Officer was said to have privately renamed the scheme ‘eat out to help out the virus. The government had spent months telling the public that socialising indoors was dangerous, then subsidized it. The logical dissonance was complete.
The decision by Jeremy Hunt in the March 2024 Budget to abolish non-domicile status ranks as one of the more self-inflicted wounds of the Sunak years, combining bad economics with naked political calculation in a way that achieved neither its fiscal nor its electoral objectives.
Hunt announced that as of April 2025 the UK would abolish non-dom status, a quirk of the tax system dating back to 1799 that allowed wealthy people living in Britain but not domiciled here to pay UK tax only on income earned in, or transferred to, the country.
The theory was that Hunt could neutralize a Labour attack line while raising revenue. Instead he triggered an exodus. Tax advisers for wealthy residents warned that the reforms had only added urgency to those looking to leave the UK, and that it would mean people would not come in the first place. Research from Oxford Economics based on a survey of non-doms and their advisers suggested 63% would leave within two years. Under a scenario where 32% departed, the policy would start costing the Treasury money, not raising it, given that non-doms had paid £8.9 billion in taxes in 2022–23.
Beyond the direct fiscal hit, thousands of jobs in retail, hospitality, legal services, and luxury goods depend on the continued presence of such individuals, and scores of charities, cultural and sporting institutions depend on their patronage and philanthropy. Abolishing it to score a political point against Labour was the act of a government that had run out of ideas.
What made the Truss budget so damaging was that it was entirely self-inflicted. There was no external shock. It was a budget that was repudiated by the markets within hours. The reputation of Britain as a reliable, fiscally serious country took years to rebuild.
Reading across the fourteen years, certain patterns recur. There is the dramatic gesture deployed for internal party management rather than national benefit. There is the gap between rhetorical ambition and administrative follow-through, nowhere more so than in housing. There is the cheerful abandonment of stated principles when political pressure suggested it. The party of free markets introduced sugar taxes and calorie labelling. The party of fiscal responsibility produced unfunded budgets. The party of property rights abolished branded packaging. The party of choice proposed lifetime age limits for tobacco purchases.
The IFS concluded that GDP per head today is nearly £11,000 lower than it would have been had pre-crisis trends continued, and that while much of that slowdown reflects international factors, low investment, policy mistakes, political instability, they combined to hold back growth by more than in many comparable nations.
To score political points, Conservatives became Labour Lite. But intellectual honesty sometimes requires sitting with uncomfortable conclusions.
Madsen Pirie