The Austerity Lie

Why this is back

On 27 July, UK Research and Innovation confirmed it is withdrawing funding from e-MERLIN, the national radio astronomy network run from Jodrell Bank that links seven telescopes including the Lovell. Observations are expected to stop on 1 April 2028. Twenty-eight jobs go, around 3,000 scientists lose the instrument, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site keeps the dish but loses the reason it turns. The saving is £2.8m a year.

British public spending runs at roughly £2.3m a minute. The state spends Jodrell Bank’s entire annual funding every seventy-four seconds. It is one part in 428,000 of the total, and it did not survive, because radio astronomy sits outside the ring-fence and the ring-fence is where the money went.

The state that could not find £2.8m is not short of money. Defending the decision, the Business and Science Secretary Jonathan Reynolds cited £38.6bn committed to UKRI over the coming years. The same body is currently funding The Europe that Gay Porn Built, 1945-2000 at Birmingham City University, an award of £841,830 running to October 2027; a five-year fellowship at Sheffield on diversifying participation in English folk singing; and an £805,769 project on the digital repatriation of a museum collection from Britain to India.

Those awards were always on the public record. They are visible because Charlotte Gill has spent years reading UKRI’s grant register and publishing what is in it, which is the unglamorous half of journalism and the half that matters.

Those are multi-year totals and e-MERLIN’s £2.8m is annual, so nobody should pretend one would have paid for the other. The priority order is the point, not the arithmetic. A body holding £38.6bn put a seventy-year-old national instrument below the line and these above it. Nothing was unaffordable. It was de-prioritised.

Jodrell Bank loses its funding. The Europe that Gay Porn Built keeps its £841,830.

Andy Burnham has been Prime Minister for a little over a week. He took the Labour leadership on 17 July promising the most significant change in British politics for forty years, and put the country’s troubles down to “a series of wrong turns” taken in the 1980s. He used the phrase again on the steps of Number 10. Austerity sits in the middle of his list of things to reverse, between privatisation and financialisation.

The Burnham Bounce has since put Labour top of three national polls in a week, ending a Reform lead that had survived more than 300 consecutive surveys. A new government with momentum and a story about the past will keep telling it. The 2010s are going to be relitigated for the rest of this parliament, by a party that held office for fifteen of the forty years it now indicts, and against an opposition with its own reasons to misremember the decade.

The numbers should come first.

What everyone remembers

Libraries closed. Courts backed up. Sure Start centres shut. Social care thresholds tightened until only the most acute cases qualified. Potholes became a national joke and then a national expense. Anyone who lived through the 2010s in a mid-sized English town can describe austerity without a single statistic, and none of it is wrong.

The received account is that the British state was cut across the board. It is the one thing both sides agree on. The left calls it vandalism, the right calls it discipline, and the argument runs from there. Both are describing something that did not happen.

What the ledger says

Total managed expenditure was around £690bn in 2010-11. By 2018-19 it was around £850bn. By 2023-24 it had passed £1.2 trillion. There is no year in the period in which the cash total meaningfully fell.

Adjust for inflation and the picture barely moves. The Institute for Fiscal Studies puts the real-terms cut at 2.7% between 2009-10 and 2014-15, followed by broadly flat spending to the end of the decade. Five years of austerity took 2.7% off the total.

One measure shows a fall of any size. As a share of the economy, spending went from 46.3% of GDP in 2009-10 to 39.3% in 2018-19. That seven-point drop is the whole of austerity in aggregate. It was achieved by holding spending flat while the economy grew around it.

The ring-fence

The cuts landed almost entirely in one place.

Central government funding for councils fell 55% in real terms between 2010-11 and 2019-20. Other unprotected services, covering the Home Office, Justice, Transport, Defra, Work and Pensions and the Treasury itself, lost 20%. Every service outside local government, taken together, saw no change at all.

Council core spending power, which includes council tax, fell 26% across the 2010s. Non-education spending per resident fell by almost a quarter.

Justice took the deepest Whitehall cut. The Ministry of Justice’s day-to-day budget fell 33% between 2007-08 and 2016-17. Over the same years, health rose 25%. Total departmental day-to-day spending fell 3%.

A 33% cut and a 25% rise, inside a 3% fall. Nothing was saved. The line items were reordered.

The part nobody voted for

The ring-fence followed the demographics.

An ageing population moves money into health and pensions whoever holds office, and the triple lock compounded that by design. Debt interest took its own growing share, then after 2021 an enormous one. Those three grew faster than the budget. Everything outside them fell to make room, even as the total rose. That is the crowding-out mechanism, and it did not start in 2010 or stop in 2024.

You paid more and got less

The tax side moved the same way. The burden went from roughly 33% of GDP in 2010 to around 36% by 2024, the highest sustained level since the 1940s. Almost none of it came from raising headline rates. It came from freezing thresholds and letting wage inflation do the work, which is why so many people got a pay rise and less money in the same month.

Taxes up, spending up, visible services down. That is the record of 2010 to 2024, and neither side tells it.

Why nobody checked

The claim survived fourteen years because it suited everyone in a position to correct it.

For Labour, Tory cuts was the shortest route to an argument it was winning. Conceding that spending rose every year would have meant explaining the ring-fence, the triple lock and the demographics behind them, none of which fits on a placard.

For the Conservatives, the accusation was a compliment. A party that had promised discipline was content to be charged with delivering it. The denial would have cost more than the charge, because it meant admitting the state grew on their watch.

For the press, one number is a story and three are a graph nobody opens. Cuts are photographable. Composition is not. A closed library has a picture. A ring-fence does not.

For the Treasury, the ambiguity worked in both directions at once: austere to the bond markets, protective to the electorate, depending on who was asking.

Four sets of actors, four reasons, one shared story. No conspiracy required. A fact only survives scrutiny when somebody’s argument depends on it, and nobody’s did.

Three true things at once

One. The cuts were real, severe, and landed on the people least able to absorb them. Council services and the justice system took a decade of damage that has not been repaired. Anyone calling austerity a myth is arguing with a closed library.

Two. The state did not shrink. It grew in cash terms, held roughly flat in real terms, and by 2024 took a larger share of GDP than in 2010. Anyone saying the British state was cut is arguing with the ledger.

Three. Something had to give. Borrowing hit 9.9% of GDP in 2009-10, the post-war record. Consolidation was coming whoever won the election. The argument worth having is about its shape and its speed, not its existence.

And on Jodrell Bank specifically. The University of Manchester, which runs e-MERLIN, says the observatory is not closing and that work at the site continues while alternative funding is sought. STFC says the decision followed an evidence-based prioritisation, and that it still backs Jodrell Bank through the UK’s hosting of the SKA Observatory headquarters. Both statements are true. Neither of them turns the telescope.

The point

Fourteen years, and the bill went up the whole way. What changed was the itemisation.

The country was told it was buying less government. It was buying the same amount of government, distributed differently, at a higher price. The closed libraries and the backed-up courts were never the cost of a smaller state. They were the cost of a state that kept growing in the places that were ring-fenced.

Seventy-four seconds. That is what the country could not find for Jodrell Bank, in a year it spent £1.2 trillion. The receipt was there the whole time. Almost nobody asked for it.