3 days ago
The great pensioner gravy train is finally coming to a halt
Rachel Reeves may go down in history as the Chancellor who had the bad luck to be in charge when the music stopped.
For decades, British politicians have spent beyond their means, robbing the future of its inheritance to pay for consumption today. Now the bill is beginning to come due.
Wherever you look, the pillars of the welfare state are beginning to buckle.
The Covid backlog may have added a mountainous pile-up of cases to the NHS's problems, but the fundamental flaws of the health service are the same as they were at its foundation – a system of state command and control that destroys competition and price signals. If the NHS were a patient, we'd put it up for assisted dying.
Ever greater injections of cash and resources have ceased to produce visible responses, with the result that despite advances in AI and medical equipment, productivity has now slipped below its level in 2012.
