Sam Freedman
Last month there was a fascinating poll from More in Common asking people to pick the main reason Britain is “on the wrong track”. As you can see from the chart below the results were fairly polarised. Voters from centre and centre-left parties were most likely to choose Brexit; on the right Tony Blair’s election came top. I suspect if the decision to allow high levels of non-EU migration post-Brexit had been an option that would have been chosen by most Reform voters.
Obviously polls like this shouldn’t be taken too seriously. People answer quickly and will default to a decision they disliked (like Brexit). But it was, nevertheless, surprising to see such a low score for “the 2008 financial crash”. For many of us working in policy it is axiomatic that the financial crisis was the moment when everything got worse, not just here but around the world. The UK and major European economies, in particular, have never fully recovered. Productivity growth hasn’t come close to pre-crisis levels.
But it’s not just the lingering economic effects. All of the crises, screw-ups, and bad decisions that have happened since 2008, with the exception of covid, were at least partly caused by the financial crisis. Clearly for most people the crash is now a distant historical event which is remembered, if thought about at all, as a one-off moment of panic, with frazzled bankers yelling at computers, that was resolved with massive state intervention. In reality it changed everything from the geopolitical landscape to electoral politics.
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