"Imagine a family stuck in a house that constantly floods. The carpets are soaked, the walls damp. It's always cold, no matter how much they turn up the heating. The family try everything. They promise to replace the sodden carpets and find new, innovative ways to warm the house. Someone with a laptop wonders if AI might be the answer. But no one ever looks upwards and says: maybe we should just repair the giant hole in the roof."
"Every public service you can name is desperate for more cash. Take, almost at random, Britain's prisons: overcrowded, understaffed and saddled with boxes of paper records, a system so archaic, according to the prisons minister, that as many as three inmates are mistakenly released each week. It's the same story everywhere, from the NHS to the armed forces: we need more money than we've got."
Britain faces chronic underfunding across public services because the economy is weaker than it should be. Brexit functions as a structural damage that has reduced prosperity and hampered recovery since 2008. Real wages have barely risen in 17 years and productivity growth has slowed most in the G7, leaving less tax revenue for prisons, the NHS, the armed forces and other services. Short-term budgetary measures can find a few billion, but they will not fix the long-term weakness in growth. The government has made growth its priority, yet achieving sustained productivity improvement remains stubbornly difficult.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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