Britain in dire need of moral leadership

Sir, – Jeremy Hunt will probably not please anybody in his Autumn Statement, even though his rumoured tax and spending cuts of around £50 billion are less than 5% of the government’s total £1.1 trillion annual spend.

The real way to solve the problem, as Liz Truss rightly argued, is economic growth. Not simply borrowing and cutting taxes, we need to get people back to work, reform the public sector, improve education and health – and attitudes.

There are 5.5 million UK citizens on incapacity, job seeker and Universal Credit out-of-work benefits – up from 3.6m in 2018 – and 600,000 people have left the workforce since 2019. If they were all on average annual earnings of £35,000 that would equate to almost £2bn in income tax and National Insurance.

There are 1.2m job vacancies and 1.2m unemployed registered unemployed in the UK. Scotland’s numbers are roughly proportionate.

Reasons given for many people leaving employment include waiting for medical treatment for long-term illness or they are fed up working and think they have enough income to get by on.

According to the British Medical Association, the UK spent £193bn on the NHS in 2019. In real terms the number was £74bn in 1999, £34bn in 1979 and £16bn in 1959.

The bottom line is in the last 20 years spending in the NHS multiplied threefold and yet people give up work and go on benefits because, it’s argued, the NHS can’t cope with them.

When I was a kid in the ’60s people died quickly of heart attacks, breast, bowel and lung cancer, mostly due to

smoking and fatty food. These days, more illnesses such as diabetes, high blood pressure and cancer are long-term, often caused by diet, obesity and lifestyle, and there’s a growing array of expensive treatments and not enough emphasis on prevention.

Based on the numbers (£193bn vs £16bn), we spend 12 times more today than in 1960. Most of that is genuine progress but there has to be huge saving due to better organisation and preventive medicine.

It’s a similar story with education. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, when I went to school in 1960 the UK spent 2% of GDP on education.

This doubled to 4% in the ’80s, peaked at 10% in 2010 and is now around 8.5%.

So we spend four times more today than when Scottish

public education was the best in the world. In my simple, anecdotal brain this is down to a mixture of genuine improvements torpedoed by poor parenting, disregard for the importance of education, poor behaviour in class, consequent dumbing down of the curriculum and growth in the number (and cost of ) classroom assistants.

Why has this all happened? I’m not a sociologist but I think it’s a combination of us all going soft, a very human response to years of peace, actual prosperity, decline in family life, de-industrialisation, globalisation and consumerism.

And no moral or political leadership willing to spell this out, challenge us and show us the way forward.

Allan Sutherland. Willow Row, Stonehaven.

BITTER MEDICINE: Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has warned of tax rises and spending cuts ahead.