[gabriel666smith]

Yeah - I used "austerity" as a slightly sloppy shorthand in my comment. My two closest local libraries were closed due to cuts made during "the credit crunch" by the coalition government (from memory!), when "austerity" was the buzzword, so I felt it'd communicate most broadly (to HN's international userbase) the phenomenon I was gesturing at.

From what I can understand, these sources are saying: "because costs are up, those past cuts have not yet really been reversed, especially not in terms of real-terms funding per-capita, or funding for 'non-essential' services".

Super bleak reading - it's a very dark rabbit hole!

[Ntrails]

> Super bleak reading - it's a very dark rabbit hole!

That it is! It will require an actual change to the societal contract to resolve as best I can tell - and it remains unclear to me what direction the change will take.

[gabriel666smith]

Yes - I think the idea of 'citizenship' feels increasingly abstract and outdated to anyone who only rarely noticeably interacts with the entity they pay taxation to, typically solely in moments of extreme crisis. 'Noticeably' here meaning I'm excluding ambient aspects of life, like walking on a government-maintained pavement.

I would argue those 'non-essential' services - those which you actively notice benefiting from - are extremely important for building institutional trust in the state. For young people entering the workforce today, who (for example) are a demographic that have a lower requirement for the services of the NHS, it must be genuinely confusing and alienating to be paying (what I believe is) a historically high tax rate.

Citizenship, as an idea, does need to demonstrably benefit both the state and the individual. Otherwise, the state is basically asking people to draw on their reserves of empathy to have a reason not to act like a dick. That will, unfortunately, have much more varied results than empathy alongside tangible incentives.

The cost of not providing those 'non-essential' services may ultimately be larger, and more difficult to calculate, I think, than are calculable today. How you provide them without the cash to do so is a question I'm not smart enough to answer. But people have now - completely anecdotally - gone a very long time with low tangible incentives toward citizenship being provided by the either the state or local authorities, and the vibe is very, very bad.

I don't think this is restricted to the UK, either. The OECD’s 2024 trust survey found only 37% of respondents across 30 countries were confident their government balances the interests of current and future generations. [1]

[1] https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/oecd-survey-on-drivers-...