Enter the NHS, a beloved institution that is hailed as the pride of the nation by both the political left and the right. The majority of Britons use the NHS, with only 12-14% of the population "going private," so when the NHS declines, *everybody* notices (what's more, even people with private care use the NHS for many of their needs).

Britons love the NHS and they want the government to spend more on it.

14/

There's "a broad public consensus that the government is not going far enough when it comes to funding." That's because generations of cuts to the NHS have left it substantially hollowed out, with major parts of the service handed over to for-profit entities who overcharge and underserve.

15/

The most tangible and immediate evidence of this slow-motion collapse comes when your local general practitioner ("family doctor" or "primary care physician" in Americanese) shuts down. The UK has lost 1,700 GP practices since 2013.

Reasoning that a GP closure would make people angry at the system, the economists behind the paper wanted to see what happened to people's political beliefs when their GP's office shut.

16/

They relied on the GP Patient Survey, a longitudinal study run by NHS England and Ipsos Mori. The survey asks a statistically significant random sample of patients from every GP practice in the NHS and then weights the results "to reflect the demographic characteristics of the local population according to UK Census estimates." It's good data.

17/

The researchers cross-referenced this with various high-quality instruments that measured the political views of Britons, like the U Essex Understanding Society Panel, drawing on 13 years' worth of surveys from 2009-2022, gaining access to a protected version of the dataset with fine-grained geographic information about survey respondents, which allowed them to link responses to the "catchment areas" for specific GPs' office.

18/

They combined this data with the British Election Study panel, which has surveyed voters 29 times since 2014.

Most of the paper describes the careful work the researchers did to analyze, cross-reference and validate this data, but what interested me was the conclusion.

19/

People who see a severe degradation in the quality of the services they rely on switch their political affiliation to one of Britain's fascist parties - UKIP, the Brexit Party, or Reform - parties that have called for ethnic cleansing in Britain.

This is what has me scared. We can see the looming economic crises in our near future. If it's not the AI crash that triggers the next wave of austerity, it'll be the oil crisis created by Trump's bungling in the Strait of Epstein.

20/

And of course, we could always get a twofer, because the Gulf States that *were* pouring hundreds of billions into AI data-centers now need every cent to rebuild the LNG shipping terminals and oil refineries that Iran blew up after Trump, Hegseth and Netanyahu started murdering all the schoolgirls they could target. Once they nope out of the AI bubble, that could trigger the collapse.

21/

This is a study about the NHS, but it's not *just* about the NHS. It's perfectly reasonable to assume that people react this way when they experience cuts to their road maintenance, their schools, their community centers, and any other service they rely on. Fascism - what Hannah Arendt called 'organized loneliness' - can only take root when people stop believing that their society will reward their lawfulness with an orderly and humane existence.

22/

The crisis is coming, but whether we do austerity is our choice. Everywhere we turn, political leaders are rejecting generations of failed austerity in favor of "sewer socialism" - the idea that you get people to trust their government by *earning* that trust. Zohran Mamdani is fixing 100,000 potholes in the first 100 days, despite the multi-billion dollar deficit that outgoing Mayor Eric Adams created by "running the city like a business":

prospect.org/2026/04/10/zohran…

23/

Getting New York City to Believe in Government

Mamdani's first hundred days in office end today, and his goals for the period have been twofold: show those supporters meaningful progress on their concerns, and expand participation in New York City democracy even more.

^{David Dayen (The American Prospect)}