It's easy to get lost in the minutiae of election results - swings, demographics, careers busted and revived. Here's a wider view.
The welfare state was created at a time when life expectancies were much lower and healthcare procedures much less sophisticated. Nearly 70 years later we are living longer. Elderly people are expensive to keep alive, both because they require more medical intervention than the young and because the state has to pay them a pension. The increased complexity of new medical techniques has driven the cost of healthcare upwards.
At the same time Britain has effectively outsourced its manufacturing industry to countries in the Far East where labour costs are lower. This has reduced the price of consumer goods, but has been devastating for Britain's balance of payments because the money we use to buy such goods goes out of the country. It pays workers abroad, whose taxes go to their governments, not ours.
To put it bluntly, running Britain has got more expensive just as our ability to pay for it has declined. The 2008 crash is symptomatic of this. It happened because both consumers and governments tried to sustain their living standards by borrowing.
When income declines and costs go up, a number of solutions are possible. One is to say "We must spend less". This has been the Tory approach since 2010; and it has been successful to the extent that the deficit (excess of spend over income) has been reduced from about £150bn per year to about £1bn per week. However there is now a perceptible effect on public services, and in the meantime Britain's public sector debt has continued to balloon towards a danger point whose exact location is of course unknown.
The other solution is to say, the best way to reduce long-term borrowing is more short-term borrowing. The economy runs faster and companies are encouraged to invest. A virtuous circle is created whereby investment begets investment and both beget growth. That growth raises the taxes which therefore pay for the extra borrowing (or at least makes the extra borrowing smaller as a proportion of newly increased GDP).
One weakness of this latter proposal is that economic policy is always implemented by politicians, whose view of the limits of prudence is always taken with an eye on the next election. In a way it is fatuous to point out such defects, because there will always be a section of the public, of politicians and of the economics profession which wants it to be true even if it is not. That section can become influential enough to contest a general election, as the events of last week demonstrate.
I heard again again, from Mr Corbyn, his supporters and the media that "people are tired of austerity". I take this to mean, "people are tired of attempting to live within their means", which is not the same thing as "people think the case for living within your means has not been made out". The Times headline this morning is "Austerity is over, May tells Tories", so even the Nasty Party seems to have accepted that the public mood is against them, never mind that if you look at the figures, public spending has actually continued to rise.
I believe that ultimately we will have to live more or less within the limits of our income, and that we will all come to realise that sooner or later. I'm not surprised that a lot of people haven't grasped it yet, but they will, and I suppose it's only to be expected that they will only do so after all the vaguely plausible alternatives have been tried. Eventually, a Government will try to spend its way out of debt. I'm sure they will fail. Eventually the markets will rebel.
What society will look like then I shudder to think. The affluent (in other words anyone with a good job or who has built up some savings) will be told they must bear their fair share of the burden (this will be whatever the party demanding the money says it means at the time of the demand). Tax rates will rise to punitive levels, enterprise will be discouraged and mobile money will leave the country. It will, in other words, be a return to the '70s, but with this crucial difference: then the UK's debt to GDP ratio was below 50% and falling. It is now above 80% and rising.
Be afraid. The culture of entitlement has a sharp grip on the British public imagination, and the first response of many to the realisation that it is in jeopardy will be anger and denial.
