Make this the punishment election – damning the Tories for 14 years of tragedy and waste | Jonathan Freedland

Elections are a choice about the future, they say. We should look forward, not back, they say. And most of the time, that’s true. But every now and then we should make an exception – and this is one of those times. Because the coming general election must also be about the past. It must be about holding the Conservatives to account for the colossal damage they have done to this country over the past 14 years. It must be a punishment election.

The Tories need to face the consequences of what they have done, starting with the cold fact that they have made people poorer. People are worse off now than they were at the last general election, a feat with little or no precedent. Every day, thousands of Britons pay hundreds or thousands more on their mortgages, thanks to the wrecking ball a smirking Liz Truss aimed at the UK economy.

Pick any measure and it tells the same dismal story. Wage growth during the 2010s was the lowest for any peacetime decade since the Napoleonic wars. Those same years also saw the lowest UK productivity since Waterloo. It took until 2022 for average earnings to reach the level they had been at in 2007: 15 lost years.

The squeeze has been felt by everyone, but it’s been hardest for those with the least. There are 4.7 million Britons living in a state of food poverty; that includes 12% of all children. A rare growth industry in the Britain of this era has been the food bank. We used to think of that as a last resort, a final safety net for the tiny number who were truly destitute. No longer. Now more than 2 million people live in households that have had to use a food bank in the previous year.

The Tories will blame forces beyond their control: Covid or Ukraine. But that is to dodge the blame for their own decisions. It was this government that decided to impose a two-child limit on the benefits available to families in need: scrapping it would lift some 500,000 children out of poverty. But they kept it.

That limit came courtesy of David Cameron and George Osborne, architects of the boneheaded policy of austerity, which defied all economic logic, choking off spending at the very moment the country was gasping for air. The burden of that act of economic illiteracy fell heavily on local authorities already pared to the marrow, who then had to cut even deeper. Communities across the country still bear the scars, in the form of closed libraries, drained swimming pools and playgrounds left to rust – children and adults deprived of the only leisure facilities some of them ever had.

So much of today’s public realm is like that, essential services shrivelled by neglect. Britain is full of people waiting and waiting for things they need urgently. It might be the mother clutching the phone in the 8am scramble for a GP appointment, a son waiting for an ambulance, fearing his dad is about to join the 8,000 people who were harmed or killed by delayed care in 2022, or it could be any one of the 7.5 million Britons on an NHS waiting list. It could be a victim of crime, waiting for a day in court that takes years to arrive, thanks to a justice system clogged and backlogged and, like everything else, starved of funds.

So much is broken. Whole areas go unpoliced, with more than 90% of crimes unsolved and some offences, such as burglary or antisocial behaviour, effectively decriminalised, given how rarely anyone is charged or even investigated. Under the supposed party of law and order, the police were this week urged to consider making fewer arrests, because there’s no room in our dangerously overcrowded prisons.

To see how far we have sunk, look into our rivers and coastal waters. Or rather don’t. Because they have turned brown with raw sewage. An island nation where we fear to venture into the sea, because the Tories have turned it all to shit.

And all this before we get to the project that consumed so much of our national energy for so long, energy that could have been deployed in countless more fruitful directions, whether grappling with the climate emergency or tackling the housing crisis that has deprived a generation even of the dream, let alone reality, of home ownership. That project is Brexit.

Put aside the damage it has done to our economy, a slow puncture that will cost us billions until the day it is reversed. Think instead of the demons it unleashed, the poison it released into the bloodstream, and how casually it was done. Cameron calling for a referendum that risked a core national interest just to relieve an immediate headache for the Conservative party; Boris Johnson insouciantly riding around in a bus plastered with a £350m lie; Theresa May promising a hardcore Brexit that she knew made no sense. For a reminder of the casualness, recall one of the enduring images of this era of Tory misrule: an EU team, armed with files full of papers, sitting across the negotiating table from the then Brexit secretary David Davis, equipped only with a witless smile.

What did it achieve, apart from bringing instability to Northern Ireland, where upending constitutional arrangements is not a debating society wheeze but a matter of life and death? It injected an ugly populism into British life, urging distrust of “experts” and those deemed “enemies of the people”. And it imposed on Britain a disastrous form of Tory magical thinking, one that says reality is just what you want it to be. Putting up trade barriers with your neighbours can make you richer, said the Brexiters. You can simultaneously cut taxes and increase spending, and pay no price, said Truss. Rwanda is a safe country, said Rishi Sunak.

They have degraded everything they have touched. The pandemic revealed something admirable about this country – our willingness to make individual sacrifices for the collective good – and the Conservatives mocked it. Johnson laughed in the face of all those who had given up so much, partying when grieving families bade farewell to their loved ones, denied even the small consolation of touch. And I haven’t even mentioned the corruption.

There has been a lot of talk of accountability this week, for the victims of both the infected blood and Post Office scandals. When politicians are in a corner, they often like to say that the jury they’ll face is on election day. Well, that day is coming.

So save your talk of pledge cards and retail offers. This one is about accountability. The 4th of July is a day of reckoning for the chaos and calamity the Conservatives have brought and for the harm they have done. On election day, the Tories don’t deserve merely to lose. They deserve to be punished.