Long, long, long ago, before the weakness of Sunak’s government, before the Truss ‘experiment’ crashed the economy, before the shambles and corruption of Johnson’s government, before the disaster of Brexit, there was the Coalition Government – launched, for those with long memories, in the Downing street rose garden with the ‘bromance’ between David Cameron (Conservative) and Nick Clegg (Liberal Democrat).

Lib Dems are always desperate to move on from this shameful period in their political history.

Sheepishly, almost apologetically, they often try on the desperately weak argument that they were attempting to curb the worst excesses of the Conservative majority partner in the coalition, while deep down they know, as do the rest of us, that this was simply a desperate power-grab from Party that has little chance of ever being more than a political paperweight.

Over the years since 2010, what has become abundantly clear, is that so much of the societal damage that we suffer today was done during the period when the Lib Dems propped up a very right wing Conservative administration.

The ‘big economic idea’ back then was ‘austerity’ – the idea that the state needed to be ideologically shrunk and that Cameron’s ‘big society’ would be able to pick up the slack. Utterly discredited by sociologist and economists since, austerity saw the closure, amongst so much else, of Sure Start centres, libraries and youth clubs.

Spending on education and healthcare was slashed and between 2010 and 2019 a staggering 900,000 public sector jobs were lost. Fast forward to Cornwall September 2024 and the damage is still being felt right across our communities today.

Over the summer I have had the privilege of meeting many fabulous local organisations, working hard in trying circumstances and a tough environment. But one particularly consistent theme has really struck me, whether it’s talking to our Police and security services, our educators, our health services, our youth and social services or our transport services – it was not just the loss of total number of workers from these services that did the damage – it was the loss of a cohort of highly experienced professionals, who were either pushed out or took early retirement, having built a wealth of invaluable experience in the service in which they were working.

The loss of this experience has been massively underestimated.

What it has meant is that even though the Labour government is beginning a decade of renewal to rebuild the services cut by the Conservative and Lib Dems, what will take much longer to rebuild is the experience that comes from working in these roles.

The mistakes will, in some cases, be made all over again. There is no quick fix for experience – it just takes time and we will all have to be patient and tolerant of the services that we are beginning to rebuild, to repair the damage that was inflicted from a bromance in the Downing street rose garden 14 years ago.