In early September last year, a prisoner at Wandsworth Prison in London was allegedly planning his escape.
Daniel Khalife was an ex-soldier and a suspected spy, awaiting trial for terrorism offences.
He was working in the kitchen of the prison when sometime around 7:30am, he allegedly walked into a loading dock and tied himself underneath a food delivery truck that was being unloaded.
By the time the police caught up with the truck a few miles up the road, Khalife had already climbed out, leaving only the bed sheet straps he'd used to hold on.
London Police desperately appealed to the public to help them find Khalife, who they said "could be anywhere in the UK".
In fact, he wasn't "anywhere in the UK"; he was on the other side of London from the prison, and he was found three days later.
But how was this escape possible?
On the day of Khalife's alleged escape, 39 per cent of the staff rostered on at Wandsworth Prison had not shown up for work.
Not only that, the prison was in a state of decay, well over capacity, and enormously understaffed.
It can all be traced back to a policy called "austerity" introduced 14 years ago, when the Conservative Party took power.
It was designed to save the country; instead, it seems to have broken it.
Institutions have eroded, more and more people are relying on charities and food handouts, one in five households with children living in them are struggling to afford food.
As recently as 17 years ago, Britons were the richest people in any of the world's large economies.
Since then, they've gone backwards, more than any other large economy.
So what was the austerity program, and how much is it to blame?
Tories take power
In 2010, a soft spoken, Eton-educated man named David Cameron — who also happened to be Queen Elizabeth II's fifth cousin — was taking the Conservatives to an election win.
It was just after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis and the message from the Tories was simple: the GFC was the other team's fault.
Thanks to Britain's heavy reliance on its financial services sector, they'd been hit particularly hard by the crisis.
The British military was involved in two wars, there was a wave of strikes, and the unemployment rate was rising.
The polls said the Labour PM Gordon Brown — a prickly, publicly-educated Scottish Boomer — was set to be replaced by upper-class English Gen Xer David Cameron.
David Cameron presented himself as the youthful new leader of a reinvigorated, safe Conservative Party.
It was a return to predictable politics. Historically, the Tories are usually in government; have been for most of the last 300 years.
But that predictability was coming to an end.
George Osborne's austerity plan
David Cameron ran on a funky new plan with a funky new name — a word that would come to define the decade — austerity.
The man charged with delivering the austerity policy was the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, and David Cameron's best mate, George Osborne.
The 38-year-old, was the eldest son of a wallpaper magnate Sir Peter Osborne, 17th Baronet of Ballentaylor and Ballylemon.
Osborne started working for the Conservative Party straight out of Oxford.
He believed in small government, getting people off benefits and into work. This was the core of his ideology.
He believed that "the best way to help [people] is getting them to help themselves".
He thought it could solve every problem, and it was the opposite of what Labour had been doing.
Inauspicious beginnings
David Cameron's Tories began their era of government the way all UK governments do — with a traditional speech by the monarch at the opening of parliament.
This speech is written by the government for the monarch to read, but it created a stark juxtaposition.
The queen took a gold coach from one of her palaces, wearing a diamond-encrusted crown, sat down on a golden throne and told everyone to brace themselves for government spending cuts.
But the cuts did not extend to everybody.
As Osborne began to roll out his cuts, he found himself cornered by the queen at a state dinner.
He said on his podcast Political Currency that Her Majesty demanded that a bagpipe school be spared from the cuts.
In fact, the Army School of Bagpipe Music and Highland Drumming had been set to be closed by the budget cuts. Osborne spared it.
On the podcast he said, "I immediately sent a message back to the palace that she could be reassured that the pipers of the British Army would remain well-trained."
It's really quite hard to think of a more British story than that.
Cuts, cuts, cuts
George Osborne delivered his first budget speech the month after the British election.
He called it an "emergency budget" and followed with 55 minutes of cuts announcements.
With the exception of the National Health Service, the aged pension and some large infrastructure projects, nothing came out unscathed.
In one 90 second section of the speech, he announced 13 cuts to benefits for single parents, children, working families and expectant mothers.
As the months went on, more and more cuts were announced.
Public service jobs would be axed, and the people who stayed would have their wages frozen.
Osborne said the cuts were tough but fair. Except, they weren't.
The Treasury's own analysis showed the cuts disproportionately hit lower-income groups.
The drastic cuts to budget spending, were brought in to bring down the UK government's historic level of debt.
It had reached 131 per cent of GDP in 2010, and while interest rates for government loans were low, George Osborne feared they would rise.
But they didn't. In fact, 2010 was pretty much the perfect time to borrow as much money as you could.
Chaos and decay
Fourteen years later the data is in — austerity was not good for Britain, and in many cases did the opposite of what it was meant to do.
In 2018 Phillip Alston, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty toured the United Kingdom.
He's an international human rights lawyer who has done a wide range of jobs in the UN in extremely poor countries in Africa, Asia and Central America.
"What I saw — food banks, schools, community centres, job centres, libraries and elsewhere — is a lot of misery, he said.
"A lot of people… feel that the system is failing them. A lot of people who feel that the system is really there just to punish them."
Research from the Office for National Statistics found austerity policies had had an "immensely damaging" impact on life expectancy, and that approximately 335,000 additional deaths had occurred between 2012 and 2019 compared with what had been previously been reported.
British unemployment went up. Poverty went up. Government debt even went up as a proportion of GDP.
"Britain is certainly capable of eliminating most, if not all of its poverty if it wanted to, but it's clear it's a political choice; that it doesn't want to," Phillip Alston said.
Pretty much every developed country in the world has spent the last 20 years dealing with the same challenges Britain did — globalisation, energy transition, the rise of social media.
Manufacturing jobs are disappearing; housing is more expensive; the cost of living is rising, and wages are not; trust in politicians and institutions is eroding.
But David Cameron and George Osborne's extreme, ideologically-driven austerity policies accelerated this, and made one of the richest countries in the world undeniably more unsafe, poorer and sicker.
Research from the Office for National Statistics has linked a rise in knife attacks and violence to cuts to youth services.
Some of this may have happened under another government, but Osborne's severe austerity policy was fuel on the fire.
