Coalition, then majority. The austerity years open with a migration promise that sets the tone for everything that follows, and a tuition betrayal that outlives the government that made it.
Cameron takes office on the manifesto promise to take “net migration back to the levels of the 1990s, tens of thousands a year, not hundreds of thousands”. It is the birth of a target that will not be met once in fourteen years.
A dedicated border police force, automatic prison sentences for carrying knives, and a British Bill of Rights to replace the Human Rights Act. None of it happens.
Fees are hiked from £3,290 to £9,000 a year, a change absent from the manifesto, loading a generation with lifelong debt.
Osborne’s June Budget retains the freeze on the £325,000 inheritance tax allowance. It has stayed frozen ever since, dragging thousands of moderate estates into a 40% tax trap.
The Behavioural Insights Team is set up with the aim of implementing psychological manipulation in public policy.
Cameron’s flagship immigration speech declares “our borders will be under control and immigration will be at levels our country can manage. No ifs. No Buts”.
Chancellor George Osborne raises the standard rate of VAT from 17.5% to 20%.
The Government endorses the Davies Review, pushing FTSE 100 companies to reach 25% female board representation by 2015 and threatening quotas if businesses cannot comply.
A new route of entry for family reunion makes it possible for refugees to bring spouses they only married after fleeing their home countries.
The PSED comes into force, legalising anti-white discrimination in the public sector. Section 159 of the Equality Act 2010 also begins, allowing employers to legally ‘prioritise’ candidates from minority backgrounds.
The Tories enshrine the 4th Carbon Budget into law, legally binding the UK to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 50% from 1990 to 2025.
Cameron defends his commitment to spend 0.7% of national income on foreign aid by 2013. In 2011 the Tories spend £8.6 billion.
Defence Secretary Liam Fox resigns after letting friend and ex-business partner Adam Werritty, who had no security clearance, attend the MoD on 22 occasions in 16 months and 40 of his 70 recorded engagements, breaching the Ministerial Code and posing a “security risk”.
The government publishes “Advancing Transgender Equality: A Plan for Action”, with a foreword signed by Theresa May.
May establishes the College of Policing, the body that goes on to propagate a so-called Race Action Plan, promoting two-tier policing that has severely damaged public trust.
Interest is linked to RPI plus up to 3%, depending on income, punishing successful graduates. By July 2024 total student debt has reached over £266 billion.
The flagship deterrent fails to substantially reduce immigration or drive the self-deportation of illegal migrants.
Shares are undervalued at flotation, losing the taxpayer nearly £1 billion in revenue foregone.
Contracts for Difference lock the government into subsidising renewables projects, the source of many of the high energy prices Britain still pays today.
The ‘Bedroom Tax’ comes into force, punishing those on housing benefit if they have one or more spare bedrooms.
May amends Police PACE Code A; stop and search falls to its lowest recorded levels by 2018.
Lubov Chernukhin, wife of a former deputy finance minister to Putin, bids £160,000 for a tennis match with Cameron and Johnson, on her way to becoming the party’s largest ever female donor at nearly £2.2 million.
£12bn in 2015 alone, more than the entire budget of the Ministry of Justice, is committed to overseas aid by statute.
Championed by May, it opens a deportation loophole. Foreign-national referrals quadruple between 2014 and 2021; as of February 2026, four in ten migrants earmarked for deportation under ‘one in, one out’ claim to be trafficking victims.
Theresa May sets up the National Police Chiefs Council. Its Police Anti-Racism Commitment proudly states that producing equality of policing outcomes “does not mean treating everyone ‘the same’ or being ‘colour blind’”.
David Cameron commits to resettling 20,000 Syrian refugees.
The Home Secretary who built the Hostile Environment becomes the Prime Minister who dismantles detention, pledges self-ID, and rushes a £1 trillion Net Zero target through in ninety minutes.
May orders an audit of racial disparities across public services, creating the Race Disparity (now Equality) Unit inside the Cabinet Office.
Cameron announces his “deal” with the European Union, failing to secure any major concessions despite initially wanting an outright ban on EU migrants claiming in-work benefits or social housing.
The Conservatives sign the Paris Climate Agreement, ratifying the treaty in November.
The dividend tax credit is abolished and higher rates of 7.5%, 32.5% and 38.1% introduced. The initial £5,000 tax-free allowance is later cut to just £500 in 2024.
The government commits to developing a new action plan for transgender equality.
Thirty-five recommendations on BAME outcomes in justice, from assessing young offenders’ maturity to exploring how criminal records could be ‘sealed’.
May’s government agrees the Irish ‘backstop’ that becomes the Northern Ireland Protocol, placing a border in the Irish Sea and keeping Ulster under EU law.
May promises to make it easier to legally change gender by removing the requirement for a diagnosis of Gender Dysphoria.
“Off-payroll working” IR35 rules are introduced into the public sector. In 2021 they are extended to medium and large private sector firms as well.
A 0.5% tax on the payroll of employers with wage bills over £3 million. Total apprenticeship numbers fall significantly after the levy’s launch.
The Conservatives announce plans to ban the sale of all petrol and diesel cars and vans by 2040.
Defence Secretary Michael Fallon resigns over allegations of inappropriate behaviour and unwanted touching from multiple women. Priti Patel resigns after breaching the ministerial code with unauthorised meetings with Israeli officials. First Secretary of State Damian Green is removed after being found to have lied over pornography found on his parliamentary computers.
After the Shaw report, ministers boast of cutting removal-centre places by a quarter; by 2019 the estate is 40% smaller than in 2015.
As the caps on work and student visas are scrapped, Kemi Badenoch thanks the Home Secretary in the Commons: “I especially thank the Home Secretary for removing the annual limits on work visas and on international students: I lobbied for both”.
May voices support for ‘land reform’; within a year, South Africa prepares reforms permitting uncompensated expropriation of land.
May pledges to introduce gender self-ID; the law is never changed to protect single-sex spaces.
Home Secretary Sajid Javid relaxes immigration policy, ending data-sharing agreements between the Home Office and other public services, making it harder to find illegal migrants.
The Soft Drinks Industry Levy drives up costs for consumers and encourages businesses to use artificial sweeteners.
The Home Office launches its “Inclusive by Instinct” diversity strategy, aiming to embed “Positive Action initiatives”. The MoD follows with “A Force for Inclusion” 2018–2030, the commitment that later leads to the 2022 RAF recruitment scandal.
Small boat crossings are declared a “Major incident” by the Home Secretary.
The 2050 target passes after barely ninety minutes on the floor, despite Treasury estimates of £1 trillion and warnings Britain could be left uncompetitive. Industrial energy prices go from 25% above France’s in 2019 to 63% above by 2024.
Relationships and Sex Education becomes mandatory in secondary schools. Relationship education for primary school children includes compulsory teaching on LGBTQ+ families.
The Civil Service introduces its Gender Identity and Intersex Model Policy Package to all departments, allowing transgender people to access women’s toilets and treating refusal to accept someone’s gender identity as “transphobia”.
“Get Brexit done”, then locks the country down, bans fracking, domesticates the EU carbon market, and presides over the single largest surge in migration in British history.
The ban makes it illegal to tap Britain’s onshore gas, energy under our own feet.
Co-chair Ben Elliot builds a club of donors giving over £250,000 a year in return for regular access to the Prime Minister and Chancellor. Kemi Badenoch has since chosen to keep the cash-for-access scheme.
Serco, Mears and Clearsprings are contracted to buy or lease housing for illegal migrants. Under the hotels scheme that follows, residents commit crimes including the murder of hotel worker Rhiannon Whyte in October 2024.
The manifesto commits to phasing out new petrol and diesel cars at the “earliest date” and “proudly” maintains the 0.7% commitment to foreign aid, while promising fewer lower-skilled migrants.
Boris Johnson announces the first UK-wide lockdown, the largest infringement on the rights and civil liberties of UK citizens ever imposed by a British Government. Across the lockdowns over 28,000 people in England and Wales are convicted of breaching Covid regulations, some as minor as eating a takeaway burger in a car, with a further 125,000 fixed-penalty notices issued. The cost is estimated at £310 billion to £410 billion in direct public spending and a £251 billion reduction in gross value added.
Baroness Mone lobbies ministers on behalf of PPE Medpro, a company set up by a consortium led by her husband Doug Barrowman. The firm is placed on a ‘VIP lane’ procurement scheme and secures over £200 million worth of contracts.
The use of hotels to house illegal migrants expands enormously, from around 1,200 people in March to 9,500 by October.
Johnson nominates Russian-British dual national Evgeny Lebedev, whose father was a KGB agent, for a life peerage. Intelligence officials visit Downing Street to warn against the appointment; Johnson ignores them.
The Department for Transport under Grant Shapps releases its transport decarbonisation plan for a net-zero transport system.
Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s scheme records a fraud rate of 9.5%, contributing to a combined £4.5 billion cost of fraud across furlough, self-employed support and Eat Out to Help Out.
The National Audit Office estimates 35% to 60% of borrowers will default on Bounce Back Loans, at an expected cost of £15–26 billion. Later reports put the losses around £17 billion, of which £4.9 billion was fraud.
Johnson nominates billionaire Peter Cruddas for a peerage despite the Lords Appointments Commission not supporting it. Days after his introduction to the Lords, Cruddas donates a further £500,000 to the party.
Britain domesticates rather than exits the carbon-credit system; every emitter must buy permits, and the cost is passed to the public.
Johnson and Patel’s post-Brexit visa system throws the door open, care-worker routes and dependants send migration to record highs.
Former Prime Minister David Cameron is revealed to have extensively lobbied Chancellor Rishi Sunak and other ministers to obtain Covid-19 relief loans for Greensill Capital, the firm he worked for.
Health Secretary Matt Hancock resigns after leaked CCTV shows him kissing his aide in his departmental office, despite forcing social distancing regulations on the entire country.
828 illegal migrants cross the English Channel in a single day on August 21st, the highest ever total. On November 11th the record falls again: 1,185 in a single day.
The Covid-19 legal restrictions on social contact are finally lifted in July.
Owen Paterson resigns from the Commons after breaching lobbying rules, having repeatedly advocated for two firms paying him over £100,000 a year. Johnson initially tries to get Conservative MPs to vote against his suspension.
The Electoral Commission fines the Conservative Party £17,800 for failing to accurately report a £52,801.72 donation from Lord Brownlow for the furnishing of 10 Downing Street.
The Partygate report is published, covering breaches of lockdown regulations by Downing Street staff, including eight events attended by Boris Johnson himself.
Deputy Chief Whip Chris Pincher resigns over allegations he groped two men at the Carlton Club. The scandal ultimately brings down Boris Johnson.
Electoral Commission data reveals nearly £2 million donated to the party since Johnson took office by donors with Russian business links or dual nationality, including over £350,000 from Alexander Temerko.
The FCA requires London-listed companies to have at least 40% women on the board, a woman in a senior position and an ethnic-minority board member, on a comply-or-explain basis. The change is cited as a cause of decreased listings; London’s share of global IPOs falls below 1% in 2023.
The shortest premiership in British history, long enough to crash the gilt market, spike mortgages, and be outlasted by a lettuce.
An economic crisis is caused by Truss’s response to the energy price caps and the LDI crisis. Inflation peaks at 11.1%, a forty-year high.
Windfall taxes on the North Sea, a Brexit bonfire quietly cancelled, and a secret superinjunction over a data breach that invited 20,000 more, the last acts before the reckoning.
Introduced at 25% and raised to 35% later in 2022, taking the total tax rate on North Sea oil and gas companies to 75%. Tens of thousands of jobs are lost as a result.
Equalities Minister Kemi Badenoch publishes her Inclusive Britain Report, promoting anti-white discrimination in hiring across the police, the judiciary and the wider public sector. Her later update reports commend DEI progress, including the NHS plan requiring every NHS board and executive team member to hold EDI objectives.
Chancellor Jeremy Hunt freezes the income tax personal allowance and higher-rate thresholds until 2026, later extended to 2028. The freeze has since dragged around 3 million taxpayers into higher tax brackets.
The RAF admits prioritising ethnic minorities and women over white men after a 2021 memo is leaked, warning that hiring on merit would have “huge implications” for the Air Chief Marshal’s diversity targets.
1,295 illegal migrants cross the Channel on August 22nd, a record broken on September 3rd by 1,305, to this day the highest ever single-day total.
Badenoch abandons the promise to scrap every retained EU law by end-2023; the list of 4,000+ is quietly cut to about 700.
An MOD official accidentally shares the names of 20,000 Afghans who applied for settlement in February 2022. Ministers, made aware in 2023, obtain a superinjunction making it illegal to report the breach, or that all 20,000 and their families were invited to Britain.
Rishi Sunak pledges to ‘Stop the Boats’ as one of his five key pledges.
Baroness Mone and Doug Barrowman admit their role in helping PPE Medpro secure over £200 million in contracts. The Department of Health paid over £122 million for 25 million surgical gowns later found non-compliant; Mone admits she stood to profit.
The Gambling Commission investigates senior Conservative figures for betting on the date of the election before it was announced. Sunak’s parliamentary private secretary Craig Williams later pleads guilty.
Frank Hester donates £15 million to bankroll the 2024 election campaign. His company, The Phoenix Partnership, has received over £440 million in NHS and other government contracts since 2016.
William Wragg admits giving out MPs’ personal phone numbers to a stranger he met on Grindr who blackmailed him. Mark Menzies is suspended over alleged misuse of campaign funds, including a 3:15am call asking an aide for £5,000 to pay off “bad people”.
