Since Britain’s Conservative Party took power 14 years ago, most things have not gone the way it planned.

The Conservative Party has dramatically reshaped Britain since 2010, orchestrating its exit from the European Union, slashing spending on public services and cutting welfare spending. Time and again, British voters have returned the party to power.

But Britons say their country is worse off now than when the Conservatives took office. Their dissatisfaction emerges on almost every issue they are asked about, from the economy to education to the National Health Service.

With the Conservatives facing the possibility of a crushing defeat in Thursday’s election, we took a look at how Britain has changed since they came to power. To do so, we chose the metrics that voters — and the party itself — say matter the most.

No single measure can capture the Britain of 2024, of course, but taken together, these metrics offer a snapshot of decline.

The Economy Has Stagnated

Britain’s economy has been stagnant ever since the 2008 financial crash, and the pandemic also hit it hard. Many of its peers, including Germany and the United States, managed to recapture pre-crisis levels of economic growth, but Britain never regained its momentum.

Productivity, a measure of economic output for every hour worked, was growing at about 2 percent per year in the decade before the financial crash. Since the Conservatives took power, it has grown by only about 0.5 percent per year.

One consequence of stagnant productivity is stagnant wages: The average British worker earns just £20 more per week than 14 years ago, after adjusting for inflation.

Austerity budgets explain a lot of the stagnation.

The new Conservative government, intent on reducing the deficit, cut deep and broad, slashing spending not just on party bugbears like welfare but also on public budgets for investment.

Following the vote to leave the European Union, private investment also ground to a halt amid economic uncertainty. The U.K. has the lowest rates of investment among G7 countries, according to the Institute for Public Policy Research, a think tank based in London.

The Conservatives took power bemoaning the “debt crisis” and saying deep cuts were necessary to reduce the public debt. But even after a decade of austerity, it continued to rise, and then jumped sharply because of the pandemic.

The Conservatives also positioned themselves as a party of low taxation, pledging to reduce taxes in every election manifesto since 2010. The opposite happened.

More people have been dragged into higher tax brackets, and those at all income levels were hit when the nationwide sales tax was raised to 20 percent from 17.5 percent.

The Conservatives argue that the taxation is needed to reduce debt and cover the cost of measures introduced to counter economic shocks like the pandemic and the energy price crisis tied to the war in Ukraine.

The party did fulfill one of its pledges.

Unemployment has roughly halved since 2010, when the U.K. was just emerging from recession. Conservative policy makers argue that their welfare changes, aimed at making benefits less attractive and employment more rewarding, motivated people to return to the workforce. Some researchers found that the changes did modestly encourage people to work.

Public Services Are Struggling

The picture the Conservatives painted of Britain in 2010 was of a country living beyond its means. They detailed £6.2 billion, or about $9 billion, of spending cuts within their first two weeks in office, and severe cuts continued for the next decade.

Fourteen years later, despite record debt and the highest tax burden in 70 years, many of Britain’s public services are greatly diminished.

Local councils, which run services like social care, libraries, waste management, and local infrastructure, bore some of the deepest cuts, with their spending power dropping almost 30 percent by 2019.

Even the National Health Service, which was ring-fenced from cuts, has been under intense pressure. Its budgets have not risen in line with the increasing demands of Britain’s aging population, and cuts to the social care sector forced more vulnerable people into hospitals.

Britons rank health care as the second-most-pressing issue facing the country. Going into the election, four times as many voters believe Labour is better placed to manage the National Health Service as the Conservatives.

Outside the N.H.S., almost no department was spared from cuts. Troop numbers in the armed forces were reduced by more than 40,000.

Policing was also cut significantly, but during the 2019 election Boris Johnson pledged to stand for the “law abiding majority” and restore the 20,000 police officers that had been lost — a promise he fulfilled.

Record Levels of Immigration, Despite Conservative Pledges

The Conservative party long promised to reduce immigration, and the pledge to “take back control” of Britain’s borders was one of the top reasons many Britons voted to leave the European Union.

But legal immigration has soared in recent years. Net migration — the number of people who moved to Britain minus those who left — reached 764,000 in 2022, almost three times as high as when votes were cast for Brexit.

The migration spike in 2022 was largely driven by specific events, and it has already shown signs of subsiding. Some of the increase was likely migration delayed by the pandemic, and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians, Hong Kongers and Afghans all fled to Britain on humanitarian visa programs.

Much of the debate around migration is being driven by record numbers of small-boat crossings across the channel, even though they only account for about 2 percent of migration to the U.K.

A huge backlog of unresolved asylum claims has grown under the conservatives. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has promised to send people seeking asylum to Rwanda for resettlement, but those flights have been delayed by court challenges.

Two-thirds of Britons think immigration is too high, and the disconnect between the Conservatives’ tough talk on immigration and the record levels of migration has opened the party up to attacks from the hard right.

Increases in homelessness, hunger and student debt

The Conservatives tightened up significant parts of Britain’s welfare system, introducing a two-child limit to child welfare payments, stricter limits for disability benefits and a freeze on working-age benefits for four years.

At the same time, food bank use has skyrocketed. A third of the food parcels distributed by the Trussell Trust last year went to children.

Housing prices have risen dramatically, and an annual survey also found increasing numbers of people sleeping on the streets. Although the number dipped during the pandemic, when the government moved many homeless people into hotels and temporary accommodation, it is now steadily rising toward record levels again.

The problem is stark in many cities now, where the combination of little affordable housing and reduced support services have left many without a safety net.

The cuts have reshaped all aspects of British life, but especially for young people. The Conservatives’ legacy for many of them will be defined by their rising student debt.

The government cut funding for universities and tripled tuition fees to plug the funding gap, meaning the average student now graduates with about £45,000 of student loan debt.

The overall crime rate peaked in the mid-90s, driven by increases in violence, vehicle crime and burglary, but it has declined ever since. From 2010 to 2023 it dropped by a further 54 percent.

Despite Mr. Sunak’s recent moves to roll back the reduction of carbon emissions, the country his party leaves behind is greener than the one it inherited: Britain is generating 60 percent less electricity from fossil fuels now than it was in 2010.

Stung by past failures to prepare for hurricanes, the Mexican government on Wednesday began evacuating even sea turtle eggs from beaches ahead of incoming Hurricane Beryl.

While Beryl remains far offshore in the Caribbean near Jamaica, it is expected to hit somewhere south of Cancun by late Thursday or early Friday.

Given that Mexico did so little to warn or evacuate residents of the Pacific coast resort of Acapulco during Hurricane Otis in October, this time around officials are being extra cautious, digging up recently-laid sea turtle eggs for fear they could be washed away by the storm surge.

HURRICANE BERYL: NEWLYWEDS AMONG AMERICAN TOURISTS STUCK IN JAMAICA AS STORM HITS

Government employees kept the carey sea turtle eggs covered with sand in dozens of coolers while transferring them to safer spots.

In other areas, they used sand-bag barriers to create safe “corrals” to protect turtles nests against the expected strong waves.

Biologist Graciela Tiburcio, one of Mexico’s foremost sea turtle experts, said it was an extreme measure that might cause some excess failure to hatch among the turtle eggs.

“Look, it’s not the best thing to do, but we are facing an emergency in which if they don’t take them out, they all could be lost,” said Tiburcio, who was not involved in the effort.

Several species of sea turtles come ashore in and around Cancun to lay their eggs in the sand, where hatchlings will emerge a few weeks later and crawl into the sea. Normally, people are told not to disturb the nests, because the sand keeps them at the ideal temperature for hatching.

Moreover, sea turtles are believed to use the natural light on the beaches to orient themselves, and in many cases, return to the same spot themselves after they become adults.

But Beryl’s waves and storm surge could simply sweep them out to sea, where they couldn’t hatch.

“In a normal situation this would not be right, because this will surely cause mortality,” said Tiburcio. “There will be a lower rate of hatched eggs, that is the reality. But it’s also a reality that if the nests are left there, they’ll all be lost.”

The Cancun municipal environment department did not immediately respond to requests for comment on where the turtle eggs were being taken for safekeeping. But in a social media post, the office said it had dug up over 10,000 eggs from around 93 nests.

Carey turtles, like all sea turtles, are protected species in Mexico and removing their eggs — which were once widely eaten — is prohibited.

It’s not just turtles: further south in the Caribbean coast, in the fishing village of Punta Allen, soldiers, police and marines were strongly pressing the 700 inhabitants to completely evacuate their homes.

Punta Allen is located on a narrow spit of land south of the resort of Tulum.

One resident of Punta Allen who asked to remain anonymous said many residents, about half the population, were resisting the calls to evacuate.

“They’re asking everyone to get out of Punta Allen … but people don’t want to leave,” she said. “They don’t have any money and they don’t want to leave their possessions.”

Moreover, the woman said, the government offers free transportation out, but doesn’t give people rides back once the hurricane is over.

Many in Mexico have long distrusted the government’s disaster preparedness efforts, because officials often don’t enforce zoning and safety rules, and do little before the storms.

Acapulco is still struggling to recover after being hit by Category 5 Hurricane Otis in October. Otis left at least 52 dead and destroyed or damaged most hotels.

The painting was dated using a new technique and suggests Europe was not where cave art first emerged.

Scientists have discovered what they believe to be the world’s oldest artwork – depicting three people gathered around a large red pig – in a cave on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.

Research published on Wednesday indicates the painting was created some 51,200 years ago.

“This is the oldest evidence of storytelling,” Maxime Aubert, an archaeologist at Australia’s Griffith University and co-author of a new study published in Nature, told the AFP news agency.

Aubert was part of the team that identified the previous record holder, a picture of a warty pig thought to be at least 45,500 years old.

The latest discovery, found inside the Leang Karampuang cave in the Maros-Pangkep region of South Sulawesi, is in poor condition.

It shows three people around a wild pig, measuring 92cm by 38cm (36 inches by 15 inches), in a single shade of dark red pigment. There are other images of pigs in the cave as well.

“The juxtaposition of the figures – how they are positioned in relation to each other – and the manner in which they are interacting – were clearly deliberate, and it conveys an unmistakable sense of action. There is something happening between these figures. A story is being told. Obviously, we don’t know what that story was,” said Griffith University archaeologist Adam Brumm, another of the study’s authors.

Aubert speculated that the paintings were probably made by the first group of humans who moved through Southeast Asia before arriving in Australia about 65,000 years ago.

“It’s probably just a matter of time before we find samples that are older,” Aubert added.

Previously, the first narrative art was thought to have emerged in Europe.

The date given for the Indonesian cave art is “quite provocative” because it is so much older than what has been found elsewhere, including in Europe, said Chris Stringer, an anthropologist at London’s Natural History Museum.

Stringer, who was not involved in the research, said the experienced team’s findings looked sound but needed to be confirmed by further dating.

“In my view, this find reinforces the idea that representational art was first produced in Africa, before 50,000 years ago, and the concept spread as our species spread,” he told AFP.

“If that is true, much new supporting evidence from other areas including Africa has yet to emerge.”

The researchers used a new scientific approach to determine the minimum age of the Leang Karampuang cave painting by using a laser to date a type of crystal called calcium carbonate that formed naturally on top of the painting.

Little is known about the people who created the Sulawesi cave paintings.

“This discovery of very old cave art in Indonesia drives home the point that Europe was not the birthplace of cave art, as had long been assumed. It also suggests that storytelling was a much older part of human history, and the history of art, in particular, than previously recognized,” Brumm said.

“The earliest Sulawesi rock art is not ‘simple’,” Aubert added. “It is quite advanced and shows the mental capacity of people at the time.”