The Great Austerity Con

Living in the UK in 2018 is not easy. Now that statement is of course loaded. Millions of people live in countries with situations far worse than my experience. I am not fool enough to consider myself in a worse position than a Syrian, an Iraqi or an Afghan, dealing with war and sectarianism. Nor am I claiming to have it worse than a starving African or a systematically disenfranchised and impoverished Latin American. I am grateful for the comforts and safety-net that growing up in what was the fifth richest country in the world have afforded me, but my frame of reference is obviously a UK one and as such I can only deal with what I know. The safety-net is evaporating, the comforts for many are simply gone, poverty and destitution are increasing rapidly, all in the name of austerity.

Austerity, the concept that the country has lived beyond its means for too long and has to tighten its belt, in essence seems almost a sensible premise. If you are spending too much and get into too much debt you start cutting back right? Individuals, families and businesses do this as a matter of course, don't they? However, if you need to cut back you start with luxuries, cut expensive purchases, choose less expensive brands don't you? Surely what you don't do is focus on cutting the core essentials that you need to survive. Food, fuel and shelter are the priorities, the essential bills, and you curtail anything non-essential to free up that cash to pay the debts. You take responsibility for the fact that you got into debt so you have to get out.

Austerity, the Conservative government would have us believe, is a drive to reduce the national debt by cutting spending. According to them, this debt was accrued purely by the last Labour governments reckless spending. As a result, we are told, spending has to be cut across all government departments, and public sector wages and benefits have to be frozen. Doesn't sound like a bad idea, I hear you cry. Sadly the premise that austerity is built on starts with a huge lie. The idea that the last Labour government is to blame for the debt problem is false. The national debt was incurred by the financial meltdown of 2008 and subsequent government bailout of banks. The reckless lending and profiteering of the finance and banking sector threatened to sink the economy, so the Labour government injected billions of pounds of tax payers money into saving the banks and propping up the economy. The Conservatives took over in 2010 and continued this, in fact they increased it.

It is important to note at this point that I am not a supporter of the Labour Party. Although ostensibly my political views tend to come from what most people refer to as the left, I have no allegiance to Labour. Indeed, the Labour government under Tony Blair was to my mind a Thatcherite-driven populist affair, its 'Tory-lite' policies simply a slightly more subtle continuation of the pervading neoliberal doctrine, led by a narcissistic neocon with little more than self-gratification in mind.

So the premise of austerity is built on falsehood. Let's turn to the nuts and bolts of debt reduction. Most people would assume you follow the same logic as an individual or family with a debt problem. Cut out luxuries, defer purchase of big-ticket items, chose cheaper brands. By that logic the obvious aims of austerity should be to defer or cancel big expensive plans, like not replacing the trident nuclear system and shelving the HS2 high speed rail project for example. Then how about going back to the drawing board with all contracts with private companies and renegotiating, and rethinking the outsourcing of public services? I am not privy to many of the possibilities for reducing spending by government, but there are surely many more - the wages and expense allowances of MP's would be a good start.

The startling truth is after eight years of austerity it is patently obvious to all but the ideologically blinded that the burden of spending cuts has not fallen upon the more prosperous. It is the poor (working and non-working), the sick and disabled, the underprivileged and the elderly who have felt the most pain. The welfare state and the NHS are being systematically dismantled. Whilst cuts to social security benefits have plunged thousands into poverty and the threat of destitution, the closure of support services and organisations there to support the poor have rendered them helpless. Waiting times in every part of the healthcare system have increased and staff are collapsing under the pressure, whilst creeping privatisation and deliberate underfunding lurk in the background. Crime is increasing whilst police numbers and resources are being drastically cut, access to legal help has dwindled to almost nothing while court staff are made redundant, prisons are less and less secure with cuts to prison officers, local governments have cut essential services due to budget cuts. The list goes on. Don't take my UK-centric view of all this as red, have a read of this recent article in the New York Times for an outside perspective - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/28/world/europe/uk-austerity-poverty.html

In the UK we have become accustomed to paying more and getting less. Council tax, rents, food, fuel and energy bills, pretty much everything goes up year on year. Simultaneously, provision of public services are reduced or cut completely in some way. Whilst this goes on, we see corporation tax reducing and tax cuts for big business. Tax avoidance by rich elites and big corporations goes unpunished whilst money and resources for petty benefit fraud cases increases. Wages have been stagnant for years, resulting in a real-terms decrease in income in the thousands of pounds for many. The country is run by a cabinet of millionaires. Whilst I do not have an issue with people being wealthy I fail to see how these people can possibly claim to be able to improve the lot of the less well-off, nor expect us to accept that we 'all have to tighten our belts', when they are unaffected by the austerity they impose on us. In reality, there is no justification for having to pay more and get less.

There is a bigger picture to all this, involving the very nature of capitalism and the neoliberal agenda, but that is for another post. The essence of the problem is that austerity directly increases and accentuates inequality. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. Sadly, many people, particularly among the working class, have somehow fallen for the austerity con. They actually believe they have to go through all this hardship 'for the good of all' or 'because we're all in the same boat'. We are not all in the same boat. The politicians, business leaders, financiers and speculators who preach austerity are sailing around luxury resorts in their yachts while many of the rest of us are paddling up shit creak in a sinking dinghy. What the answer is I just don't know, but I do know that austerity is not just a con, it is ruining lives. It is actually killing people, but you won't see much of that in the news. There have been literally thousands of documented cases over the last eight years, but mainstream media is of course controlled by the very rich elite who have endorsed and imposed austerity, so these cases are drowned out and effectively censored. I would strongly advise giving Ken Loach's outstanding film, 'I, Daniel Blake' a watch for a true and realistic portrayal of a life destroyed by austerity.

It falls to the current Labour Party, the official opposition in the UK, to raise awareness of and campaign against austerity. There has been progress on some key fronts. There is much about the approach and policy ideas of Jeremy Corbyn and his allies to be positive about. There are also pitfalls within the socialist ideology he adopts, not least the public distaste for anything radical, lest we allow 'communist doctrine' to proliferate. Sadly I neither think there is enough support within his party nor among the public to elevate Labour into government, and there is no guarantee that what we let in would work. All I know is that any anti-austerity party is better than the current perverse ideology, even if their influence merely brings the austerity con into the light. One thing is certain however. If we are to combat inequality, surely the fundamental driver of so much that is wrong in the UK, we have to realise that we are being conned, and fight against this doctrine.

Copyright ©2018 Richard C. Greenlow. All rights reserved.