The MOST UNKINDEST CUTS of ALL

Now at last we know what the government intends for us and what its philosophy is: we’re all in it together but those already least likely to vote for the coalition are a whole lot deeper in it than the rest. George Osborne’s unleashing of toxic sludge into Britain’s hitherto relatively secure communities has been cunningly contrived. He and his fellow ministers, Tories and Lib Dems alike, have been assiduously softening up the ground by repeatedly attacking supposed benefit scroungers, blaming Labour for “the mess” and trotting out Margaret Thatcher’s trusty TINA mantra (“there is no alternative”). So far, the softening up appears to have achieved the desired effect. Public opinion polls – of which I am ever sceptical – suggest that these spins have been widely believed. Whether a majority will swallow the toxic sludge remains to be seen.

I earlier wrote at length about Osborne’s attack on those who, in his phrase, make “a life-style choice” of living on benefit (‘Lifestyles of the Poor and Infamous’ September 11th below). The Labour blame-game is readily scotched: this has been a global recession (remember?) and. while Gordon Brown was arguably a tad premature in claiming to have “saved the world” (rather than, as he clearly meant, “the pound”), the Labour government led the way in addressing the global recession (oh yes, read the far-seeing American economists Paul Klugman and Joseph Stiglitz, both Nobel laureates).

As for there being no alterative, some excellent analyses lately have put the lie to that: see http://www.redpepper.org.uk/Countering-the-cuts-myths and www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/oct/17/finances-cuts-public-services-welfare
I would add that it’s critical to bear in mind that there are always alternatives, that politics is about what Rab Butler called “the art of the possible” but that possibilities are virtually endless. Economic policy is never about what is baldly affordable and always about what the government intends to do. Economic policy is never about inescapability. It is about free choice. To dress up choice as unavoidable is to tell bare-faced lies.

Another cynical but crafty stroke has been to contrive it that agencies other than the Treasury are obliged to wield the axe and so – in theory, at least – take the blame. The headline on a piece in today’s Guardian puts it admirably succinctly: “Outsourced: town halls must do Osborne’s dirty work”. Local councils across the land have been told they must make spending cuts of 26 percent before the next general election. Those of us who remember living through rate caps, the poll tax and the general decline of local services following Margaret Thatcher’s rise to power in 1979 will know that we ain’t seen nothin’ yet. 100,000 jobs in the gift of local authorities – one in ten of the work force – are expected to be lost. Neighbourhood services, already indiscernible in many areas, are to be squeezed further.

The poor rely on local provision proportionately much more heavily than do the comfortably off. The same is true of public transport. Rail fares will rise by 5.8 percent in January but will have risen by fully 30 percent by January 2015. Over the same period, a 20 percent cut in bus fuel subsidy will force up fares well above inflation. London tube fares, partially announced yesterday by Mayor Boris Johnson with a fine disregard for candour, will rise, it emerged today, by as much as 16 percent. Since Tony Blair came to power in 1997, bus and coach fares have risen 24 percent above inflation, whereas overall motoring costs have fallen 14 percent in real terms. Ministers in their chauffeur-driven cars – which they still enjoy despite loose talk of such provision being surrendered shortly after the general election – have no sense of what travelling by bus, tube or even train is like, nor of how punishing those who depend on such transport find the fares and the daily travelling conditions.

In savaging the welfare state, on top of the squeezing of local authorities, public transport, legal aid, police protection and social housing, the government has very deliberately targeted those least able to fight back. Those areas where social deprivation is most widespread are not in Tory-held or even in Lib Dem-held constituencies. There is no recent tradition of the poor and vulnerable marching in protest and even if vast crowds of the disabled and the elderly take to the streets (and I hope they will, if only to enjoy the feeling that they have made their anger clear), the government will grit its teeth through the shaming spectacle. If trade unionists and students march, Cameron will easily shrug it off as “rent-a-crowd trouble-makers”. After all, the Blair government didn’t turn a hair at the rallies against the invasion of Iraq and in favour of fox-hunting.

Meanwhile, it’s striking that those traditionally termed “the Tories’ friends in the City” were broadly supportive of the spending review. Well, of course they were. Their enormous pay packets and even more outrageous bonuses will continue. Osborne’s weasel words on this matter are that he is going to “extract the maximum sustainable tax revenues from financial services”. This is spin-speak for his intention to do nothing that might discourage the spivs and shysters from staying in town. While they can make a fancy living at the expense of everyone else, they will stay. Once the attractions of some other centre where the gap between rich and poor is even more grotesque – Hong Kong, for instance – become irresistible, they will be off. Obviously Osborne would rather lose the 40,000 teachers and the 6,500 currently employed through the Home Office (including police and customs officials) who will shortly be applying for job-seeker’s allowance than any of his dinner table giests.

Osborne’s flourished “bank levy” will raise, by his account, £2.5bn. It sounds a lot but let’s just see it in the larger picture. It’s approximately three percent of the total spending cuts. And it’s less than 0.1 percent of bank profits. So, not too hard a knock, then. There’ll be the odd arbitrageur who will momentarily consider moth-balling the smaller private helicopter (the one the wife uses) but then decide anyway to tough it out till the gloom lifts. Poor sod.

There has been one more aspect of the government’s treacherous manipulation of policy disclosure: the contrivance of sudden switches of tack disguised as panic and/or incompetence and/or supposedly admirable reaction to public opinion but in reality a back-door method of forcing its intention through while people are looking the other way.

A fine example was the outrageous and vindictive eleventh-hour slashing of the BBC's budget by 16 percent. In the cold light of day, this vicious assault should be met by an equally combative response from the Corporation. I propose that it should both follow the logic of the government's philosophy on public provision and neatly reflect the cut's equivalence of the cost of the national radio stations. The BBC should announce that it will withdraw entirely its provision of radio services.

This makes good economic sense. The wireless is provided without charge. It generates negligible income. In the present climate, the BBC needs to maintain those of its enterprises that are capable of making money. And given that the government has reneged on its expressed commitment to avoid top-slicing – it has newly imposed the cost of the World Service and the funding of S4C onto the BBC's budget, but denied the BBC any editorial say in the Welsh service's output – it cannot be doubted that other public service burdens will be off-loaded onto the Corporation in future.

It will be a long time before commercial radio is able to offer any sort of replacement for what the BBC has built up over almost ninety years. Ministers would find themselves contemplating the loss of Today, The World at One and other platforms with dismay. And BBC Radio's constituency is fierce and loyal. It would rise up in fury. This is the kind of issue that decides significant numbers of voting intentions. The government would be forced to reopen negotiations.

It might be objected that the BBC is obliged by its founding charter to provide a full national service of wireless transmissions. In fact, the BBC’s charter is a surprisingly unprescriptive document, its provisions hung about with the reiterated proviso “for the time being”. In any case, ITV was also set up by charter – a much more rigorous set of provisions than those that obtained for the BBC – but it will be noted that the original infrastructure of a federation of locally-based franchises has been entirely overthrown without any executive order, legislative enactment or other kind of government intervention.

The BBC, the Labour Party and everyone else hit by these cuts – in other words, almost everyone aside from the superrich – need to gird up and fight this vindictive, ideological government. There are plenty of alternatives. Even unthinkable ones may come into play.