25 June 2015
End Austerity Now!
by J R Thomas
Last Saturday was a day to enjoy one of the great British ceremonial traditions. Ranked alongside Trooping the Colour and the State Opening of Parliament, this was that great and enduring ritual of March Against [Insert Cause Here] to Parliament. The chosen cause this year though was a slightly shocking one. “End Austerity Now!” shouted the crowds as they progressed from the City and through the streets of the West End to burn their banners in Westminster Square. (Incidentally, this ritual flaming is to be highly commended – burning banners seems fully in the spirit of the march; to destroy after just an hour or two of use something into which money and personal artistic endeavour has been poured is indeed very un-austeric.)
As the eager crowd chanted its way through the streets, the plutocrats and super-rich who inhabit the luxurious mansions and apartments of the W1 and SW1 streets waved their support from drawing room windows and cheered from their landscaped roof-top terraces. Ending austerity is something many of these folk have devoted a lot of time to, and now, in the successful prime of their lives, austerity is something they are very much against. A car must be a Bentley or Ferrari, champagne should be Bollinger at all times, clothes should be acquired (frequently) from Dolce and Gabana or Armani. Travel is always first class. Austerity is at all times to be avoided. It is indeed a sentiment with which your average Russian billionaire or Arab prince or English hedge-fund manager finds himself entirely sympathetic.
As do the leaders of this joyous march – the millionaire singer Ms Charlotte Church has, by all reports, carefully avoided any imposition of austerity on her life-style since her early teens; and Mr Russell Brand, the patron saint of these occasions, has had his life-style so well raked-over in the public prints that we even know the not terribly austere rent he is alleged to pay, £4,500 a month to maintain his humble lifestyle. A splendid example to those who followed them through the grey and drizzly streets of London.
This is probably not the anti-austerity approach that most of the crowd had in mind. The march was organised, as were smaller parades in Glasgow and Liverpool, by the People’s Assembly Against Austerity. The PAAA, we cannot resist abbreviating it, is an ad-hoc combination of mostly left-leaning groups. It was able to attract a meld of students, union members (mostly coordinated by the largest trade union, Unite), public sector workers, academics, Labour and Green politicos, and others affected by the cuts in public services or sympathetic to those who are. All are united in campaigning against the newly-elected Conservative government’s much trailed intention to take a sharper scalpel to public expenditure.
In truth public spending cuts have so far been more threat than reality. The politics of the former coalition meant that it was very difficult to really cut anything very meaningful, so cuts fell on easy targets and minor expenditures, and of course on the armed forces. What has probably irritated most of the population is that where cuts have been made they have been at the delivery end, not in the office-bound bureaucracies which employ the actual service providers. The armed services have lost men, weapons, equipment; the Ministry of Defence sails on with more or less its former complement of civil servants. Libraries are closed and dustbins emptied less often, but the local council offices continue to bulge with administrators and support staff, though it’s not always very clear what it is they are there to support. In the Health Service, which has suffered no cuts at all but has benefitted from increased expenditure, somehow there are less nurses and doctors but more persons sitting in the various levels of administration keeping themselves very busy – laying off nurses and health visitors and rehiring them as agency temp staff at much greater cost, for one thing. This is austerity of a sort, certainly to those who would like to use the services no longer available, but it has meant that for those who work in the administration of services the edge of the axe has been fairly blunt.
What may now be coming is a series of deeper cuts. Not in the Health Service, which is protected and which is in any case a crystal chalice in political terms – something to be admired but never touched or handled, but Mr Osborne wants cuts in every other area of government; in particular, he wants cuts in the social security budget – £12bn in the course of the next five years or less. He has two reasons for that particular cut. He wants to reduce the government’s outgoings so that the national debt, to use an old fashioned term, is reduced as fast as possible so that it becomes less of a burden and allows the UK to build more reserves for the next recession whenever it may come (it will); but he also wants to make the economy more productive – and that means he wants people back in productive work, wealth-creating and not living off social security benefits. That is not austerity; it is efficient deployment of resources. Which brings us to a consideration of “austerity” as abuse, a bad thing, an anti-Tory slogan.
Austerity surely is not a bad thing in itself, but something to be commended. Mr Gladstone’s handling of the public finances could well be described as austere. He spent as little as he could to achieve the objectives that he laid out before an electorate which four times returned him and the Liberals to government. His austere approach was applauded by the electors, who generally agreed that government should be prudent and careful in its handling of the taxpayer’s (ie their) money. It chimed also with Gladstone’s own lifestyle. Although a rich man he lived a relatively careful and modest life. He was by most definitions austere and that was well-regarded.
It is of course very irritating and upsetting to be on the receiving end of somebody else’s austerity drive. If you are a nurse or dustman or librarian made redundant by “the cuts,” austerity is unlikely to appealing. But austerity in government, as Gladstone knew and Cripps (now there is an austere Chancellor) knew and Lawson and Osborne knew or know, is commendable and sensible. If the government is careful with the public money it can do more things, needs to raise less taxes, can build up reserves for use in bad times. This is as true for left wing governments as for right wing ones. Indeed, socialism might well be said to have its roots in an austere approach to life, something it draws both from the Marxist and Christian elements of its history. Again we must commend the example of Stafford Cripps, as full-blooded a socialist as there has ever been in British government but a man who carefully considered the value of every pound spent. Such parsimonious behaviour is an entirely proper approach, in public life and often to private life too. Those carousing oligarchs in Mayfair may one day come to wish they had been rather more austere in their conduct when they contemplate what is left of their investments and the state of their livers.
Language evolves constantly. Words come to mean what we want them to mean. We gradually cease to shudder when told we will be sent an invite or are asked for directions to the train station. Those are battles lost but we might fight a rearguard action for austerity. If you want the government to spend more, then please hold an Extravagance March, hold placards screaming “Spend More Now”, shout “Increase the Public Debt”. But don’t abuse austerity – it’s something that we can all practice with pride.
