Comprehensively Screwed. Royally. Being Working Class in Cameron’s UK October 21, 2010
Posted by Garibaldy in British Politics, Inequality.trackback
It’s a bad play on words in the title I know. But I couldn’t think of an acceptable insult starting with ‘r’ to complete a description of the in-no-way-simpering-over-privileged-idiot millionaire Gideon “Call me George” Osborne as a Conservative Sickening R… Perhaps the CLR readership will be able to come up with one. Still, I shouldn’t be singling out Osborne for being a millionaire. After all, he’s one of 23 in the cabinet. They’re still all just ordinary people though don’t you know, who understand the problems of ordinary people, and totally sympathise with them. I guess deciding which billionaire’s yacht to spend your (free) holiday on is a bit like having to decide whether you spend your benefits on eating or heating that week.
The full Comprehensive Spending Review is available here (see page 11 for a convenient summary of the scale of the cuts), and its effects are analysed here for their impact by sector in the Guardian. In its own words, the Coalition’s Spending Review “makes choices”. Particular focus has been given to reducing welfare costs and wasteful spending”. This, apparently, is to allow a focus on the NHS, schools, early years provision, and capital investments that will promote, we are assured, long-term prosperity. And, indeed, fairness. The use of the word ‘fairness’ in this way is an affront to the very concept of linguistic meaning. Not only will the choices made promote fairness, they will also answer the strategic coalition aim of ensuring social mobility. I’m looking forward to being told how, for example, raising the fees for university places between two and four times will guarantee social mobility. A few token bursaries for working class students will no more ensure widened access to the likes of Oxford and Cambridge than the scholarship schemes have done for the likes of Harrow and Eton. Or that the scholarships used to do for Oxford and Cambridge in the past. We know from past example that this is sheer fallacy. Ah the cry goes up from the Blue-Yellow snake, there was no Big Society back then. And of course cutting the Communities budget by 51% is going to help create it isn’t it, and help defeat the spread of religious and far-right extremism? Suddenly I have images of the snake from the Jungle Book, asking us to “trust in me”. Or perhaps a HypnoToryToad.
The consequences of these choices to build fairness and social mobility are, to put it mildly, outrageous. Half a million job losses in the public sector, which will pretty much guarantee about another 200,000 go in the private sector from the deflationary effect. Social housing as we understand it looks very likely to be on the way out – new social housing tenants will pay up to 80% of market rates themselves, and more “flexibility” in the system means that attempts will be made to get rid of people from social housing at every available opportunity; fixed-term contracts look likely. The government believes that upping rents will result in more social housing being built by property developers – government policy deliberately designed to aid property developers and housing speculators you say? Surely not. Can it be coincidental that local government is having its capital development budget cut by 100%?
One of the counter-arguments put to the claim that it is necessary to cut £7bn from the welfare bill is to go after the £20bn-plus hole in public finances caused by tax evasion. A search of the CSR PDF reveals that evasion turns up 5 times in 106 pages. Four of these are the same £900m allocated to go after tax, fraud, evasion and avoidance. Fraud – which admittedly includes a few cases of fraud other than welfare fraud – appears 16 times. So that’s 4 times with evasion and avoidance; and around 7 times in relation to welfare fraud and error. This despite the fact that tax evasion and avoidance costs 15 times what welfare fraud does. And as for welfare error, what about the estimated £10.5bn that people are entitled to but aren’t claiming? Is the government going to make sure they get what they are entitled to, backdated? We all know the answer. We also all remember that Lord Ashcroft, Tory Peer and major donor to and former deputy chairman of the Tory Party was forced to admit, nearly a decade after the Tories gave a pledge on his tax status, that he was not domiciled in the UK for tax purposes. Accusations about his relationships with politicians in the tax haven of Belize continue to fly. Tax avoidance and evasion is ok as long as you donate enough to the right political parties.
Obviously this could go on. It’s sickening to look at the document and see the words ‘fairness’, ‘reform’ and ‘sustainable long term growth’ appear time and again to try and hide the reality of what this is. As Seumas Milne notes, this is the Bullingdon Boys trying to finish what Thatcher started, to rip the heart out of the welfare state. The cuts are going to hit the very worst off the hardest. They will least affect the rich, as was the case with the mini-budget in June. Simply put, the CSR is an act of class war. The working class across the UK is being made to foot the bill for the crisis of neo-liberalism and the corrupt and vicious ideology of the Tories and their Lib-Dem cheerleaders-cum-minions. They are counting on the weak organisation of the working class to carry this through. Politics matters. Resistance matters. And we can start by promoting the ICTU march against the cuts on 23rd October, assembling at St Anne’s Cathedral at 12.30.
[...] I’ve published a response to the Comprehensive Spending Review over at Cedar Lounge Revolution [...]
The ConDem CSR utterly disgusting. How anyone can describe it as ‘fair’ takes the idea of political spin to a whole new level. Nye Bevan was right, when on the eve of the birth of the NHS he called the Tories ‘vermin’.
See you at St Anne’s tomorrow, Garibaldy.
Isn’t that a day early Rabelais?
Unfair is the new fair, Inequality the new equality…
They say that everyone across the board will take a cut. But UK society is grossly unequal to begin with, so what might be an irritation for somemone with plenty of money will mean devistation for (the much greater number of) poor people. Sorry but I have to say this – they really are a bunch of priveleged notnice-but-dim BASTARDS.
Let me share with you a grafitto from France (where they have a talent for this kind of thing):
“Let’s strike until we retire!”
great post! one interesting thing I’ve noticed though is what a difference a proper media makes. Channel 4 News actually checks the government’s figures and claims to see if they’re true and then tell you ‘no this bs’ they’re spinning you here. Can you imagine RTE doing that here after the budget?
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/opinion/columnists/eamon-mccann/eamonn-mccann-when-your-backs-against-the-wall-you-just-have-to-stand-up-14980523.html?service=Print
Thanks for that Captain Rock. Hadn’t seen it. Let’s hope that there’s a big turn out on Saturday. Certainly people on the ground trying to ensure that.
I certainly hope you get a big turn out , what about this from British MOD report on future defence requirments
“The middle classes could become a revolutionary class, taking the role envisaged for the
proletariat by Marx. The globalization of labour markets and reducing levels of national
welfare provision …and employment could reduce peoples’ attachment to particular states.
The growing gap between themselves and a small number of highly visible super-rich
individuals might fuel disillusion with meritocracy, while the growing urban under-classes
are likely to pose an increasing threat to social order and stability, as the burden of
acquired debt and the failure of pension provision begins to bite. Faced by these twin
challenges, the world’s middle-classes might unite, using access to knowledge, resources
and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest.”
Have you got a link to that report HAL? It looks interesting – if it’s for real the quality of their intelligence analysis has improved.
http://www.mod.uk/NR/rdonlyres/94A1F45E-A830-49DB-B319-DF68C28D561D/0/strat_trends_17mar07.pdf
Thanks LATC – good to see you back.
Hadn’t gone anywhere, just busy, and minding the content of my contributions
Interesting report – speed reading seems to indicate in 2007 that they were blind to financial instability and underestimate severely energy price rises. I wonder if there is and update in the pipeline?
I don’t know about the middle classes becoming the revolutionary subject through whom the riddle of history will be solved. . . but I do have a close relative who says that if she ever sees Mary Harney in the street she’ll physically attack her.
The middle class mentioned is actually the working class,A lot was done to fracture class identity but the reality remained.But it is interesting that the MOD are plannig for this possability.
Garibaldy,
You’re dead right. But it’s a measure of how keen I am. So, I’ll be there on Friday. See you on Saturday.
Doh!
You should start your own alternative politics tent city, like there was opposite Westminster. Might get the crusty/goth/skater/hippy teenagers away from the City Hall for tomorrow. I’ll keep an eye out for it.
As I predicted, the CSR has done for the Liberal Democrats as a force in British politics, just as the bank bailout did for the Greens here.
And the British Labour party is unable to mount an opposition because it has (sound familiar?) bought into the ‘logic’ of austerity.
Has every Uk party, and indeed almost every Irish party, simply bought into Neo-Liberal Capitalist ideology that explicitly states that workers should be made marginalised, frightened and beholden to Corporatism to generate any sort of GDP growth through efficencies as defined by Capitalists?
Or is there an implicit recognition among political parties that local growth in the productive capacity of our economies is limited? (Also we’d need to incorporate increased global resource competition into the picture, as this generates real inflation as measured in bartering terms.)
The fiscal crisis, arising out of a Capitalist crisis of too much fiat currency chasing a limited pool of investment opportunities, has been spun using, as Naomi Klein highlighted, a shock doctrine to create a fiscal narrative of crisis. From where I sit this narrative has been created to engage the middle classes using hokey household-type financial analysis to justify sovereign national economic policy. It has created a class conflict, albeit in subdued tones, in order to allow the middle classes to justify their manipulated attitudes about people they have been taught to think of as sprongers and underachievers in society while also accepting that they must endure some “temporary” cuts in their own lifestyles for the good of a nation. But this narrative is just masking or blurring the fact that for over 30 years no new blue-sky industries have sprung from commercial acitivty.
There is a fundamental crisis of productive Capitalism (i.e. the antagonism between finance and industry) so the responses by non-Capitalists must, imo, be different from simply trying to reinstate reform in the current system. Capitalism, always a long term disfunctional and parasitic ideology, must morph into a real image of itself as an extractor of rents. The conflict isn’t about opposing Capitalism (which opposition inherently justifies Capitalist ideology as one worth fighting) but finding a way to leave the failing and failed system behind us.
I would posit that Capitalism has been in crisis for over 40 years. They have masked the long term crisis using various fiat currency bubble economic ploys that have generated the appearance of growth through wage cuts (including cuts in retirement funds and health care), and the simple replacement of old assets with new assets through fiat currency debt accumulation. There is the appearance of growth, but even the growth in fiat currency accumulation by billionaires is illusionary. Why else would they (Buffet, Soros, Gates et al) being giving away money if it was still useful to them. Their huge hoards of money are becoming worthless unless they can rent future cash flows generated through future production (not through investment in the creation of current productive capacity but simply through fiat currency rent on what will be produced by labour).
That is, Capitalism comes home to roost on the feudal plane of extracted rents in the absence of being able to invest in new production. It isn’t as course as a peasant directly supplying free labour to the lord a couple days a week. Rather, it is a long term extraction of present + future labour supplied to financiers/rentiers of all stripes through a glossy array of terminology that accumulates rent through debt on nations and individuals. But it’s exactly the same feudal process, except us peasants are not being given any land to produce for our own needs; nor are we being given protection against the barbarians. The barbarians are our feudal lords.
Anon,
I would posit that Capitalism has been in crisis for over 40 years.
In The Long Twentieth Century Arrighi argues that the process of capitalist investment in production and trade, leading to massive accumulation but decreasing profit, has repeatedly led to systemic cycles whereby financialisation occurs as the last throw of the dice of the hegemonic power, and it’s replacement by a newcomer who has evolved the structure of the model to reduce an element or risk or cost, and thus recreate the cycle afresh. Starting with Genoa/Spain, moving to Holland, then Britain, then America, now East Asia. Each time the final crisis led to a rebirth of the cycle but with different characteristics.
Which ties in very well with what you’ve said above.
And it doesn’t necesarily tie in with the line that Capitalism will eat itself. That hasn’t been borne out by history to date. As with Capitalist enthusiasts for bubble economics, anyone who might claim “but it’s different this time” is probably wrong.
anyone who might claim “but it’s different this time” is probably wrong.
What I meant to say is not that capitalist rebirth is inevitable, but that it’s demise is not inevitable either.
What possibly IS different this time is that the scope for rebirth through imperialistic expansion is more limited that it was in the past. But imperialism morphs also, it doesn’t necessarily require territorial expansion.
Resource collapse is another new factor also.