"Austerity Cuts" and the "Britsh Way Of Life"

In seeking to imagine the scale of the cuts and their effect on the British way of life, reference is often made to Margaret Thatcher. But Thatcher did not make cuts of 25 to 40 percent in public expenditure. She did much to turn the country back towards the classical capitalist model, by privatisation, the de-regulation of finance, reducing taxation for the rich, imposing market forces on the public sector, and shackling the trade unions. However, and despite their worst intentions, she and her Conservative successor John Major did not succeed in making radical cuts in public spending.

Writing in 1998, Professor John Hills of the London School of Economics recalled:



However, as Professor Hills emphasised:



Thus the welfare state, encompassing universal public services and a mixture of universal and means-tested state benefits, which had been achieved gradually since the late 19th Century although its main expansion took place following World War Two, was left substantially still in place. And to that very important extent, society and the economy was not fully returned to the dog-eat-dog principles of raw capitalism. Further radical progress- or more accurately, regression- in that direction was left to the next generation of Conservative leaders; allied, as it has turned out, by the next generation of Liberal leaders.

As is already becoming apparent, there will be four prongs to the assault on the welfare state. Firstly and most obviously, massive reductions in public services and welfare benefits. Secondly, an assault on the pay and conditions, notably including the pension schemes, of those who manage to retain their jobs in the public sector. Thirdly- as exemplified by the plan to break up the local planning structures of the NHS and force GPs to use private consortia in order to buy hospital treatment and other specialist services on behalf of their patients; and also by the plan to take money away from state schools and hand it over to the proposed so-called 'free schools' (privately-owned schools that will be subsidised by the state)- the further fracturing, privatisation and marketisation of state-funded services. Fourthly and most insidiously, the attack on the principle of universal provision - council house tenants to be evicted from their homes if they earn above a poverty-line income, 'middle class' toddlers prevented from attending Surestart children's centres, child benefit and the pensioners' winter fuel allowance to be means-tested.

This latter process, as Ed Balls has pointed out, will take us increasingly towards ghettoised services; the state to deliver a second or third class rump provision only for the destitute or semi-destitute, while those who are presumed able to fend for themselves are left to fend for themselves. The Tory rhetoric is that the 'better off' should not be subsidised via the state, and where does the logic of that argument end? If they are emboldened by success in implementing their current proposals, why not, during a subsequent Conservative or Conservative-Liberal term in office, a means test for using the National Health Service or sending ones children to state schools, with free heathcare and schooling only for those who can prove that they are below the poverty line?

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And everywhere else I guess.

Accept for some modest amount, then the discussion of austerity cuts is possible, until then, it is not an argument that can be made.