The UK government's Autumn Statement, released last week, is a mid-year review of its economic policy (Treanor, 2014), and an opportunity to stop and assess the general health of the national economy.
On this occasion, that assessment has stirred up controversy. The main story behind the review was that the Conservatives have not reached their target reductions to the country's budget deficit, and will likely seek further and deeper cuts to public spending in the next parliament (Allen, 2014).
While senior Conservatives have criticised coverage of
future spending cuts as hyperbole predicting that the world would fall
in (BBC, 2014), they did not deny that further cuts would be coming. In
fact, further cuts to welfare certainly appear to be planned.
The
most baffling thing is that, despite the Autumn Statement having laid
bare that the Conservative approach has failed to deliver the promised
results, the government seems intent upon pushing on, further and
deeper, with their strategy of cuts, and of placing trust in markets.
They seem to be turning a blind eye to the fact that the economy is still weak, the recovery remains slow, and the public
deficit has not been eliminated.
The possibility of more cuts is sure to inflame more than a few hearts that are already set against the Conservative austerity agenda. That will not be helped by independent assessments that say future cuts could take the UK's public spending down to an 80 year low, the lowest since the inter-war era (Reuben, 2014; Johnson, 2014).
It has been suggested that one key reason for the failure of the Conservative approach to achieve its goals, was hinged upon a rise in private sector employment. Conservatives thought that a rise in employment - which they believed would follow from economic incentives and encouragements for the private sector, along with cuts to the public sector - would boost the economy to pick up the slack as public sector spending was reduced. Their gamble, however, did not deliver (Arnett & Nardelli, 2014).
The new jobs, that the Conservatives have celebrated, have come with very low pay and short, unstable hours. In conjunction with the general failure of wages to rise, the decrease in unemployment has not led to an increase in the funds available to pay off public debts and deficits. Further, and even more disastrously, austerity and cuts are being directly linked with rising poverty (Wintour & Butler, 2014).
If, as predicted, the next stage of the Conservative approach returns Britain to its pre-war settlement, with a drastic reshaping of the state and its role in society - with further retraction of the state and a return to a market place with fewer safety nets - it is not unreasonable to ask if the continuation of the cuts agenda will drop public spending so low as to threaten even the most basic services like health and welfare that protect people who fall on hard times.
Conservative policy is steering towards an economy built on the backs of workers labouring through unstable and fluctuating hours, for low pay, and with no safety net when something goes wrong in their incredibly temporary situations. That assault upon the security of workers lives, in pursuit of making labour markets more 'dynamic', is undermining the living standards of workers while simultaneously failing to produce a useful growth in the common wealth.
And that is not good enough. It's not enough to just peddle cheap impermanent work, and assume that work itself will be some sort of miracle cure for societies ills. To live the better and fuller lives that they deserve, people need more security and better pay, with real safety nets.
'We believe with a passionate faith that the end of all political and economic action is not the perfecting or the perpetuation of this or that piece of mechanism or organisation, but that individual men and women may have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.'
(Yellow Book, 1928)
The Autumn Statement is just the latest demonstration that Conservative austerity and cuts are failing, both economically and socially, to address the problems of the day. The question now becomes: what alternatives do we have?
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References:
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+ Jill Treanor's 'Autumn statement 2014 at a glance: eight key points'; in The Guardian; 3 December 2014.
+ Katie Allen's 'George Osborne thrown off course by pay squeeze and falling income tax take'; in The Guardian; 3 December 2014.
+ BBC's 'Osborne: Autumn Statement cuts warnings 'hyperbolic''; 4 December 2014.
+ Anthony Reuben's 'Headline Numbers: Public spending heads to 80-year low'; on the BBC; 3 December 2014.
+ Paul Johnson's 'Institute for Fiscal Studies: Autumn statement briefing, 2014 - Introductory remarks'; for the Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS); 4 December 2014.
+ George Arnett and Alberto Nardelli's 'Why has George Osborne missed the deficit target?'; in The Guardian; 3 December 2014.
+ Patrick Wintour and Patrick Butler's 'Tories seek to avert rift with Church of England over food bank report'; in The Guardian; 8 December 2014.
+ 'Yellow Book' or 'Britain's Industrial Future: being the Report of the Liberal Industrial Inquiry'; Ernest Benn Ltd, 1928. [Buy Now
]
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