How should wonks react to cuts?
It’s not our fault, but we have failed.
Since becoming the effective prime minister, Jeremy Hunt has made it clear that all areas of public spending are now on the chopping board. Inflation has ensured that many parts of the state are already facing real-terms spending cuts, and things are now poised to go from bad for worse.
If you, like me, are a policy wonk that has been trying to argue against austerity over the past decade – to demonstrate its failures and its impacts so as to change things… then you’ll be finding this hard to take. We know the damage already done, and we can only try not to think about what’s coming.
However, now is not the time for wallowing. It is, on the other hand, a good time for self-reflection. Because one upside of having spent ten-plus years not achieving your aims is that we should now have learnt a few lessons about strategy.
One thing I think we can say with some certainty is that when austerity was first enacted post-2010, progressives in the policy sector didn’t put up nearly enough of a fight. Despite resting on an incredibly shaky evidence-base, a huge portion of the political spectrum was taken in by the logic state retrenchment.
With the Labour party failing to make the pragmatic case for Keynesian orthodoxy (see below), I think there was a general sense of ‘well I guess this is just how things are now’ across the policy sector. People saw the damage that austerity was doing, but felt unable to challenge the idea that there was simply no choice but to carry on with the programme. Arguing that cuts were not just morally wrong but also unnecessary was a genuinely fringe position.
A style of “it’s hurting but it’s working” rhetoric played a powerful role here. Saying that things were bad was like pushing against an open door. No one was really saying that they were good. They were just saying it’s how it had to be. And a lot of us accepted that for quite a long time. Anti-austerity positions feel almost hegemonic now in charities and thinktanks across the left and centre – but the tide only really started to turn after the 2017 general election.
So having been through this experience – what have we learned? What can we do differently this time to protect public services and the people who rely on them?
Here are a few thoughts:
1. The obvious one – we can vocally argue against austerity from the start. This should be easier this time around. If you were a part of an organisation that had to preserve some sense of impartiality during the last round of cuts, it was easy to feel like criticizing austerity was the same as coming out against the government. This wasn’t true, but the fact that the Tories were so united in what they were doing, the fact that the cuts programme was their whole raison d’etre at the time, turned up the pressure on all of us. The terrain in 2022-23 will be different.
2. We can stand up for everyone. One of the reasons that austerity was able to be politically successful under the coalition was because it was carefully targeted to only hit groups who don’t have a huge amount of power in the Westminster system. Non-voters, Labour voters in non-marginal seats, people who were stigmatized for their citizenship status, their ability to work, their dependence on the state… we failed to speak up for these people. That job was left to the student movement and to street protest groups like UK-UNCUT. Not. This. Time. We cannot allow the suffering of those least able to broadcast what’s happening to pass the mainstream conversation by. We can use our platforms.
3. We can resist divide and rule. Austerity 1.0 was not evenly distributed. The NHS was untouched. Schools were insulated. Local government was decimated and students were hammered. This led to an unfortunate dynamic, where people working in more protected areas of policy kept their heads down, and by and large failed to speak up for what was happening elsewhere. This was a mistake. What happens in one part of the public sector affects what happens everywhere else. A ‘protected’ department will simply absorb the demand that’s not being met elsewhere. To borrow a phrase… we are all in this together.
4. We can lead politics, not be led by it. As stated above, a big reason for the acquiescence to austerity from large sections the first time round was because the Labour party under Ed Miliband failed to create space for people to oppose it. Whilst Labour post-Corbyn is now more comfortable talking the language of public spending, they are already now also talking about ‘tough-times’ ahead and dampening down expectations for what they might do in office. Progressives in the policy world need to push Labour into a clearly anti-austerity position, rather than allow Labour to determine the boundaries of debate.
As we discussed in the last edition of this blog – there is not going to be much in the way of a positive story to justify this round of austerity. There will also be not much that can be cut away at that goes unnoticed by the majority, because those cuts have already been made.
As such, this is all going to be much tougher going for the pro-austerity side than it was ten years ago. An organised and effective progressive policy sector can play a role here.
Who knows, we might even win this time!