For those of us who are opposed to it, it’s easy to see austerity simply as vandalism.
If you’ve read this blog before, you’ll be bored of me rattling through the evidence of the destruction to the public sphere wrought by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government. I’ll save you the tedium of repeating it again - but suffice to say it was very pointless and very bad.
However, it’s hard to sustain a political movement purely out of an appetite for destruction. Those responsible do not view their actions as senseless – and nor do they regard the work they did in sashimi slicing up the state as a mistake from which they’ve gone away and learned lessons. They thought it was necessary, and they’re glad they did it. Ask George Osborn about what he sees as ‘a remarkable national effort’, or if you’re a glutton for punishment, read David Cameron’s interminable book.
No, to build the political, public and media support needed for a policy programme like austerity, you need some kind of positive vision. It doesn’t need to be hugely convincing, but it does need to exist, or else you will never have any kind of narrative justification with which to counter your critics.
The Big Society
At the beginning of the austerity project, for true believing Cameroons, the positive story was ‘The Big Society’ – and it was an appealingly simple proposition. Austerity would cut away at the state, sure. But into the gaps created would rush a renewed community sector made up of charities, faith groups and local volunteers.
As David Cameron said in a party conference speech, Thatcher was wrong – there was indeed such a thing as society. However, rather than this being a repudiation of her politics in the macro – it was actually a justification for them. As Miranda Joseph has outlined, for the 21st century neoliberal, ‘community’ can be imagined as a safety net – meaning that the state is no longer needed to provide one of its own. Thatcher’s wrongness was exactly why we could double down on her ideas.
In the decade since its time in the sun, the Big Society has become a bit of a punch-line. Shallow readers of history have written it off as an empty slogan, quickly dropped once the rubber hit the road. In my view though, this is a profound misreading. Because the Cameron government did not just hack at the way at the state, it also unleashed a torrent of reform onto it. And the reforms that took place in schools, local government and even the NHS had the finger prints of the Big Society thinking all over them.
What does this tell us? It does not mean that the project of cuts+’community’ was a sensible one. It doesn’t even mean that it wasn’t all deeply contradictory. But it does mean that there was a real project there.
It means that the people who were in charge believed in something, or at least could pretend they did. They could plausibly claim not just to be destroying, but to be building something. In their own minds, they weren’t smashing the state, they were remaking it. Both for participants and supporters, this is clearly a much more palatable basis for a political project.
The Cameroons won the argument that cuts were necessary to avoid our economy going the way of Greece. But they were able to win the argument that the state left by New Labour was unfit for purpose, that the incentive structures of society were wrong, and that professional ‘blobs’ in all sectors were incompetent. It was the intersection of these lines of thinking that gave the coalition government its edge.
That was then… what now?
Fast-fowarding to 2022, and the public sector is bracing for another round of austerity. Kwasi Kwarteng’s ‘mini-budget’ has so scorched public finances that some sort of state retrenchment is now pretty much locked in. Local government, having borne the brunt of things last time round, has already been told to adopt the safety position. With the Treasury needing to recoup 18bn pounds from somewhere, things are looking bleak.
This time around though, what’s the positive story available for the government? The project that Truss and Kwarteng want us to be latching onto is, presumably, their ‘plan for growth’. But to call this half-baked seems an insult to squidgy dough. No matter what the Truss camp may want, we’re about to enter a recession. Talking about ‘delivering growth’ when the figures will literally be going in the other direction, is not going to make a lot of sense.
What's more, it’s already clear to all observers that there is no plan for growth. The connection between abolishing the 45p tax bracket and people’s lives improving is pure voodoo – and there is zero articulation from the government about where they expect growth to actually come from. They are simply performing a rain-dance and praying for an end to the drought.
In short, as a rhetorical strategy, the growth line is not going to work. So what will happen next? There are a couple of scenarios. The first one is that they simply come up with something better – a new metanarrative that makes their cuts feel like a positive action rather than suffering for sufferings sake. Maybe I’m not as clever as the Tory braintrust… but I just don’t see what this could be though. So I don’t think is plausible.
This leaves us with a second scenario. They are simply unable to prosecute their agenda. Perhaps Truss and Kwarteng will u-turn on everything… perhaps they will be ousted by their own team… the point is not whether they will jump or be pushed, the point is that their project will simply fail.
I don’t want to be recklessly optimistic… but unless they can find a new story, this is the outcome that I’ll be putting my money on.