In the news this week…..
“I’m scared to eat sometimes in case we run out of food.”
“We had people coming to us who hadn’t eaten for several days,”
“I wash in what I call a birdbath – a little hot water in a basin and have a spruce down,” she said. “To keep warm I wrap up in layers and layers. I never thought I would be 48 and in this position.”
“They have taken everything from me but my body. What do they want me to do? Do they want me to sell my body?”
These are some of the many shocking indictments of the UK government arising from the UN Special Rapporteur, Philip Alston’s two-week fact-finding mission to gather evidence about the impact of austerity on British families. He has been visiting some of the poorest cities and towns across the UK including Jaywick in Clacton, Newcastle and Newham where he has heard the heart-breaking testimony of families and individuals plunged into hardship and despair as a result of the government’s welfare reforms and cuts to public spending.
It is sure to prove yet another shameful assessment (the fourth so far) by the UN of the last 8 years of government imposed austerity. Here, in the world’s fifth largest economy, the UK has over 4 million children living in households that struggle to feed them. The growth of food banks and charitable food collection has become normalised and child homelessness is at its highest level since 2007. According to a report published by the Equality and Human Rights Commission last year, it is disabled people, single parents and women who have suffered disproportionately as a result of the government’s harsh welfare reforms which have left people in penury and abandoned.
In 2009 David Cameron declared that the ‘age of irresponsibility’ would give way to the ‘age of austerity’. The government committed to cutting £billions of government spending claiming that failure to do so would leave the country under mountains of public debt and facing bankruptcy. Public sector jobs were lost and benefits slashed as the government set in motion its programme for welfare reform.
Almost a decade on the consequences of its cuts are laid bare for all to see. The neoliberal belief that it was possible for a nation to cut its spending without wrecking the economy has proven catastrophic and has delivered unnecessary human suffering, increased poverty and rising income inequality.
As Philip Alston told a packed public meeting in Clacton:
“What tells you most about a society is how it treats its poor and vulnerable. A wealthy country could decide to help those who hit hard times, to ensure that they don’t slip through the net and are able to live a life of dignity. It’s a political choice.”
That is the crux of the matter. Beginning or ending austerity is a choice. An ideological choice by government. At the ballot box voters should base their decisions not on a party’s promise to be fiscally accountable but whether it has a clear agenda to act in the best interests of citizens for their economic and social well-being. That it will make its spending decisions based on the best use of resources it has available to deliver public, social and economic purpose.
An understanding of monetary reality is essential in challenging the idea that fiscal prudence, taken out of its wider context, is a stand-alone marker of good government.
Restoring public service to its rightful place as a public good.
So said the Chancellor Philip Hammond in the Autumn Budget, conveniently sidestepping the increasing public concerns about public private partnerships which over the last year have been in the news again and again.
After the collapse of Carillion last year, the on-going fiasco over the part privatisation of the public probation service and now fears over the financial health of Interserve one of the British government’s biggest contractors alarm bells are ringing very loudly.
Adam Leaver, professor of accounting at Sheffield University claims that this ‘failure’ is due to ‘there [being] something structurally wrong with the outsourcing model”.
Over decades the rationale presented by politicians for private involvement in the delivery of public services is that it can deliver more efficient services at lower cost thus creating less of a burden for taxpayers. But at the root of free market ideology is a belief that when the state interferes in service provision it is distorting the market in such a way that it can’t find its natural ‘equilibrium’. The solution, therefore, must be for government to try harder to ‘liberate’ the market from the constraints of state interference by stepping aside and only providing the services that the market can’t or won’t provide because they are not profitable i.e. services for the poor.
In the meantime the so-called failure of Private Public Partnerships can be remedied, the government claims, not by a change of policy to bring services back into the public sector but by better negotiated contracts to deliver better value to the taxpayer. This is not just a fantasy but is also confirmation to corporations that it’s business as usual.
The nation is paying the price for the government’s obsession with balanced budgets. While the lie continues to be perpetuated that there is a finite amount of public money determined by taxation and the confidence of markets to lend it or that public debt not private debt is the real problem, the government will be able to continue its ideological assault. The damaging economic cost of the government narrative about creating value for the taxpayer will increasingly put more strain and pressure on the lives of citizens and the social and public infrastructure which will ultimately lead to further economic decline and unnecessary suffering.
If Philip Hammond was serious about restoring public service to being understood as a public good then he could start with the recognition that public service adds real value to society and its well-being. It provides the infrastructure upon which everything else depends including corporations, from the NHS and social care, to education, bin collection and street cleaning. Given their strategic importance to the health and well-being of the nation and the economy such services would be best delivered by the public sector not profit hungry corporations who derive profit through cutting costs. Secondly, recognising the value of public service must be accompanied by a better public understanding of how money works and the powers of a sovereign currency issuer so that we can challenge once and for all the narrative which has served market driven ideology so well that the government has no money but taxpayers’ money.