Oh, the irony of it. Boris Johnson makes law and order the central plank of the Queen’s Speech. After having spent 9 years telling us about how we could no longer afford our public services and imposing cuts to every part of our public and social infrastructure, his response to the consequences is astonishing.
Austerity has been about removing the cornerstones of a healthy society, increasing poverty and inequality and abandoning people to privation and hardship. Johnson’s logical response should have been a reversal of the politics of austerity; instead, it was to tighten up on law and order. You couldn’t make it up if you tried.
Cuts have had and are continuing to have consequences. One element of the breakdown of society has been the huge increase in knife crime. As campaigners warned earlier this year, spending on youth services has been decimated; an analysis of figures compiled by the YMCA in England and Wales showed that the average spend per local authority had fallen drastically. In 2010 it stood at £7.79m and will fall next year to £2.45m. Denise Hatton the CEO of the YMCA said at the time that ‘the impact of these cuts were visible across the country’ and that youth services had a ‘significant role’ to play in reducing the numbers of young people carrying weapons.
Some media sources chose to report this emphasis on law and order announcement in positive terms. Others like Frances Crook, the Chief Executive from the Howard League for Penal Reform were less complimentary referring to it as ‘the politics of the lynch mob…currying favour by stirring up hate’ and she later tweeted ‘increasing punishment is a race to the bottom of politics.’
A Labour frontbencher’s response was less understandable when they said that Johnson’s proposals were ‘just an uncosted wish list which the government has no intention and no means to deliver’. As Deborah Harrington, one of GIMMS advisors commented “What has the cost got to do with it? If we can afford to hurt people does it make it ok? Would we applaud the government if it had both the intention and the means to deliver more cruelty?”
Criticising the government by continuing to frame the debate in monetary terms of affordability is not only insensitive but also fails to acknowledge the cruelty that has already been meted out by a government more interested in delivering its ideological priorities and serving its corporate friends by using a false household budget metaphor to justify it. Those on the opposition benches should not be trying to score points in a ping pong battle of who is more fiscally prudent but should be rejecting this damaging model outright. Instead of fixating on the state of the public accounts we should be considering instead the effects of government spending and policy decisions on a nation, its economy and citizens. That is the only measurement that counts.
To reduce people’s lives to monetary concerns is an affront to those who have suffered at its hands, particularly in the light of the comments of Therese Coffey, the newly appointed Secretary of State at the DWP, who this week denied that government cuts were driving children into poverty. She challenged a June 2019 report carried out by the Child Poverty Action Group which charted the damaging effects of the two-child policy on parents and shamefully defended other reforms to the benefit system which have been equally harmful, despite the evidence piling up against them.
In a display of arrogance, she claimed she was the ‘only person in government who’s got a PhD in science’ and referred to ‘product lines’ and ‘balance sheets’ for analysing whether welfare was working. The evidence of poverty, hunger and destitution are clearly not enough for her. She also talked about how the benefits of increased prosperity could be shared with everyone in society as if somehow those benefits were dependent on a strong economy. This will not be the first time that a Conservative minister has trotted out this lie when the truth is that a strong economy depends on a healthy nation and a government serving public purpose through sufficient spending.
When ministers fail to recognise the human dimensions of their policies then we are in serious trouble. Worse still, when a Church of England bishop complained about the stench in an underground tunnel where many homeless people were sleeping, which subsequently resulted in community protection notices being served threatening them with fines of £20,000 if they continued to sleep there it shows how far we have descended into indifference about the consequences of government policies. Whilst she sympathised with their plight, she had nothing to say about the origins of it. One of the group said ‘our belongings were taken and thrown away without warning, sleeping backs and all. We were harassed under the 1824 vagrancy Act and then without warning a grate was installed expelling us from the best shelter in the area and the closest thing we had to a home. The tunnel now sits warm and empty and unused at night while we sleep outside.’
We have too often accepted the notion that homelessness and hunger are the result of the inadequacy of individuals rather than a direct effect of cuts to public spending which is a deliberate policy choice by the government and has no relationship with the state of the public accounts. The government in its spending and other policies has ignored the social determinants of health whether of body and mind or the economic well-being of society as a whole.
In other news this week according to joint research by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development and the Centre for Cities, there are excessive levels of hidden unemployment in towns and cities across Britain which are not included in official government statistics. The study revealed that if this hidden unemployment was included national estimates would jump from 4.6% to 13.2% and would raise the official level of 1.3 unemployed to almost 4.5m. It reported a clear north/south divide and figures showed that in many northern cities such as Liverpool, Sunderland and Dundee approximately one in five people were likely to fall into this category.
Whilst the Conservatives have consistently lauded their record on unemployment claiming that around 3 million jobs have been created, the government has not only been creative in its presentation of employment figures, but it has also overseen a huge growth in self-employment, work on zero-hours contracts and agency work as well as the growing gig economy. Record employment levels don’t tell the full story and belie the actual quality of the work being undertaken as people struggle simply to survive in any way they can. The harmful effects of low incomes and employment insecurity on individuals, families and the wider society are daily in evidence.
Unemployment and underemployment is a scourge and yet is a political choice made by the government of the day. It doesn’t have to be like this. In the post-war period governments pursued full employment as policy objectives as a matter of course. From the 70s onwards in the belief that pursuing such policies would increase inflation successive governments have equally chosen to make a political choice to leave millions of people unemployed, underemployed or in insecure low paid jobs. In this way, it took economic power out of the hands of working people and gave it to employers, who could use it to keep wage costs down at huge human cost.
A public sector job guarantee challenges this gross assumption and offers a serious alternative which not only acts as a price anchor for wages, gives people the dignity of work at a fair wage and good working conditions but also and more importantly operates as macroeconomic stabiliser smoothing out the ups and downs of the business cycle offering increased economic stability for all.
At a moment in history when we face the challenges of dealing with the climate crisis and addressing the huge disparities in wealth which exist across the globe, we need an alternative model. It is shocking, as Oxfam pointed out earlier this year, that the world’s 26 richest people own as much as the poorest 50%. Worse still to realise that these facts are not down to a natural state of affairs driven by the ‘market’ as if it was a living breathing entity directing the orchestra but by human intervention and deliberate political action it should be the lightbulb moment which drives us to challenge the prevailing narratives which have suggested that money is scarce and public services unaffordable. When a train boss for the TransPennine Express is rewarded by a 44% pay rise including a bonus and pension boost whilst people struggle to put food on the table to feed their children and live hand to mouth with scarce or no savings to fall back on then we surely must know that something has gone terribly wrong.
In his speech, Johnson referred to ‘a momentous new environment bill’ – a lodestar by which we will guide our country towards a cleaner and greener future’ Meanwhile Extinction Rebellion activists were disrupting London life, with over a thousand being arrested and risking a police record for protesting. Extinction Rebellion demands that the government declares a climate emergency and legally commits to reducing carbon emissions to net-zero by 2025. This will require huge public investment and a willingness to run deficits, which is nowhere indicated in the government’s position and, indeed, runs counter to its free-market beliefs.
The actions required are global in scale and demand attention now. They demand strong national governments to work cooperatively to deliver a global public purpose agenda aimed at addressing the climate crisis and the social injustices which blight the planet. They require national governments as monopoly currency issuers to undertake directed spending programmes through a Green New Deal and Job Guarantee programme. And, importantly, to legislate for a green path towards sustainable living.
This can only be achieved if our representative democracy is strengthened to ensure that elected politicians are there to serve the public purpose and not their own careers in a revolving door which allows them to influence policy at the behest of big business for future rewards such as directorships with handsome salaries.
Extinction Rebellion activists say that the civil approach has not worked and therefore the only course of action left to raise awareness is direct. Certainly, they are right in that as it stands our political system exists to deliver corporate benefits dedicated to unsustainable growth and profit motives which do not coincide with the best interests of the health of the planet or human survival. Without electoral reform and radical change to restore public confidence in electoral democracy, we run the risk that corporations become the arbiters of greenness in the promotion of ‘eco-capitalism’ aimed at keeping the growth and profits status quo in place whilst promoting the idea that we can have our ‘green’ cake and eat it.
We are very aware of the scale of the problem of addressing the climate crisis and solving social injustice. It is a perennial problem and every step forward meets resistance. But that never means we shouldn’t try and that we can’t succeed. Understanding how governments fund their agendas remains central to that success. We leave the last few words on the subject to the historian, playwright and socialist thinker, Howard Zinn:
History is instructive. And what it suggests to people is that even if they do little things, if they walk on the picket line, if they join a vigil, if they write a letter to their local newspaper. Anything they do, however small, becomes part of a much, much larger sort of flow of energy. And when enough people do enough things, however small they are, then change takes place.”