Who Needs More Cuts? E-Book

Barry Kushner

• Herausgeber: Hesperus Press Ltd.
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 300

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Shortlisted for the Bread and Roses Award,Who Needs More Cuts returns in a powerful new edition. With a foreword by former Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell MP, writers Barry and Saville Kushner show how austerity politics have barely moved on in over a decade—and why the alternative they present is more necessary than ever.

Leseprobe

Foreword

John Mc Donnell mp

The impact of the publication of the first edition of this book was phenomenal.

Years into austerity under a Conservative government there was a desperate need for a concise expose and explanation of the causes and consequences of the austerity that was being inflicted on our society.

After the banking crash of 2008 the Labour Party, in particular, had vacated the intellectual and propaganda fields leaving it to the neoliberal Conservatives to fill the space. The result was that it became relatively easy for Conservative politicians to fill the media, especially the broadcast airwaves, with spurious, simplistic slogans and analogies justifying one of the greatest cons in British economic history that austerity was an economic necessity not a political choice.

The result was the implementation of a mass redistribution of wealth in favour of the richest in our community society and the imposition of extreme economic hardship causing immense human suffering.

The arrival of the book in 2014 armed activists through the Labour and trade union movement and well beyond in civil society with the arguments they needed to challenge austerity and the arguments used to justify it.

Time has moved on and we have entered a period now even more dangerous.

14 years of austerity certainly fuelled the election of a Labour government promising change. They have also created an urgent demand for immediate and fast change that the incoming Labour government has failed to understand or act upon with sufficient speed or radicalness.

What is emerging is the phenomenon political theorists describe as proto-fascism.

This means that fascism has not taken hold in our political life but the danger is that the ingredients are emerging that could lead to fascism.

The ingredients include the impact of a lengthy economic recession that has undermined the wages, quality of life and security of the majority of the population. Next comes the entry onto the political scene of demagogues exploiting new forms of mass communication to target not the system that has brought about this deterioration in living standards but a readily identifiable minority. In this case the minority is asylum seekers.

In this perilous moment we need more than ever a clear analysis of our economic and political system and equally we need the explanation that this book provides of the alternatives there are available to us.

We can demonstrate and mobilise against the rise of the far right but to win this struggle just as importantly we need to win the argument. The much cited Gramsci would describe it as hegemony.

Intro

The UK has had Trump-ism for years

Most people can’t see what’s in front of them if they don’t know what they’re looking for. But once you know what you’re looking for, you wonder how you didn’t see it.”

—Crystal Chan

It is 2025. What Donald Trump is doing to the US economy and democracy has much of the world in shock and disapproval. His proposals to slash social funding, including Medicare, and to severely reduce the State by cutting staffing and programs astonish British observers. Eradicating domestic and international aid programs, confiscating resources and jobs from professionals committed to relieving poverty and vulnerability, and attacking the whole (‘woke’) values infrastructure of compassion and inclusion – these things are seen as an outlandish assault on society’s moral advance. They seem to strike at the very heart of post-war movement towards a Humanist society.

And yet...and yet...Britain has been undergoing precisely these policies since 2010 – in fact, since 1976, when a Labour government invited in the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that imposed fiscal retrenchment policies as conditions for loans; and then in 1979 with the election of Margaret Thatcher, we had a person who for the first time clearly, unequivocally verbalised the policy to diminish the State and its welfare foundations. When Geoge Osborne became Chancellor of the Exchequer in 2010 under the coalition government, he mounted a wagon that was already rolling. The banking crisis of 2008 gave it impetus, a concrete motive, an alibi and legitimacy. That he could sell to us – the public. Now, the severe Monetarist ideology of the IMF and Margaret Thatcher’s advisers could be fully revealed – and named. We called it austerity.

Its progress has been more protracted than under the Trump and Elon Musk and Project 2025 regime, more discussed and publicly legitimated. The erosion of the State and its democratic underpinnings has been evidenced more by relentless, steady and continuous public spending cuts and incisions over 14 years rather than the DOGE slash and burn- attended by a thin veil of remorseful political rhetoric of ‘difficult decisions’, ‘we’re all in this together’, and eventual ‘sunlit uplands’. But the ruthless determination to roll back the post war social improvements, to return distributed wealth to the wealthy, and to curtail State intervention has always been there, as has intolerance and a suppression of alternative economic approaches.

This very same intensity of indignation and shock in Trumpland has also eroded on this side of the pond. The response to the attack on public services and the welfare state now are unrecognisable from the co-ordinated attack in the 1980s. The surging , yearlong miners’ strike, marches that bellowed resistance through the centre of many of our cities, the March for Jobs, have largely gone.

We – most of us – are either gaslighted into believing in the correctness of austerity, believe in the underlying mission, or else are resigned to the overpowering strength of a Parliamentary majority. Resistance has moved to social media or a growing, silent frustration in our own homes. For those who were convinced of the need, austerity was justified by a series of what we are calling ‘economic myths’ – essentially making up what has been called (as we will see) ‘deficit deceit’. A baseless (we argue) moral panic over levels of national debt, while doubling borrowing to pay for tax cuts for big corporations and the wealthy.

And all the while, the social structure, crafted around a welfare state and institutions with a Humanistic leaning, has been crumbling, depressed below what has been a long-standing safety net for the most vulnerable. Previously unimaginable levels of food, housing and warmth insecurity have meant a creeping return to Victorian times with a growing dependence on charity and voluntarism; foodbanks; the resurgence of poverty diseases; the secure refuge of a hospital bed replaced by images of corridor-beds we are accustomed to seeing in war zones; the unconscionable rise in child poverty so well concealed by the ghettoisation of our cities; and the uncomfortable, nasty Victorian values of the ‘deserving’ and ‘non-deserving’ poor have led to cruelly punitive measures for such as having ‘too much space’ in your home (the ‘bedroom tax’) or having more than two children.

The consequences of sustained austerity are not just an affront to decency and reasonableness. They make for a pathology that exposes our society to grave risks. We are experiencing a world that is, once again, destabilised by conflict and retribution – both domestic and geopolitical. From the raging horrors of Palestine and the Sudan to the absurd but real fears of globalised combat, and the vengeful assault on refugee rights, we detect at least the fingerprints of lurching populism and resentment towards ‘other’ whipped up by economic inequalities. And we are in the midst of a technological revolution that is already laying waste to gainful, productive employment – from supermarket cash registers to data-based white-collar jobs. To respond to all of this, not to mention future pandemics, demands social cohesion, a lively economy with proper protections, robust social institutions, the protective embrace of government with a moral vision, and a renewed commitment by the State to Humanistic procedures. But austerity has pulled at all of these threads, pathologically weakening the fabric of society.

This book was first written to expose the deceit that it is economic necessity that is driving this – not political choices. And it has been successful, evidenced by its short-listing for the national Bread and Roses award for radical literature. But that was in 2014. As we move into a second edition of this book in 2025 a Labour government has been elected and has staked out its economic ambitions. It claims to have left austerity behind to enter a period of national reconstruction, rebuilding on the wreckage.

So why a second edition?

The debate about austerity has become more nuanced, to some extent more camouflaged. Austerity is now discussed critically and openly – something that should have happened more than a decade ago, but was suppressed by a compliant media and political establishment (more of this later, too). George Osborne, the architect of the explicit policy of austerity, told us that he faced two options for reducing debt: either increasing taxation or cutting public spending. The former was ruled out, putatively since it would suppress economic activity – the ‘trickle-down’ theory of money dictated that we concentrate wealth, not redistribute it. This Labour government claims to face two different options for reconstruction: immediate refinancing of the public sector – health, education, pro-poverty action; or stimulating growth with long-term infrastructure spending, which would generate more government income through expanding the tax base. The former is ruled out since it cannot be afforded. (We are, as was the brief administration of Liz Truss, hostage to the bond markets which enjoy the super-high levels of energy and power released under Margaret Thatcher’s deregulation of the finance industry. We’ll come to that, too)

Critics say that, while infrastructure projects are welcome, the dismissal of the first option, and the continuation of public sector budget erosion signifies a continuation of austerity – in consequence, if not in intention. And it is justified in just the same terms that made austerity a permanent feature of our economy, rather than merely a temporary, but protracted, emergency measure following the 2008 banking crisis. We don’t have ‘maxed out credit cards’ anymore, but we do have ‘black holes’. Debt paranoia allied with weak submission to the short-term caprices of the bond market dictate relentless fiscal restraint – even continuing retrenchment. So we consider our original analysis retains its critical bite, and is no less lacking and necessary as it was in 2013. Hence this new edition – updated and recast in numerous ways. Using the benefit of hindsight to see what austerity has done and continues to do.

In this revised edition we do not look in detail at the political and social consequences of austerity. We focus on challenging those myths which have served and continue to serve as faux justifications for reversing wealth distribution and eviscerating the public sphere. But its impact serves as a backdrop to what we write. It is the political and ethical air you breathe as you read what follows, as we breathed as we wrote. The rise of Right-wing populism, Brexit, trashing traditional Conservatism and the frontal attacks on conventions of democracy are commonly seen to appeal to those voters who feel ‘left behind’, and who have, as a consequence, lost their faith in conventional politics. Citizens are gaslighted into believing that tax is evil, fuelling a collapse of progressive taxation and the monumental transfer of wealth back to the wealthy, all at the cost of the public sector. Well, who are the ‘left behind’, if not the immediate casualties of an impoverishment visited on them by the withdrawal of benefits, erosion of incomes and of institutional State support.

Once the abyss of greed was opened up it became necessary to roll back hard-fought social gains to feed the ever-hungry maw of stockholders with widening profit margins, short-term goals and a reckless abandonment of moral obligation. And, so, employment rights were eroded, heralding the ‘gig’ economy and zero-hour contracts. Wages were driven down so much that more than 40% (around £45-50bn) of benefits for working-aged people go to those who are in employment, but whose wages are miserly. These are enormous tax-payer subsidies and transactional advantages given to business and the corporate sector – one of the real-term costs of austerity.

Then came Covid. Covid made people realise just how lethal their poverty could be. Poor quality housing and overcrowding killed people as cholera did to the same communities for these same reasons in the 19th century. The UK Health Foundation1, the US Poor People’s Pandemic Report2 and the IMF3 document that people living in poorer areas were up to 400% more likely to die of Covid. The wider point, however, is that we are seeing, once again, the rise of poverty diseases of obesity, scabies and rickets4 and a fall in life expectancy and an increase in child mortality. The Food Foundation calculates that a family seeking to meet government guidelines on a healthy diet in 2025 would have to spend 50% of their income on food5. No wonder that they note malnutrition has quadrupled since the early 2007.

The public has become frustrated. Our faith in the political machine has widely been shaken, as many do not think that it is working on our behalf. The volatility of electoral loyalties for traditional political parties is suggestive of a dislocation from the fabric of political governance which no longer gives us options. ‘They are all the same’. As this frustration is cut loose it becomes unpredictable where public preferences will land. Arguably Brexit was one landing zone. And now there is a genuine prospect of electoral gains by Reform, gathering the voters on its magic carpet of right-wing populism. But more, surely, a flight from an absence of political values than a flight to a world of preferred values. In this maelstrom, the UK joins Hungary, Poland, Germany, France, the Netherlands… the USA – all of whom opted for the logic of austerity. We wrote the first edition because we wanted to add to the understanding that economic austerity was really political austerity, and it gifted us an austerity of compassion, imagination and an austerity of political ambition. The doors were opened for political charlatans to enter and to exploit the confusion of living under governments that are driven by cash more than by moral obligation.

And now we have Donald Trump. He rides shot-gun to the careering phalanx of right-wing extremism and its hatred of the public sphere. The fierceness and rapidity of his attempts to accomplish in months what Thatcher and Osborne saw as a project of years, promise to fully and finally reveal, naked, the dysfunction and pathological cruelty of austerity policies. We do not enter into any analysis of ‘blitzkrieg austerity’ in the USA. But there it is. The brooding, menacing backdrop to our telling of the destructive policies of UK governments of Left, Centre and Right – all carry blame. The only innocents in austerity wars are those who were gaslighted into voting for these cruel policies while suffering their consequences. Francis Bacon told us “knowledge is power” (“scientia potentia est”) and 500 years on we must remember that. We are offering insights, explanations, definitions, historical accuracy and context to cut through the political narratives, to pull back the curtain of so-called economic imperatives to reveal the political choices that lie behind them.

1. https://www.health.org.uk/press-office/press-releases/inquiry-finds-working-age-adults-in-poorest-areas-almost-four-times

2. https://www.poorpeoplescampaign.org/pandemic-report/

3. https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2021/06/inequality-and-Covid-19-ferreira.htm

4. https://www.disabilityrightsuk.org/news/report-exposes-shocking-rise-levels-food-poverty-related-illness?srsltid=AfmBOoo2vnA6fLbOzlMRSQFJBgytD0SDkp21GlsUFDxTDGAS8MzK0EE1; see also The Guardian report, ‘Doctors urge government to fight poverty after rise in patients with Victorian diseases’, 03.04.2025.

5. https://foodfoundation.org.uk/sites/default/files/202310/TFF_The%20Broken%20Plate%202023_Digital_FINAL..pdf

1

Austerity, The Single Narrative and Where It Came From

What is the use of repeating all that stuff, if you don’t explain it as you go on? It’s by far the most confusing thing I ever heard!

—Alice in Wonderland

Barry’s Story – When Austerity Started

It was an unusually chilly July day in 2010 when Barry arrived with a colleague in the small, proud but unmistakably impoverished town on the coastal fringe of north-west England. He had come for a meeting of the ‘Children with Disabilities’ planning group which he had been brought into support.

Here was a dilapidated ex-junior school that was accommodating the Children’s Services offices. The meeting room, when he eventually found it, was in an anteroom off the old main hall that had all the feel of an equipment store.

Squeezed into this cramped space were parents’ representatives, of voluntary sector organisations and Council officers. Although the group was relatively new, its importance could not be overstated. For the first time in many years parents were at the heart of the service planning process. They were coming together to oversee and contribute to the design of respite services for their own children. This opportunity had been afforded by ‘Aiming High for Disabled Children’, a central government programme, articulating an ambitious vision for some of our most excluded and disadvantaged children. In practice, where Barry was working, this meant that the local Cumbrian network of parents was now actively leading on the design of a long-awaited respite care centre. But beyond the tangible, beyond the targets and measures, there was no mistaking the level of trust being slowly established between parents and professionals – a breaking-down of institutional barriers that had hampered partnership and progress for many years.

Sadly, the agenda for the meeting had changed at the last minute, so rather than giving an update on the capital project which Barry had been leading, he was now required to facilitate a discussion on how they had to abandon plans for the new centre.

This sudden change of plan was a direct result of the moratorium on spending that the incoming Chancellor, George Osborne, had introduced in his first ‘emergency’ budget. In May 2010 he had proudly announced that ‘In the space of just a week, we have found and agreed to cut £6¼ billion of wasteful spending, across the public sector.’6The respite care centre was a real example that fell into the sack of Osborne’s ‘wasteful spending’. But why was he doing it? The Chancellor was clear and confident: ‘We need to tackle the deficit so that our debt repayments don’t spiral out of control.’7

This is the kind of argument that we had been hearing since the inception of the new government in 2010, if not longer, and it amounts to a debt and deficit narrative that went like this:

Our national debt is higher than it’s ever beenOur deficit and debt interest payments are unmanageableOur debt crisis was caused by the overspending of the previous governmentWe are on the brink of bankruptcyPublic sector spending does not generate economic activity and so is nonessential and dispensable.

The narrative was turned into these simple mantras by Coalition government ministers, amplified by supporters in the media and embedded into the consciousness of the British people: ‘The cost of repaying our debt is £120 million per day, we maxed out our credit card, our debt interest payments are higher than our spending on education, and the debt crisis was caused by Labour government overspending.’

The potency of this story, its ability to gain traction with ordinary people, is rooted in fear, anxiety and the almost effortless way in which the personal is woven into the national. The fear of financial meltdown – personal and national ruin. David Cameron had said it before, but he repeated it at the Davos get-together that year that Britain needed to cut its deficit or risk a full-blown fiscal crisis such as the one that had engulfed Greece. In June 2010, George Osborne told Andrew Marr: ‘You can see in Greece an example of a country that didn’t face up to its problems, and that is the fate that I want to avoid.’8

At the time Greece was teetering at the sharp end of financial demands from EU banks via EU politicians – but more of that later.

What is more, the Coalition was telling us that ‘we are all in this together’, the obvious connotations being that we all – rich and poor – must share the pain, and, more menacingly – you are either ‘with us or against us’.

One Narrative is Like Economic McCarthyism

In truth, all this comes close to what could be described as economic McCarthyism9: tapping into fear and prejudice to drive a narrative aimed at establishing a level of public and political acquiescence sufficient to force through a radical programme of action. McCarthyist in the specific sense that the premise (communist infiltration/unmanageable debt) of the single narrative is unassailable, unappealable. Then, as now, the ‘single story’, as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie explains in her TED talk10, ‘robs people of their dignity’ for it denies us agency.

It is interesting to reflect that at the height of the witch hunt for communists in the United States in the 1950s, Senator McCarthy would hold up a piece of paper that he said contained lists of people whom he was investigating. In reality, we now know that there were often no lists of names; that his evidence was thin, but that the climate of fear he created was powerful enough to galvanise action and subdue challenge. It was a narrative that even the American president at the time found hard to resist, fearful of challenging a wave of populism and social paranoia. In this way the overwhelming, fearful, single narrative of the threat to the social order disarmed people, stifled dissent and showed that you don’t need cold, hard evidence to build a compelling story. On the contrary, a powerful argument, repetition of exaggerated claims, and the fear of consequences of “denial” are quite sufficient.

In the same vein, the evidence tells us that our present debt narrative is just as much a construct of untested assertions, laced with fear. How bad would it be had there been no cuts? The government made references to our economy ending up in the same position as that of Greece – again. After all ‘we were on the brink of bankruptcy’, George Osborne told us, and what’s more the markets would abandon the UK: ‘The largest bond investor in the world was saying that UK gilts were a no-go area, sitting on a bed of nitro-glycerine.’11

In the face of such scaremongering, no wonder we were made to feel awkward and risked being marginalised as heretics – ‘deniers’ – if we dared to even question the storyline. For example, why, when our debt was lower than it had been in 200 of the last 250 years, when our borrowing was cheaper than it was during Thatcher’s government and virtually any time in our history, when unemployment and a decrease in taxation revenue had caused the deficit, were we told that the cuts were necessary and the only option? But more of that later.

Returning to the scene of the crime, the narrative started to build in the wake of the credit crunch in 2008, with bank bailouts and an increase in unemployment. By the time the political parties were preparing for the autumn 2009 conference season, they were rehearsing arguments they were to take into the forthcoming election. Public sector spending cuts had become the main plank of Conservative Party policy – and so it was for the Liberal Democrats, who even began to identify where the cuts would fall if they were in government. The Labour Party joined the cuts camp in full force slightly later, when Alistair Darling finally persuaded Gordon Brown and Ed Balls to change Labour Party policy in autumn 2009. Brown and Balls had been arguing that spending could be maintained if growth began to reduce the deficit – at the time the media was making hay with Gordon Brown’s reluctance to utter ‘the C-word’ (Cuts)? Alistair Darling, then Chancellor, former Minister James Purnell and others were arguing for cuts, and they won the day. By the time of the budget in March 2010, the Labour Party was committed to halving the deficit in four years.

This was a bombshell and the final confirmation that this debt story would see the country return to the divisive, unhappy period of the 1980s. Was that what we and our families and children had to look forward to? That period left its scars on us, as it had many baby-boomers who lived through it. Austerity measures in the 1980s were met with marches, strikes, protests; Darling’s offer to return to the 1980s was greeted with an intake of breath and a resigned nod of the head.

In December 2009, three months before Darling’s statement, Barry had been at a reunion of the successful parent occupation of Croxteth Comprehensive in Liverpool. The school had been closed in 1981, an early victim of Conservative Party cuts, and the parents’ knee-jerk reaction had been to take over the school and open it up for their children. Three years later in 1984, after a campaign that brought together trade unions, educationalists, communities, musicians, actors and journalists, ‘Crocky Comp’ was re-opened. Barry was one of the campaigners and a teacher. The reunion was the first time the parents, some pupils and volunteer teachers and staff had come together, reunited to remember the successful campaign since then, and the heart of the event was an exhibition of photographs and a film retrospective of the events at the time.

In 1980 Croxteth was one of the poorest neighbourhoods in the country and the pictures brought it back: young people posing in the no-man’s land of overgrown grass, dumped furniture and supermarket trolleys lying like resting tumbleweed in front of 1970s maisonettes, half of them empty and boarded up. The net result of cuts and limitations on social welfare in places like Croxteth was poor health, poor life chances for young people, few jobs and low life expectancy. It is now 2025. Sean, who was a cute, cheeky, mischievous eleven-year-old when Barry taught him in in Croxteth in 1983, is now 40 years old, and has just stopped using drugs after twenty-eight years of addiction. He is taking Barry through the old school photograph, putting the names to the faces of the children who attended the school in 1983. At least seven are now dead.

How The Narrative Developed

Invoking the 1980s as the closest comparison to what was about to happen in the 2010s, this time with a political consensus, was shocking. Darling’s statement was accepted by politicians and the media and absorbed into the inevitability of cuts. In fact Nick Robinson put the words into Alistair Darling’s mouth:

Robinson: The Treasury’s own figures suggest deeper, tougher [cuts] than Thatcher’s – do you accept that?

Darling: They will be deeper and tougher.12

True, Robinson flushed out Darling’s position, but where was his follow-up question – about whether it was ethical or viable or even necessary to return to a society that convulsed under the impact of austerity in the 1980s? ‘Where we make the precise comparison, I think, is secondary to the fact that there is an acknowledgement that these reductions will be tough.’13That was what Darling told us.

But how could that be the case? Let’s briefly rehearse the history. What we knew was that this began as a banking crisis that had its roots in the USA, with the mass sale of mortgages to people who couldn’t afford them. These mortgages were consolidated into packages and sold on as investments to UK, North American and other international banks, who in turn sold them on again, in large part to borrow money to finance re-mortgaging and 120% per cent mortgage deals in the UK. They are known as mortgage-backed securities and were insured by the biggest finance companies in the world. When homeowners in the USA began to default on their mortgages, the value these mortgage packages had as investments fell. When it came time for the banks to cash in these investments to return the money they had borrowed, they were worthless; insurance companies couldn’t afford to pay out for the losses and the banks didn’t have the cash to cover their own repayments and would have gone bust had governments in the UK, USA and other countries not stepped in and bailed them out.

The supposed evidence was too strong and too well known by the British public for Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England, to walk away from it. He knew cuts were coming; after all, he had taken the extraordinary step of planning government tax and spending policy with Cameron and Osborne when in opposition prior to the election. He then took another extraordinary step of speaking to the Trades Union Congress (TUC) in 2010 to take the blame, and to soften us all up for public sector cuts: ‘The billions spent bailing out the banks and the need for public spending cuts were the fault of the financial services sector.’14 But if public spending was not the cause of the economic crisis, how can public sector cuts be the solution? Why not look to the financial services sector? And why do we have to wait for a banker to tell us that?

Nevertheless, the narrative was getting through to the public and Darling was having his day. A Daily Telegraph poll15 in June 2009 had already recorded that a majority of voters believed cuts were inevitable. TUC polling throughout 2010 and 2011 consistently confirmed the broad belief that there was no alternative. Indeed, the clamour of the debt narrative had drowned out dissenting voices and had now established a political consensus. A consensus that merely needed stating and restating, often without recourse to analysis, let alone facts and (recent) history.

The political parties were backed up by the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), leading businessmen, the Centre for Economics and Business Research, the Governor of the Bank of England and by a number (though by no means all) of prominent economists. All were shouting, clamouring for public sector spending cuts. It was almost hysteria.

The narrative became government policy in May 2010, as the Conservative and Liberal Democrat Coalition picked up the reins of power. By October 2010 the government had issued the Comprehensive Spending Review, which translated the story into a reality of £80bn of public spending cuts. For you and for us, this meant that certain operations and procedures were no longer available on the NHS; the poorest in our society were losing welfare benefits; police, nurses, social workers and teachers resources were cut back; and city councils like Liverpool’s were losing £150m per year in a 20% cut to their budgets. By 2024 Liverpool after 14 years of cuts lost over £500m of its budget. Sure Start centres and libraries were closing up and down the country, and the Institute of Fiscal Studies forecast that 600,000 more children would enter poverty. By 2023 the figure was actually 730,000. The list of cuts is as extensive as the widest reach of public funding, but it amounts to a fundamental structural change in the funding and delivery of public services, and a scale of shrinkage to our public sector never before seen. Will Hutton implored anyone who would listen to understand how extreme these cuts were:

No country has ever volunteered such austerity. It is as tough a package of retrenchment as the IMF imposed on Greece, a country on the brink of bankruptcy. It is twice as tough as the famously harsh measures Canada took between 1994 and 1997. It is three times tougher than Sweden’s measures between 1993 and 1995. In British terms, it is immeasurably tougher than what we did after the IMF crisis in 1976 or after the ERM crisis in 1992…16

To explore this a little further, let’s step back to where this chapter started, and Barry’s meeting with parents of children with disabilities, where he had to confirm that the capital programme had been closed and that the funds required to build the new respite care centre had been cut. The news was greeted with resignation. A parent representative was the first to respond and given how proactive and uncompromising he and other parents had been in developing services for disabled children and the demands made on the council to provide facilities, Barry expected a tirade. He expected Cumbria council to be blamed for taking away the money or not spending it correctly, or calls to mount a campaign to have the programme reinstated. But no. The parent swallowed the decision and said that in the face of ‘overspending’ there was little choice. The other parents and members of the meeting agreed. It was a devastating moment. Barry felt powerless to respond.

The Public is Overwhelmed With Austerity

He had been working on this project for months and had witnessed the passion and commitment parents brought to the development of services for their disabled children. One parent broke down in tears at a meeting, out of the pain and frustration in trying to get across the need for the centre to give her and her family a respite break from their disabled daughter. The parent representatives on the planning group had gone into minute detail about the size of the rooms, the facilities and location of the centre. They had spent their own money travelling to meetings and had volunteered their time to attend them. Over the previous ten years they had developed a confidence in their own views and opinions through having access to local policy and decision makers and their inclusion in decision-making – even about how money would be spent. They overcame their suspicion of local government and its officers, to work with them to develop facilities, after-school groups and support networks. It was more than money being cut.

We caught a flavour of what this passion and moral purpose looked like on national TV when Jonathan Bartley, the father of a disabled child, tackled David Cameron in the 2010 election campaign about his decision to close down special needs support in mainstream schools.17 Back at that planning meeting, Barry was witnessing at first- hand how easily purpose and drive can be undermined and dissipated so much more quickly than it can be built up. In practice, the debt narrative was ploughing through people’s ideals, ambitions and plans. No one else in the meeting disagreed with this parent, but all felt uncomfortable, despondent and lacking the necessary insight to frame a response.

It wasn’t just people who attended the meeting who felt this way. The sense of powerlessness extended much further – arguably even to Alistair Darling. A lot of people felt helpless to challenge the cuts because the debt narrative was so overwhelming. As both authors became active in promoting resistance to cuts we saw people fall into three broad categories of response: those who agreed with the debt analysis of the necessity for cuts; those who were resigned and felt that there was no alternative; and those who disagreed with the cuts out of the sense that the rationale was political and not economically driven, but couldn’t marshal a coherent argument.

The sovereign debt and spending-cuts narrative was cemented. The only difference between the political parties now boiled down to how many billion pounds were to be cut and over how many years. It was a matter of degree, not substance.

The media picked this up and ran with it.

Students, in the first challenge to government cuts in 2010, marched against the increase in university tuition fees. What reporters wanted to know was where the cuts would fall if more money were put into university education to bring down the level of fees. BBC’s Question Time became and to an extent it still is a national, weekly platform for the debt narrative. Almost every discussion on almost any topic whether it be defence, schools, international development or sport, followed a similar pattern. Government ministers and supporters argued that with the ‘mess’ they were left by the previous government there was no alternative to the fiscal decisions the government was taking. Cuts were in the national interest. More often than not the Labour Party representatives remained quiet, uncomfortable and unable to challenge.