Coalition

The coalition in government is really a coalition between a friendly-faced, pale-Green, touchy-feely public face and the hardline ideological market-fundamentalist neoliberals, blue in tooth and claw.

We are promised cuts. We are threatened with cuts. We are warned of cuts. Cuts as inevitable as a new day. Cuts to be dealt out with a heavy heart. Cuts that were made inevitable by Labour’s recklessness and waste of public money.

All of this is nonsense. This government has a deep ideological investment in downsizing the state; they want to complete the Thatcherite project, to go much further than she ever managed. They have a disgust at the state and a blind faith in markets. Our enormous deficit was brought about by the recklessness of the financial markets and the steps necessary for the state to save them from themselves. And for this the state is going to be punished.

They want to clear the deficit in four years. Why? Our borrowing has a 14-year limit on it. No other country has had to cut like us - except Greece, who are on the verge of bankrupcy. We are not. In Sweden and Canada, where they had to make similarly savage cuts to welfare in the mid-nineties, they cut much more slowly and did so with a view to building a foundation for further expansion. This lot want to cut because they hate the state.

They’re in a coalition with the Liberal Democrats but only one fraction of the Liberal Democrats: that group that created the Orange Book which attempted to restore the classical liberal roots of the party. They were a bit of a fringe until now. Will this be any good for them? I doubt it. They risk being sucked into the Tory project and being associated with this wanton destruction of cherished things. Worse, they risk being seen as the figleaf.

Labour planned cuts. I think we’d have accepted Labour cuts more readily than we will accept Tory cuts, because we know Labour are fundamentally behind a strong welfare state. We know that for thirty years the Tories have been hostile to the state, happy to see people sink or swim, ready to accept poverty and suffering as signs of healthy competition.

What is remarkable is that the credit crunch is providing the basis for this. What the credit shows more than anything is that markets are not rational or self-correcting and they don’t  necessarily distribute wealth through a system; just as readily they spread poison through it. There was a moment when we might have sacrificed a bit of growth and tempered competition for a system that was fairer, more responsive to social need, less fuelled by greed and fear. There might have been a deep change. Instead, the state is going to be made to suffer, while the financial markets stand to one side lecturing us all on financial responsibility and waste.

All of this ideological extremism is being sold to us as simple good financial sense. Which is, of course, how ideology works. It’s a filthy time.