The government’s austerity project seems more like malice every day

By Chris Hansell

Photo by mjtmail (tiggy) via Flickr

Question Time, the BBC’s flagship political debate programme, can be both intriguing and insufferable. Last week’s edition, with the Lib Dem’s Ed Davey and Labour’s Harriet Harmon using up lots of words but saying very little, was a paint-by-numbers example of this.

Dropping divisive comedian Russell Brand into the pot was not therefore unwelcome. It’s always nice to see someone on Question Time who isn’t weighing their every word against their own political ambition. But this post isn’t really about QT.

What I’d like to talk about is a comment that seemed to be ad-libbed by Brand. Speaking about the bankers and the crisis they created the comedian said ‘incompetence of that degree, with those kinds of consequences, is indistinguishable from malice.’

I haven’t decided whether I agree with this yet, but it’s an idea we should all give a lot of thought. Given the many people who have suffered, been plunged into poverty, had their safety nets yanked from beneath them, found themselves jobless, is there any difference between having caused this crisis through self-interest or ineptitude?

We should ask ourselves the same question about the calamitous economic policy of our dear Chancellor. On Wednesday George Osborne stood in the House of Commons and remarkably managed to surprise no one with another set of budget cuts. But at this point what can we really expect from a man who seems to lack the imagination of even an economist?

Way back in 2009, before the Cameron-Osborne Austerity project found its way into Downing Street, world renowned British economist David Blanchflower made an obvious point: ‘You don’t cut public spending in a recession’. The sense of this statement is obvious. If you have debts to pay back the absolute worst time to pay them off is when you have no money.

Even after four years you can feel Blanchflower’s exasperation when he says of the Tories’ austerity plan ‘I haven’t seen such blinding incompetence for a very long time’. There’s that word again: incompetence. But how many people really believe that anymore? Headlines from the 2013 spending review include a ten per cent cut to local government budgets, ten per cent from the Environment department and a new cap on welfare spending. This is just a slice of the cuts. Nearly every government department has seen reductions. A government department can seem a bit abstract but we shouldn’t forget how budget cuts will damage the services millions of us depend on every day.

Local councils will be next to useless once they have combined these latest cuts with the ones they already have to implement. The welfare safety net is clearly not something the millionaires and Eton alumni in Cabinet see as important. With the Work and Pensions budget slashed by nine and a half per cent and housing benefit and disability living allowance capped this message could not be clearer.

Yet can this economic policy be, as Blanchflower suspected in 2009, simply the result of economic incompetence? In May I wrote a blog post about the media buzz surrounding an IMF visit to the UK. Really it should not have been a big deal, but key members of the IMF had said some very surprising things about our economy. Someone else who wrote about the trip was Korean economist Ha-Joon Chang. Chang had this to say about our economic bind: ‘Current policies in the UK and other European countries are really about making poor people pay for the mistakes of the rich.’

For Chang the IMF’s trip showed that our government was persisting with a policy that unnecessarily hurt poorer people because the results would benefit the rich. I find it hard to disagree with this assessment when our Chancellor slashes vital public services so freely while multinational corporations are able to pay such low amounts of tax with only token political opposition.

Internet giant Google can pay only £6 million on UK generated profits of £2.6 billion while new university students must burden themselves with £9,000 a year course fees on top of living costs. Corporation tax is lowered by eight per cent in the space of three years but freezes to public sector pay and housing benefit make the cost of living more difficult to bear for hard working people.

When Russell Brand talked about incompetence and malice on Question Time last week he could just as easily have been talking about the policies of our government and our Chancellor. What has become clear though is that the UK’s grand austerity project is more about malice than incompetence.