Owen Jones writes:
George Osborne’s political career should be lying
face down, lifeless, bobbing in the Thames. His statement last week should have been rebranded “The
Comprehensive Review of the Failure of Austerity”. The Tories’ central pledge
at the last election, after all, was that the deficit would be erased, wiped
out, vanished over the course of this Parliament: there should have been no
alleged need for further cuts after 2015.
But everything those who were smeared as “deficit
deniers” predicted would happen back when David Cameron and Nick Clegg began
cavorting in the Rose Garden has come to pass. Austerity has acted like a
growth-seeking missile, leaving Britain embroiled in a longer economic crisis
than the Great Depression itself. The underlying deficit is bigger this year
than it was the last; Osbornomics has left the Tories borrowing £245bn more
than they projected.
Here are the calamitous results of a lethal combination of
a shrinking economy, suppressed demand and stagnant tax revenues. Companies are
sitting on monumental cash piles worth hundreds of billions which they are not
investing. Meanwhile, the average worker faces a pay packet shrinking at the
fastest rate in modern British history. No wonder that Osborne’s approval
rating languishes somewhere around minus 40.
And yet, and yet. The Chancellor’s default facial expression may be set to smug, but – given the
circumstances – his performance in the Commons last week was assured,
confident, even cocky. No wonder. Even as austerity has failed on its own
terms, the Official Opposition has not so much missed open goals as fled in the
opposite direction. The Tories’ message can be summed up in one easily
digestible sentence: “We will cut the deficit by reining in public spending,
stopping hard-working taxpayers subsidising the indolent and the workshy by
cutting welfare, and we will live within our means.”
Labour’s current muddled
message would take several confusing paragraphs, filled with caveats and
clarifications, covered in scribbles and crossings-out. Osborne has cut too far
and too fast, they say, but we will stick to his plans. The Tory approach to
cutting social security is wrong, though many of their underlying principles
are right. Many of their cuts are as cruel as they are unnecessary, but we will
not reverse them.
Perversely, this farcically disastrous Chancellor
has been allowed to make the political weather, constantly leaving Labour in a
defensive posture. His declaration that people thrown out of their work must
wait for seven days before getting benefits is a classic example. Working
people pay into national insurance and deserve to be supported when their boss
sacks them, Labour should have said.
The average wait is already more than
three weeks as it is. This will only benefit legal loan sharks – who a million
families now turn to – and lengthen the queues to food banks, who now cater for
half a million people in the seventh-richest country on earth. But Labour did
not make these arguments. Ed Balls instead accepted the underlying logic of a
longer wait – with caveats, of course.
The Tory strategy is to crucify Labour over
social-security spending, aided and abetted by right-wing propagandists posing
as journalists who hunt down extreme, unrepresentative examples and pass them
off as the tip of a feckless iceberg – say, a woman with 45 kids and a giraffe
on benefits, as my colleague Mark Steel puts it.
But as a poll published in
this newspaper at the start of 2013 showed, thanks to our media, the public are
chronically misinformed about social security: about who gets benefits, how
much they are worth, and the real level of fraud (around 0.7 per cent). The
more they know the reality, the less likely they are to support life-destroying
cuts.
Rather than accepting the Tory terms of debate on
social security, then, Labour should be launching the mother of all campaigns to
educate and inform. Most social-security spending goes quite rightly on
elderly people, who have paid in their whole lives. Most working-age benefits
go to people in work, like tax credits, which are a subsidy for low pay.
Housing benefit – which has jumped by £2bn under this Government – lines the
pockets of landlords who can get away with charging rip-off rents, knowing that
you and I, the taxpayer, will step in.
To bring down social-security spending in a
sustained way, Labour should say, we will address the root causes: taking on
low pay with a living wage; controlling rents as well as allowing councils to
build; and an industrial strategy to create hundreds of thousands of jobs, not
least in renewable energy as Germany has done. Such a message would undercut
the prejudices that the Tory offensive depends on.
But instead, Labour’s leaders – pessimistic as
they are about the prospects of shifting public attitudes – fail to challenge
myths, and even occasionally feed them. It is utterly self-destructive. The
more “skivers” or “shirkers” are inflated in people’s minds, the bigger the
potential pool of Tory support. After all, if you really want to give “scroungers”
a kicking, you will always trust the Conservatives best to do it.
And here is the fatal flaw in the Labour
leadership’s strategy. They think they are buying back credibility, rather than
shoring up policies that should be seen as sunk, ruinous, shredded. By failing
to offer a coherent message, they risk a sense of “at least you know where you
are with the Tories” bedding in. But the cost is not only to Labour’s electoral
prospects: it will be to the working, disabled and unemployed people whose pockets
will continue to be emptied.
A generation of plummeting living standards
beckons – unless the Labour leadership’s failure to challenge a hijacking of
the financial crisis to roll back the state is countered. Last week, more than
4,000 people attended the People’s Assembly coalition against austerity, and
decided on a rolling programme of action.
Learning from the success of UK Uncut
in forcing tax avoidance on to the political agenda, a day of peaceful civil
disobedience will be held on 5 November. The gentleman’s agreement of British
politics has to be sabotaged: our futures and those of our children are at
risk. That’s not hyperbole. It’s the appalling truth.
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