Crisis Makes Social Democrats Of Us All

Jonathan Freedland writes:

Men in wellies, talk of "grip", Cobra in near-permanent session: the politics of natural disaster has its own vocabulary, both visual and verbal.

Repeated regularly is a set of maxims now seared into the soul of every Westminster special adviser: that a party leader cannot go abroad when the country is under water; that Bush's Katrina debacle showed what a delayed or tin-eared response to tragedy can do to a political reputation; that the prime task of all governments is to keep citizens safe, from the elements as much as from our enemies; and that while a national leader can survive being branded wrong or heartless, to be exposed by nature as fundamentally incompetent is a fate from which none can recover.

All those observations have had an airing in the current deluge, the latter lent extra sharpness by private polling which, I am told, showed voters giving the government dire marks for its handling of the floods thus far – and which in part prompted this week's show of command by David Cameron, including the cancellation of a trip to the Middle East.

Yet they obscure the moment in this crisis that may cause the prime minister the most lasting damage: the erosion not of the south-west coastal rail line but of the foundation stone on which this government was built – swept away not by raging waves, but by four words uttered by Cameron himself.

"Money is no object," he said, announcing that he would spend whatever it took to beat back these menacing waters. That's a promise that could haunt him. At its narrowest, it will surely be taken as a pledge to meet every possible cost, the PM casting himself as an unusually generous loss-adjuster to the nation.

Never mind that the transport secretary later insisted there was no "blank cheque", residents being charged for sandbags to defend their sodden homes will wonder why the government isn't paying – after all, the man at the top has said money's no object. The same will go for the repair bill when at last the waters recede.

But that is the least of the damage that Cameron's words have inflicted on himself. For this government was built, the coalition formed, on a single, simple premise: that austerity was unavoidable, that there was no alternative.

There could be no more spending, an assertion endorsed by the outgoing Labour government in what must rank as one of the most ill-judged jokes of modern times: "There's no money left," said Liam Byrne in a note left for his successor at the Treasury.

But now, less than four years on, it turns out that this is no longer true. The PM has told us that, should the need be urgent enough, there is money after all. Limitless supplies of it in fact; enough to defeat nature's wrath. To quote Cameron in full, "Money is no object in this relief effort. Whatever money is needed for it will be spent."

This rather undermines the austerity message, for it shows what was always true – that the national belt is not tightened universally and forever but can be loosened when the government wants to loosen it.

The last demonstration of that truth came nearly two years ago, when George Osborne cut the top rate of tax from 50p to 45p. That destroyed at a stroke the claim that we were all in it together, but it also illuminated a more obvious fact: that, despite all the "no alternative" talk, the government had not lost its power of discretion.

Even in the age of austerity, it still got to decide what to spend money on and what not to spend it on. By announcing that "money is no object", Cameron has delivered the last rites on what was the founding logic of the coalition: austerity, forced on the nation because there was supposedly no money left.

Now we know that there's plenty of money – just so long as the government want to spend it.

From now on, the opposition will be able to ask why, say, the bedroom tax is necessary. If money is no object, why couldn't some more be found for those people in gravest need? As Stewart Wood, close adviser to Ed Miliband, tweeted: "Perhaps the PM could tell us which issues require a 'money is no object' approach & which ones demand an 'all in this together' approach."

The veil of austerity has been ripped away, exposing politics for what it always was and is – the business of priorities. It seems repairing the homes of middle England is a priority; sufficient space for the disabled to live in, not so much.

But this is not the only havoc wrought by the floods on what passes for Cameron's governing philosophy. He used to be adamant that one of the fatal flaws of British politics was the belief that the only way to demonstrate one's seriousness about a problem was to throw money at it. There had to be a better way.

Yet now that a crisis has struck, he proves his grip by pledging infinite cash. "It's a very Gordon Brown metric for showing that you care," smiles one shadow cabinet minister. Promising big, well-funded state intervention may jar with Tory thinking, but it clearly fits the public mood. In this way too, Conservatives have surely taken a knock.

Small-government ideology may fly in the thinktank seminar room, but when water's gushing through your letterbox, few people call for the Downing Street nudge unit. It's the fire brigade or, ideally, the army you want to see at the end of the driveway.

Crises make social democrats of us all.

When G4S cocked up security at the Olympics, it was the military who came to the rescue – and whose presence Britons found so reassuring. For all the admirable community spirit on show now, when people feel under threat, it's not the "big society" but big government that they long for.

A larger hope would be that the experience of floods might translate into an intensified demand for action on climate change. That too could hurt a government that is divided on the causes – the influence of sceptic Nigel Lawson looms large, especially over Osborne – and which abandoned long ago its "vote blue, go green" promise.

The winter of 2014 might produce a new constituency – rural, southern and affluent – for the message that cutting carbon emissions is humanity's most urgent challenge. Either way, natural disasters are big, even epic, moments in the life of a nation. They can reshape the landscape, political as well as physical.

And so far the greatest damage done is to those who like to believe they are in charge – even when the elements say otherwise.