Stunted Growth Owing to …

As of a few days ago this country is officially back in recession – as defined by two consecutive quarters of ‘negative growth’ (a phrase which always makes me chuckle). One thing is abundantly clear, the current government of millionaires cares little about the consequence of this for the average man-on-the-street, but rather are paralysed for concern for their big business and millionaire pseudo-aristocratic backers. The question, though, is how much is this really the fault of the disastrous austerity policy, perused with a vigour usually reserved for an increasingly sobering drunkard?

The problem is that politics is all about presentation. When Labour were in power, the Tories blamed them for everything, including the fallout from the sub-prime mortgage crisis in the US, the bank bailouts and over-spending. And of course Labour shouted as high as possible that the fault lay with global factors. Now the Tories are in power, the discourse has simply inverted; Labour are blaming everything on the Tories, who are in turn shouting until they are hoarse that there are global factors, and because they’ve only been in power two years (!) then most of it is still Labours fault. It is a something of a minefield to navigate and know just who to listen to, and is exactly the kind of vacuous, intellectually baron shameful display of Punch-and-Judy politics which puts people off in this country.

There are a hundred ways to weasel out of responsibility, some of which are relatively convincing. It really is a global economy – we export more to Ireland than we do to China and Brazil (two of the most massive emerging economies) combined, and still export the majority within the European Union. This is not a particularly prosperous part of the world right now, so their slump affects us. It’s also debatable just how quickly economic policy affects the economy, for instance; is this second dip of the recession due to the governments policy since taking office, or is the tail end of an effect from the last governments policies? When Labour left office we had slowly increasing growth, and unemployment which was not shooting through the roof, but just what sort of delay should be expected? Time scales are very difficult, because in a climate like this one, the success of the government is judged by their perceived economic success, and as a government is 4-5 years in office, if we can expect a roughly two year delay between policy and effect then we are only judging governments on half their activities (to take an arbitrary example). And of course economics data is calculated retrospectively, so we only now know the growth data for the first quarter of this year – which adds to the delay effect. All in all is it much more interesting for politics to be in a period of growth, then you can judge governments based on social policies, superfluous wars and reforms, etc. But that’s by the by …

Whether or not the blame can be placed square on the shoulders of the Tories, they are certainly doing nothing to help the working man through these times. ‘You can’t solve a debt crisis with more debt’ is the perennial dictum of Cameron/Osborne, which is specious at best, but they seem to think you can solve a growth crisis with no growth! The left is clamouring for growth programs, capital spending programs, jobs programs, but all we get from the government is the repeated line than business leaders are behind their plans – instead of the times. When Alistair Darling left the treasury, having pumped billions of pounds into the economy in the form of ‘stimulus packages’, the UK seemed to be coming into the clear. Since taking over, George Osborne has slashed and burned, hacked away at public services and thrown half a million public servants into the streets, and he now has to borrow *more* than the labour government did to pay for welfare and unemployment benefits. This is a failed plan. There can be no other way of seeing it. Osborne’s own predictions when taking office assumed we would be approaching good growth by the end of 2012 going into 2013, but we are not. But because the Tories are so ideologically bound to austerity they cannot change course. But, most tragically, the burden of his cuts fall on the average man on the street, who has to face 4% inflation and wage freezes year on year, not on the millionaires of this land who collectively dodge 128 billion pounds of tax each year.

It is an appalling situation, and thankfully the country sent the Conservative head office a message this week by voting for labour 38% compared to 31% for the Tories. A result which if repeated at the general – God willing – shall hopefully return the country to those whose allegiances are with the majority of us, not the collective population of those who graduated from Eton.