Tories give themselves licence to cut

To start with, I am an idiot. When I wrote “Tony Blair’s revenge” a year or so ago, I didn’t realise the unique political situation the deficit discourse has created in order to roll back the state. This isn’t Tony’s Blair revenge, its Thatcher’s. When the leadership contenders were asked in the TV debates whether the cuts they would bring about would be greater than those Thatcher carried out, all the candidates agreed. Having studied UK politics in second year and the academic writing on Thatcher’s and other neoliberal governments’ attempts to cut the welfare state, this question seemed to be based on the popular assumption that Thatcher decimated the welfare state.

According to many academics, particularly Paul Pierson, although Thatcher may have wanted to roll back the state in welfare, the political structures protecting the welfare state saved it from damage. The welfare state was left more or less intact following Thatcher’s governments. Looking at this analysis of Thatcher’s failure, the political game seems to have turned upside down in 2010.

Pierson argues that the political forces that create welfare states are very different from the political forces which protect them. He argues that the politics of constructing welfare states is about claiming credit for helping those in need in society while there is a diffuse and unnoticeable cost to tax payers. The asymmetry he argues, is that existing welfare creates its own constituencies of support which can be mobilised to defend existing welfare structures. Cutting support to particular groups will lead them to mobilise in opposition and regard the negative effects as much more significant. This is due in part to the negativity bias and the relatively greater effect on them compared to any apparent positive benefits in hoped for economic efficiency and in lower taxation felt by a larger group. The principle at work is that concentrated benefits are more likely to be defended than those which are diffuse.
Cutting welfare states is about blame avoidance and it is extremely unpopular and politically difficult. The fact that Britain has highly centralised political institutions meant that Thatcher could not simply cut funding to states and then avoid the blame for cuts in welfare expenditure they would have to make. The need to win elections always overruled commitments to cutting welfare.

This time it’s different. The media and the Conservative Party have persuaded the people at large and even the Liberal Democrats (who argued before the election for a slower rate of cuts in public expenditure) that cuts are a necessity. Therefore not only can the Conservative Party persuade those whom its policies will injure that it has no choice but, it can even blame Labour for this necessity. This is a political masterstroke, to create a social construct which leads to blaming one’s enemies for doing what you have always wanted to do anyway. It is the fulfilment of unfulfilled Thatcherite commitments. It creates a picture of reality whereby to mobilize to resist cuts affecting you is like mobilizing protest against the rain. There is no alternative.

How can this be resisted? The neoliberal right cannot be allowed to turn what started as a crisis caused by unregulated markets into a crisis of state expenditure calling for further neoliberalisation of the state. The state should be there to bail out those in need not bankers, but this government seems to want to reverse this principle. The social democratic left cannot be allowed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in a crisis which started as one to which showed that Thatcher’s economic model didn’t work. The answer is to question to discourse of the deficit, to say that the policies of the 30s will worsen the plite for society and the economy.