Dear
David & Gideon,
I
hope you are having a nice day. Actually I don't care. Fuck the
niceties, I'll just get to the point.
What
a lot of people are wondering is whether you are completely out of
touch with ordinary working people, or that you don't care about
them. I believe that it is both.
The Toxic Blend: Two Types Of Tory
First,
let's look your backgrounds. You are millionaires; as such it is
natural that you would want to protect your assets. There are broadly
two kinds of Tory. Those like yourselves are so privileged that you
have never had any need of the welfare state. You've never had to
survive on £71 a week Jobseeker's Allowance, a chunk of which must
go towards paying the rent because Housing benefits doesn't cover it.
Even with the most imaginative forms of sympathy, you just have no
idea what it is like. Sympathy can never be empathy. The other kind
of Tory are those like William Hague and David Davis, self-made men
from working class backgrounds. Hague and Davis do know what it is
like to be poor; however, their ability to empathise is compromised
by a tendency to universalise their experience. They are unusual;
most people are not highly intelligent, hyper-motivated
over-achievers like them, but they don't seem to realise this. Like
Margaret Thatcher and Norman Tebbit, the classic working class Tory
thinks to themselves “If I did it, why can't everyone else?”.
Like the chronic optimist puzzled by the clinically depressed, they
just can't relate to the poor and the benefits claimants.
These two kinds of Tory form a toxic blend; a class of people who are
opposed to the welfare state because they cannot relate to the people
it is their to protect.
The
'Big Lie'
The
budget provided ammunition to those who argue that you are not
uncaring but out of touch. By increasing VAT, a tax that hits the
poorest hardest, slashing benefits while simultaneously cutting taxes
for the very richest, you rewarded your class whilst punishing the
poorest so brazenly that for most people it defied belief. It doesn't
take a public relations guru to tell you that this looks bad. Even if
there was a possible world in which it was the right thing to do,
(there isn't) it looked so bad that only the most myopic would fail
to see that it was a suicidal move. But the counter-argument here,
from those who argue that you just don't care, is that you were
working on the
principle of the Big Lie. The idea here is that people would
think “Christ, that is so intuitively awful, so crassly wrong,
that you MUST know exactly what you are doing. You must be an
economic genius who knows something we don't, and this decision is so
crucially important for the future of our country that you are
prepared to look like an arrogant thieving toe-rag in order to get it
done”. The give-away is your use of weasel words like
“wealth creators” and “job creators” instead of “the rich”.
You use those words because you know how useful they are. This brings us into the real battle ground, the
real area in desperate need of scrutiny – the realm of ideology,
and the biggest single achievement of this coalition government so
far: successfully blaming a crisis of capitalism on the Left.
Myths
And Mantras Of The New Hegemony
I've got to hand it to you –
you've done an amazing job. With the help of your delivery
boys in the media and a Labour opposition too scared to fight back,
you've managed to convince virtually the whole country that the
economic state we are in is because Labour Spent Too Much. The Right
has never had a problem of pandering to the lowest common
denominator, never been afraid of underestimating the intelligence of
the public, while the historical mistake of the Left has been thinking it could win if only it
could get people to follow the logic of its arguments. The Right has
a genius for emotive and populist propaganda; this has been it's
crowning intellectual and psychological achievement. The following
mantras have been so comprehensively tattooed onto the brains of the
public that even many with Leftish sensibilities believe them. They are as follows:
The
debt crisis is because Labour spent too much; there have to be some
cuts, we are all in this together. We are in a debt crisis, and paying back the debt is the number one
priority.
As a proportion of GDP, Britain’s national debt has
been higher than it is now for 200 of the past 250 years. From 1918
to 1961 the UK national debt was over 100% of GDP. During that period
the government introduced the welfare state, the NHS, state pensions,
comprehensive education, built millions of council houses, and
nationalised a range of industries. The public sector grew and there
was economic growth.
Now you want to turn back the clock by dismantling the NHS, comprehensive education and
the welfare state.Your are not doing this because the country is on the
verge of economic collapse, you are doing it because you are
ideologically opposed to public services and the welfare state, and
committed to handing over more of our public assets to big business.
Before
the 2008 crisis, Labour's spending plans had been matched by the
Tories. The sudden huge increase in government debt was caused by the
necessity of bailing out the banks; if Gordon Brown hadn't done this,
there would have been no money in cash machines. His plan of action
was copied by countries the world over. The cause was a crisis of
capitalism, due to a poorly regulated global banking industry.
The
Household Budget Analogy
A
crucial part of the idealogical war that the Right is winning, is
the propagation of the Household
Budget Analogy. By comparing the UK economy to a household
budget you've terrified everyone into going along with austerity.
Household debt can be terrifying. But households are not
like economies. In an economy, you're spending is my income, and my
spending is your income. It is a two sided relationship; a household
is one-sided. Economies are dependent on two types of spending;
private spending and public (government) spending. As we are in a
recession, private businesses don't want to spend; they are wary of
investing, they hold onto their money. If governments do not step in and spend, the recession
continues. The Right always argues that if government shrinks away,
the private sector will automatically fill in the gap, providing the
services. This hasn't happened, isn't happening, and hasn't happened
historically. What got us out of previous depressions was government
spending. During World War II the USA's
national debt soared to 120% of GDP – nearly twice the size of
today’s US debt. The New Deal spending plan not only got them
out of the Great Depression but set the stage for a prolonged period
of sustained economic growth in the 50s and 60s. Massive investments
were made in science and technology, American workers were re-trained
and re-employed, private investment was encouraged, and consumer
purchasing power was increased. That 25-year post-war economic boom,
with the most rapid increase in living standards in our history,
would not have happened without government stimulus.
There
are plenty of excellent commentaries by celebrated
economists such as the Noble Prize winner Paul Krugman of the New York Times and Martin
Woolf of the Financial Times – hardly what you would call
Left-wingers - who are able to debunk the myths you propagate. (See
Appendix below). Some would argue that you should study their works.
But I believe that you already know them; you instead choose to
exploit people's ignorance with simplistic but powerful ideological
mantras.
Disaster
Capitalism Comes To Britain
So why, if you know that
the way out of a recession is government spending, and that a
scorched earth austerity policy will create a double-dip (now ensuing
triple-dip) recession and massive unemployment, why did you go ahead
with it? The answer is that you have used a crisis of capitalism to
further your ideological agenda. You oppose the welfare state, and
you have used this crisis to engineer popular consent for its
dismantling. This is a perfect example of the historical technique of
'Disaster Capitalism” brilliantly analysed in Naomi Klein's The
Shock Doctrine, arguing that sudden crises are intentionally
manipulated to push through extreme free market policies that were
otherwise not politically possible. In the name of promoting “freedom
and democracy”, a shady partnership between the CIA and Chicago
School Friedmanite economists succeeded in organising military coups
to topple democratically elected, stable, popularly supported
centre-Left Developmentalist governments in South America and beyond
in order to strip the publicly owned and tax-payer funded assets so
they could be sold to foreign multi-nationals at bargain prices.
In this tsunami of Corporatism, worker's rights, minimum wage and labor laws were dismantled,
dissenters rounded up, tortured and disappeared in their thousands, while a tiny few made a killing. The
destruction it wreaked was huge, the economic, political and human
costs were staggering but clearly quantified in Klein's forensic
analysis.
Now,
you guys won't get away with mass incarceration and torture, but you
don't need to – the financial crisis was a massive blessing for
you. The language of belt-tightening, the household budget analogy,
'clearing up Labour's mess','we're all in this together'; these have
worked brilliantly in convincing the people that this is all
necessary. And like the unreconstructed Marxists who insist that
the Stalinist atrocities and poverty of the Soviet experiment can't be evidence against the feasibility of central planning because it wasn't 'true Communism', and the the
Chicago School economists who explained away the chaos their policies
created by saying that they were somehow thwarted from implementing
the truly earth-scorching policies that would have resulted in
their vindication, the triple-dip recession we are entering is just
seen as evidence that we need yet more austerity. Like the
scientists who held onto their theory of the non-existent
Phlogiston in the face of the overwhelming evidence in favour of
Oxygen through continual ad-hoc readjustments to
their theory, where every piece of counter-evidence is selectively
reinterpreted to fit with their convictions, your propaganda for
re-election will be along the lines of “yes, it's tough, but we've got this far, it's
not long now, you can't change the Commander in the middle of a war –
stick with us and you'll see we're right – don't let Labour undo
all the progress we've made”.
Divide & Conquer: Benefit Fraud Vs The Tax Gap
You
believe in low taxes and looking after your own. You believe that the
private sector will provide where the public sector is cut back,
because that is what suits your economic interests. And if
the private sector fails to provide the public services, for you that's just the free market indicating the such services are not required. And you've nothing to lose there anyway; you don't want those services and if you're stuck in a corner you can just blame the previous government. You have pioneered a
divide and conquer strategy, turning working people against one
another by smearing benefit claimants as scroungers whilst saying and
doing nothing about the tax gap, even though benefit fraud is less
than 1% of the tax gap – the £25 billion in tax lost through tax
avoidance, £70 billion in tax evasion and £26 billion in tax
uncollected. (And there is that £6 billion that you wrote off for
your pals at Vodafone). In total that's £120 billion - more than
three-quarters of the annual deficit.
Housing Benefits: No Social Housing Means Taxpayers Subsidise The Rich
You propagate myths about
housing benefit: that it is a benefit for the unemployed, when in
fact only one in eight claimants is out
of work
(not a statistic that you'll find reported in most newspapers). The
majority of those who claim housing benefit, including the under-25s,
do so to compensate for paltry wages and extortionate rents. And because Housing Benefits, fixed at 90's rent prices by the faceless Rent
Service (to whom there is no appeal process) so rarely cover the
rent, the meagre Jobseeker's Allowance has to make up the shortfall.
(In my case the shortfall was £65 a month; my rent at a very modest
£315 a month, Housing Benefit only covered £250 of it). And because
there is so little social housing, these rents go to private
landlords. Housing benefit subsidises the wealthy while propagating low wages. That's right;
the people who clean your streets earn so little, and are charged so
much for their rent, that housing benefit has to top it up, and in an obscenely unjust cycle, the money is syphoned back to the rich via
the private rental market when it could and should be going towards public housing. You aim to cut housing benefits, with no
plans to build more affordable public housing. You talk about 'making
work pay' and 'incentivising work'. You do this by making sure
benefits are in insufficient to survive on, instead of making the
minimum wage a realistic living wage. You protect the right of banks
to pay bankers whatever they need to get the best talent; you thus
recognise that higher pay is the incentive to work. Therefore you
must realise that people will only work if it is worth them doing so.
For many with children, the cost of child care that full time work
necessitates undercuts any increase in earnings. What is the point of
working if working people do not have enough to live on? The only just way
out of this is to increase the minimum wage to a realistic Living Wage. But you won't do this, because it
is not in the interest of your class, your financiers, your family,
friends, your rich constituents in safe Tory seats.
Bring
Forth The Guillotine
And
here is where you may well run into trouble. I hope it doesn't come
to this, but it might. If enough people lose their jobs, and find
themselves trying to survive on benefits, and when the cuts in public
services really kick in this year of 2013, you may find yourselves on
the wrong side of the argument. The divide and conquer strategy only
works if the worse off are in a small, hopeless and disenfranchised minority. If things get bad enough it will engender solidarity. People will
question not just the logic of austerity, but more importantly, the
Right-wing hegemony. This hegemony has been carefully crafted over the
last few decades, and since 2008 it has gone into overdrive. It
consists of a raft of beliefs – that benefit claimants are
scroungers, that the ill and disabled are faking it, that public
workers are pampered whiners, that trade unions hold the country to
ransom, that the 'undeserving poor' are taking us all for a ride. But for every alleged free-rider at the bottom of society, there is a free-rider at
the top, born into wealth, creating no jobs, manufacturing nothing,
simply moving money around and avoiding taxation. But we don't hear about
them, because the largely Right-wing press is run by and funded by such
people.
Here,
for you, is the rub: for all your hatred of the welfare state, it may
be the only thing keeping you from the guillotine. In A History Of
Modern Britain, Andrew Marr suggests that the reason Britain is one
of the few European countries to have avoided revolution is because
the welfare state has buffered the worst injustices of capitalism.
When there was a powerful Left, a Keynsian market strategy and a
welfare state were the necessary table scraps that kept the people
sufficiently placated. Indeed, that is why many on the far-Left were
opposed to the welfare state; it prevents the exploited from fully
realising their exploitation; it prevents them from becoming class
conscious. It may do you well to consider if they are right. If you
dismantle the welfare state, there may be nothing standing between
you and the jobless, baying mob. 2013 may be your Poll Tax moment.
Bring it on, I say.
Goodnight and sweet dreams boys.
Appendix
Addressing
the ‘tax gap’ is a vital part of tackling the deficit. Figures
produced for PCS by the Tax Justice Network show that £25 billion is
lost annually in tax avoidance and a further £70 billion in tax
evasion by large companies and wealthy individuals.
An additional £26
billion is going uncollected. Therefore PCS estimates the total
annual tax gap at over £120 billion (more than three-quarters of the
annual deficit!). It is not just PCS calculating this; leaked
Treasury documents in 2006 estimated the tax gap at between £97 and
£150 billion.
If
we compare the PCS estimate of the tax gap with the DWP estimate of
benefit fraud, we can see that benefit fraud is less than 1% of the
total lost in the tax gap (see diagram above).
Sources:
