The unnecessary pain and austerity of a Conservative government

By David Beeson

There is something immensely attractive in reliability as a quality among politicians. Recently, the Conservative leadership has proved itself highly reliable and I for one have been deeply grateful to them for it.

They have, each time they opened their mouths in recent months, with complete reliability proclaimed their unshakeable commitment to a policy of bleak misery. Again and again they’ve told us that if elected, they’ll cut and cut until the deficit is under control. They will hold an emergency budget within fifty days of coming to office. And they’ll cut and cut and go right on cutting.

It’s hard to understand why they’re so obsessed with the deficit. It’s likely to reach 70% of GDP next year. Immediately after the Second World War, it stood at 230%. That didn’t kill us – we simply saw it as the price to pay to guarantee our political survival. Now we’re being asked to pay a much smaller price to guarantee our economic survival. It’s time the Tories learned to take that seriously.

In any case, what they’re proposing is cuts before we get out of recession. They keep calling for more teaching of history in schools. They should learn some themselves. In 1933, Franklin Roosevelt massively increased spending in the US, allowing the deficit to rip. As a result, the economy started moving again and unemployment began to fall. In 1937, he judged – wrongly – that the US was healthy again and decided it was time to cut. Far too soon. He pushed the economy straight back into recession.

That’s exactly what the Tories are promising us. Cuts before the economy is safely growing again – so a longer and deeper recession, and of course higher unemployment. But this kind of rational analysis requires a capacity for sober thought that probably doesn’t find much place in the Bullingdon Club.

In the meantime, the Tories are making it clear that they are going to wreak an extraordinary level of misery on us all. This may seem an unusual way of promoting yourself to the electorate. Many voters really quite like the idea of being able to get healthcare at reasonable levels when they need it, of ensuring that kids are given some kind of education, of being able to call on an effective police force if necessary. All this may seem dispensable to the Tories; services they can safely cut, but a lot of us like to think of them as significant contributors to the good life.

There’s no reason to suppose that if they get in they actually won’t do these things. They always have in the past. Remember last time round? They spent billions on what they called ‘GP fundholding’ but hospital waiting lists just kept growing – it was not unusual for people badly in need of surgery to wait over two years for their operation. Two years of pain and discomfort and circumscribed life.

Their dogmatic commitment to ill-thought out privatisation left us with barely functioning and nearly bankrupt railways.

Sometimes the pain they caused didn’t even have an economic justification but was motivated only by ideology: Section 28 was a measure whose only possible effect, had it actually had any effect, would have been to harm the position of gays in society.

It’s particularly interesting to contrast what they’re promising with what’s happened under the present government. Within a few years, waiting times for hospital treatment had fallen in England to a maximum of eighteen weeks. We have a proper train service again. Gays, as LabourList so rightly pointed out with the example of Chris Smith, enjoy an unprecedented level of equality in society.

But of course the Tories are changing their tune. They’ve seen their opinion poll lead plummet and that seems to have made them much less reliable in their public pronouncements. In fact, they’re back to their old ways, tossing out shiny new promises: a 10% reduction in government’s carbon footprint in a year, rewards for recycling, all sorts of dreams and mirages. We seem to be back to spin.

We just need to remember that we’ve had a few months of the truth. What they have in store for us is pain and austerity, much of it unnecessary. If they’re changing their tune today, that’s just because they’ve decided that honesty isn’t the best policy when it comes to trying to get elected. What we need to do is to learn the lesson of what they were saying before. Their weakening position in the polls rather suggests that quite a few voters already have.