Cuts? You ain’t seen nothing yet

By Chris Williamson MP / @ChriswMP

The hyperbole surrounding the first 100 days of the ConDem coalition government has now passed.

It was a milestone that saw the media concentrating on the fact that two political parties are working together in Britain’s first coalition government since the Second World War. But the media didn’t highlight how the Liberal Democrats have become indistinguishable from the Conservative Party.

It’s a far cry from last year’s Liberal Democrat conference when Nick Clegg said:

“We know what happens when you simply squeeze budgets, across the board, until the pips squeak. We know, because we lived through it before, under the Conservatives. We remember the tumble-down classrooms, the pensioners dying on hospital trolleys, the council houses falling into total disrepair. We remember, and we say: never again.”

Yet, despite Clegg’s rhetorical criticisms of Conservative cuts, the Liberal Democrats have endorsed the fastest, deepest and most savage reduction in public spending since the 1930s.

Next month, Mr Clegg will attempt to reconcile his remarks when he addresses his conference in Liverpool. The word is he intends to urge Liberal Democrat supporters to simply celebrate the fact that they are in power.

Of course the truth is the Liberal Democrats are not really in power at all. Their cabinet members are merely occupying titular positions while their strings are manipulated by Conservative puppeteers.

After betraying everything the Liberal Democrats claimed to stand for, Nick Clegg’s comments betray an underlying contempt for the people who trusted him. Holding up five superficial cabinet members as an example of something to celebrate suggests that Nick Clegg thinks his supporters are stupid.

But far from being stupid, many people who voted for the Liberal Democrats in the general election are indignant that their votes helped to usher in a new Conservative era.

Support for the Liberal Democrats has been haemorrhaging away ever since they signed up to the coalition agreement and the Labour Party has seen an unprecedented increase in membership.

But the dwindling support for the Liberal Democrats is cold comfort when the country is about to be gripped by the most severe austerity measures in living memory.

And when it comes to cuts, my fear is we ain’t seen nothing yet. The Comprehensive Spending Review is due in the autumn and will set out where the Con/Dem coalition’s sweeping cutbacks will be made.

Leading economists are worried that the government’s policies will result in a double dip recession and a huge rise in unemployment. Consumer confidence is falling, people are fearful about losing their job and the National Institute of Economic and Social Research is predicting that last month’s encouraging economic figures will be short lived.

The Conservatives are not being honest with the British people. They are using the national deficit as cover for their ideological assault on what they describe as ‘big government’ and the Liberal Democrats to provide window dressing to legitimise Tory dogma.

But it’s worth considering what it is they want to abandon. It’s big government that is responsible for the NHS, providing care for elderly people, delivering education, putting police on our streets and protecting our children. It’s big government that supports local businesses through regional development agencies and it’s big government that saved the aerospace industry through the Export Credit Guarantee Department.

In short, big government is a good thing but David Cameron’s so-called ‘big society’ is a confidence trick to implement the 21st century equivalent of the poor law.

It doesn’t have to be this way. If we all stand together, we can defeat the cruel intentions of this callous ConDem coalition.