Pass me my Autumn Statement Alka-Seltzer

With the Autumn Statement tree looking rather forlorn, the disappointing presents unwrapped and the hangovers kicking in, it’s time for us to survey the wreckage find some way of getting on with our lives. Personally I preferred the Autumn Statement when it was less commercial.

Classifying December as “autumn” is one of the more obvious ways in which politicians are out of touch with the general public – along with the commons’ unedifying jeering, stomach-churning machismo and bad jokes. Still, I’m almost admiring of Osborne’s decision to finance a mission to Mars simply as a way of setting up a gag about the Labour Party (“the red planet is a barren wasteland” LOL). Who said there’s no money left?

I’d love to write a forensic examination of the Autumn Statement, but to do that I’d have to feel at least some enthusiasm about it. Instead I just see it as politics at its most futile. Take the proposal for post-graduate student loans of up to £10,000: this was announced by the Chancellor with a kind of smugness, as though it was some great progressive leap forward for British education. Never mind the fact that free higher education was so recent in this country that people starting university now were alive when it was still around. Apparently our national ambitions are so wanting that getting £10,000 in debt to do a masters is something to be celebrated.

More broadly we could look at the fact that the OBR predicts that within a decade, public spending will be at its lowest rate for 80 years. There’s our badge of honour right there: we’ll now be spending less on schools, hospitals, community programmes, shelters for the homeless and the arts than we have for nearly a century. And we are supposed to trumpet this miserly display of our own thriftiness as “efficient,” “economical” or a thousand other robotic terms.

I was disgusted by the way the government benches deliberately tried to use Ed Balls’ speech impediment against him when he responded to the Chancellor (if you’re wondering why people don’t like politicians, look no further than that juvenile display of cruelty), but overall I was disappointed with Labour’s performance both during the Autumn Statement and Prime Ministers’ Questions beforehand. Labour focused on the deficit; and it’s good to point out Osborne’s plan is failing on its own terms, but there so much more than that needs to be said. Where is the vision for society, for a better future? As Class Chair Steve Hart puts it, where was the vision to “prioritise growth in living standards and investment over false shibboleths like the deficit”?

As I wrote for Class yesterday: in their daily lives, people care about quality of life, relationships, communities, mental and physical health, and freedom from poverty. And yet, it’s almost viewed as weakness to talk about politics in anything other than the most hard line economic terms. With the deficit, as with immigration, there seems to be an ever-hardening, narrowing consensus. And the best thing you can say about that consensus is that it’s deeply miserly; the worst is that it is actively damaging communities and fomenting an ugly society.

Things don’t have to be this way. I should know; I work for a policy think tank that puts forward proposals for a more progressive society all the time. But right now, as you can tell, I’m a little too cross to articulate a utopian vision. Pass me my Autumn Statement Alka-Seltzer; I’m going back to bed.

Ellie Mae O’Hagan is the Media and Communications Officer at Class