Well here they are… the cuts we’ve all been waiting for, provoking a huge outcry – that the Tories spending cuts are ideological, that the right wing aren’t taking a hatchet to the nation because of the defecit but because they believe that a smaller state is a better thing.
Photo by Ssoosay.
But what do we mean when we accuse them of making cuts based on ideology? The word just means a body of ideas. Ideas about what? I’ve got a sneaking suspicion people aren’t fully sure what they’re attacking. ‘Keep your friends close and your enemies closer’ mutters Michael Corleone in the Godfather… and so in this spirit, lets go on a little journey together into the Neoliberal badlands, on the trail of what makes dem Tories tick.
Ah, lets begin with Maggie. The last time we saw cuts to rival these was under her leadership in the 1980’s. Her mission? Simple. The country needed a good shake up. We were too ineffecient, the economy was stagnant. And so she rollled up her sleeves and turned the UK economy over to the free market whilst simultaneously weakening the power of people to protest. It was a decade of a mass sell-off of all the things that the nation owned – transport, water, power, houses, the whole job lot … and then when people started to protest, she went after the Unions like a bat out of hell. But why?
Influenced massively by Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman Thatcher’s government was a proud champion of 1980’s neoliberalism. The idea was to privatise the world, giving everyone a chance to buy in. Based on a rabid belief in private sector growth, low taxes, weak unions and bargain basement wages, the government ripped into public spending, practically destroying whole communities in industrial areas that were no longer profitable. But at the same time other parts of the nation were booming; the 1980’s was a time of spectacular success and greed, spawing such characters as Harry Enfield’s ‘loadsa money.’ It was a massively unequal society.
So where was Friedrich Hayek coming from? Why concoct such a seemingly heartless theory in the first place? Strangely enough it was because he was a passionate believer in democracy and fiercely opposed to the corruption and stagnation he saw in socialist states. He believed that modern societies were too complex to manage by a single government and that you had to shrink and deregulate the state to in order to free up the power of individuals to build a successful country.
From such little acorns monster oak trees grow. Ever since the 80’s the Tory party has been deeply rooted in Hayek. He’s a gift to them. He made it all right to for the right to promote selfishness, greed and lack of concern for society, all on the basis of the 'rights of the individual.' For the modern Conservative party the market is king. Services are to be outsourced, borrowing and speculation boosted sky high and all the resources of the state sold off at rock bottom prices to let the market flood in. And so welcome boom and bust, dismembered communities, ravaged estates… but at the same time welcome money, money, money. Not for everyone… but for enough people to keep you in power.
The Tories make a calculation, you see. And it’s a clever one. As long as they’ve got the business community and the private sector and the people who profit from it onboard, they’ve got enough votes to keep themselves in power. Never mind that the rest of the country is on its knees. It’s a free market and the only the strongest will win. The trouble is when you define the strongest as basically the most greedy - you end up with a whole bunch of people acting like this...
And right there is the crux of the problem. Real life doesn’t work like this. Nature works by co-operation, by communication, by sharing. No successful community lasts long with the ‘strongest’ ripping the guts out of the weakest. You run out of steam pretty if you go down that route. No more guts left, you see. For a community to be truly successful, it’s co-operation that really works. Dull old mouldy being nice to each other, working with others co-operation. Not Coming To A Cinema Near You and definitely not starring Vin Diesel.
And so back to Ideology. And the Tories. And what we mean when we say their cuts are ideological. I think what we are attacking is their belief that the free market (a system that has nearly bankrupted us all) is the best way to run our lives. We are attacking their belief that it’s all right to sideline the inefficient, the slow, the elderly or the poor. We are attacking their belief that government should be about money and allowing business to do what it pleases as long as we’re allowed to lick up a few crumbs. We are attacking their belief that the free market approach makes our society more democratic. But most of all we are standing up for our beliefs, that good government should share resources equally, redistribute wealth fairly, and represent all of us, not just a priveleged few.
