The Conservatives won big last December in large part because of their willingness to trash their record in office. Not only was Boris Johnson able to paint himself as an outsider and an insurgent, banishing the austerity rhetoric that helped Theresa May lose her majority in 2017, but he was going to invest big: 20,000 police officers, 40 new hospitals, and 50,000 more NHS staff. Never mind that these commitments were necessary because of a decade of needless austerity his party enacted. And the fact these figures were grossly misleading wasn’t important either. With a media circus rarely working to inform voters on policy nuances, such details can, and often do, get drowned out in the noise. What mattered instead was that this would be a government spending to invest in infrastructure, improving public services and as Johnson triumphantly declared on the morning after the election ‘unite and level up’. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Much has already been written about the Conservatives' willingness to engage in culture wars since last year’s election. But a recap is instructive. From invented threats about the BBC Proms banning ‘Rule Britannia’, deliberately misconstruing the Black Lives Matter movement and the so-called ‘War on Woke’, it is clear that this government knows that cultural defeats can be intoxicating, politically effective and good for polling ratings. Rather than trying to bridge divides between those who voted Leave and those who voted Remain, those in cities and those in towns, the young and the old, this government knows where its base is, and knows who they can blame for society’s ills. It lies with the ‘activist lawyers’ representing asylum seekers, the refugees crossing the Channel in search of a better life, and those anarchists toppling the statue of slaver Edward Colston.
‘Don’t kill your gran’ implores a sneering Matt Hancock, with Boris Johnson warning young people against ‘complacency’ during the pandemic, after refusing to condemn his chief advisor for travelling across the country to his second home when he should have been self isolating. This incident helped undermine the Government’s strategy, messaging and weakened the public enforcement according to police. And yes, this is the same Matt Hancock who was recently pictured in a chauffeur-driven car without a face mask. As if entering a lockdown too late, ignoring SAGE’s advice for a national ‘circuit break’ lockdown, failing to have adequate PPE and continually outsourcing untendered contracts to failing companies is unrelated to the effectiveness of handling the Coronavirus pandemic. Far from wanting to unite the country and build consensus, this government knows it can shift the blame to others to distract from its constant failings.
Better the discourse focus on how the Government is willing to stick it to Brussels than focus on what has gone wrong with Test and Trace, or Dido Harding’s incompetence, or another contract going to one of Cummings’ mates. Easier to fan the flames of a culture war and unite a broad coalition around a supposed enemy than address substantive material conditions for the majority of working people. It is too convenient a way of turning attention away from their litany of failings. It is a tactic utilised in the US by the Republicans with the help of Fox News. The similarities between the reality TV leaders, Johnson and Trump, wanting to focus on the unreal, are plain to see. Rather than ‘uniting’, the Tories are on more comfortable terrain playing their old favourite: divide and rule.
‘Levelling up’, the bold new approach outlined by Boris Johnson, which was supposed to undo four decades of prioritising London and letting the North, parts of the West Midlands, Wales and the North East decline due to what Gary Younge calls the 'four horsemen of late-stage capitalism: inequality, austerity, deregulation and privatisation'. It is a phrase regularly parroted by Conservative MPs, and credulous journalists asking softball questions about how it will be achieved. The truth is that it won’t be.
The government and Greater Manchester’s local authorities and metro-mayor, Andy Burnham, have been unable to reach an accord over lockdown relief. The area now enters into tier three – where pubs not serving substantial meals will have to close, household mixing is banned with a variety of other organisations compelled to shut. £5m was the figure at the heart of the dispute, miniscule in terms of government spending. Burnham wanted a more generous furlough scheme as was originally provided for. However, despite Sunak previously saying he would do ‘whatever it takes’, both he and the government are keen to avoid a return of the nationwide furlough. Burnham, quite rightly, pointed out that those on the minimum wage would need 80% of their wage covered, not the 66% the government is offering. The Government, instead, claims that Universal Credit can top up wages. Yet it takes at least six weeks to receive payment, with the local furlough scheme not open for applications until December, meaning it could be months until people receive any money.
Even before the pandemic, the UK’s workforce had seen a decade of lost wage growth - the biggest squeeze on incomes since the Napoleonic Wars. 12 million people in the UK have ‘low financial resilience’, with BAME people and the young overrepresented amongst that number. 15% of people have no savings at all. Even if it’s topped up by Universal Credit, losing 33% of a wage is going to plunge a lot of people into some dreadful circumstances.
The financial package secured for Greater Manchester to go into tier 3 is a paltry £22m, for a population of 2.8million. As a comparison, Robert Jenrick’s constituency of Newark received £25m under the Towns Fund, for a population of 72,407. That works out to £7.85 per person in Greater Manchester, and £237 per person in Newark. The Secretary of State who helped billionaire Richard Desmond avoid a £45m community levy to a cash strapped London borough perfectly encapsulates how this Conservative government sees fit to run the country. Pork barrelling and accepting donations from billionaires who want to avoid tax are to be prioritised over providing adequate financial support and relief to lock down during a deadly pandemic.
Instead of providing relief and adequately subsidizing the wages of the poorest and those directly affected by the closing of viable businesses, this ‘levelling up’ government is paying Test and Trace consultants £7k a day. Consultants on these extortionate contracts are pocketing our money when it should be going to adequately furloughed workers; so much for Tory fiscal responsibility and the efficient private sector. Michael Gove indefensibly defends this as ‘value for money’.
This ‘levelling up’ agenda is not concerned with guaranteeing free school meals throughout school holidays in England, after families had been issued with vouchers during the spring lockdown and through the summer break with a ‘Covid food fund’. In the midst of a pandemic, where 32% of families have seen a drop in their income, with 900,000 children being registered for free school meals since March, this Government have decided it is indeed time for austerity again. George Osborne’s austerian mantra of there being no money left returns, like the Ghost of Christmas Past. There’s no money to avoid child poverty, but there will be £100bn to ‘expand Covid-19 testing’, presumably shorthand for further NHS privatisations by stealth.
All of this is shocking yet hardly surprising given Boris Johnson urged us months ago to show our appreciation and clap for ‘wealth creators, capitalists and financiers’. The PM repeated his assertion in trickle down economics at the Conservative Party’s conference, with his speech arguing that ‘we must be clear that there comes a moment when the state must stand back and let the private sector get on with it’. The past four decades have been an experiment in the state standing back whilst the private sector 'gets on with it'. Whether that is its failure to stockpile PPE, or Deloitte losing tests at Chessington World of Adventures, to the on-going calamity of Serco’s management of the Test and Trace system. The Thatcherite dogma that has let the free market get on with it, helping to prop it up when things go wrong like the financial crash, is the precise reason why large swathes of the country are dealing with poverty, deprivation and underinvestment. Regional inequality in the UK is the worst in Western Europe. Left to the free market, the gap between wealthiest and poorest will only increase.
After all, nowhere went as far or fast in the process of privatisation as the UK, with 40% of all privatisations undertaken by OECD countries between 1980 and 1996 occurring in the UK. The result being that of the 10 poorest regions in Europe, 7 are in the UK. Letting the private sector ‘get on with it’, is what led to the gaping chasm of inequality in wealth and income that exists in the first place. Letting the free market extract more wealth and income from workers and the public will only lead to further levelling down, in spite of the Government’s rhetoric to the contrary.
Adding to this is the chancellor’s obsession with debt. Sunak has warned of ‘hard choices’ to protect the public finances to get debt ‘back under control’. At a time of historically low borrowing, when economists warn that either cutting spending or raising taxes would choke off Britain’s economic recovery and damage future income, Sunak seems set to follow in Osborne’s footsteps. Never mind that the IMF and the World Bank are advocating stimulus over austerity, with economists being unworried about Britain’s debt. The UK’s sluggish barely recovery for the past decade should be instructive here, with economists noting that public debt is not a concern when interest rates are well below the economy’s growth rate. Only when interest rates and inflation start rising substantially due to excess demand should the deficit be considered. Talk of ‘balancing the books’ as Sunak outlined is premature and will harm the recovery as tax rises are anticipated. It will do nothing to help those in regions that are gripped by poverty and yet here we are again. The ideology of a shrunken state and smaller public sector is more important than jobs, growth or wellbeing.
Rather than level up, this government’s planned cutting of the already meagre and insufficient universal credit by £1000 a year shows this government wants to level down. Analysis by the Resolution Foundation shows the hit would fall directly and disproportionately on families in areas the government promised to ‘level up’, 62% of working age households in Blackpool South, and 44% in Great Grimsby, Birmingham Northfield and West Bromwich West. The move could affect 6 million households, and is forecast to push 700,000 households into poverty at a time of rising unemployment. It is estimated to result in levels of unemployment support falling to its lowest real-terms level since 1991.
These gaping holes between the Government’s rhetoric and the reality should be fodder for the Left. It is clear that, at least for now, Starmer’s Labour does not see fit to speak in terms of class interest, preferring to point out some of the inconsistencies between the Tories’ rhetoric and their policies, focusing on the Government's lack of competence. This is partly understandable, in a time of national crisis, where the one thing that the public loathe more than incompetence are politicians seen to be ‘playing politics’. It is also hard to imagine legitimate concerns about class interests being reported in a neutral and balanced way given the state of print and broadcasting media in this country, and the way that the last Labour leader was reported on when doing so. However, the longer Labour fails to make the case for a coherent alternative, pointing out the Tory lies about ‘levelling up’, the harder it will be to be to seize the narrative, and actually regain the votes of those in places that are in desperate need of ‘levelling up’. The longer the discourse is focused on cultural issues, where the Tories can play divide and rule, stoking up culture wars and focusing on the unreal, thereby splitting a potentially election winning coalition of Labour’s, the harder it will be to dislodge this band of charlatans.
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