These children of Thatcher are free to cut, cut, cut – and they’re loving every minute

• These children of Thatcher are free to cut, cut, cut, and they’re loving every minute

  Polly Toynbee

  

  Polly Toynbee

  George Osborne and David Cameron have been waiting for this moment – to take us back to a pre-war, pre-welfare government
  

  

  George Osborne arriving at Downing Street. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

  Thursday 21 May 2015 11.51 BST Last modified on Thursday 21 May 2015 14.58 BST

  
  

  Every new chancellor wants to set their own budget after an election. But George Osborne isn’t a new chancellor. He inherits his own 2015-16 plan, and yet last night he told the Confederation of British Industry he will re-open it to cut more, tearing up every departmental and agency budget after contracts are signed half way through the year.
  A question: what is there in his spending plans that he dared not announce to voters before the election? It was already a piece of remarkable democratic arrogance that David Cameron and Osborne refused to say where the £12bn of benefit cuts would fall – and dereliction on the part of all the broadcasting interviewers not to hammer so hard on this one point with every minister in their studios so as to force them to reply. But we shall see now, too late, exactly where the axe is falling on all the unprotected departments.
  The big question is why? Politically, the promise of a rapid deficit abolition, returning to surplus by April 2018, was a sharp challenge to Labour: beat that! Labour wouldn’t and didn’t because it’s brutal, needless and economically dangerous. Now that Osborne has won, he doesn’t need to do it either. Last time, he missed his target by half. He let the stock of debt rise far higher than it ever was under Labour. And he lost the AAA credit rating without which he said we’d become Greece – but the sky didn’t fall in. Markets would have slaughtered a Labour government for that, but markets forgive Conservatives almost anything. They would worry not one iota if Osborne again decided to slow down. A promise to keep the deficit falling would be ample.
  The only reason Osborne is putting his foot on the accelerator is because he wants to and because he can. Who’s going to stop him now? This is a dash to shrink the state, squeeze everything, contract out what can’t be cut and return, as his own Office for Budget Responsibility said, to a pre-war, pre-welfare state, bare-bones government. These children of Thatcher are ideologues to the core, often without even knowing it. They have breathed in from infancy a “common sense” assumption that the state is always wasteful, private and market always good, the collective worse than the individualist. As Thatcher said, you will always spend the pound in your pocket better than any government will.
  Now he tests that – possibly to destruction. All but the NHS, overseas aid and schools will be cut by a third, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Whitehall itself could lose 100,000 staff. Expect more of the west coast mainline contracting-type fiascos as capability is lost just when civil servants need to be canny enough to outwit the gigantic corporations contracting so much.
  

  Advertisement

  Politically, within the government, this won’t all be easy either. Such deep cuts suggest state-shrinkers should be amalgamating departments – the Department for Business and DCMS have long been under threat, along with reuniting the Home Office and justice. But Cameron needs the jobs: patronage is key to keeping his tiny majority happy. How will his party handle deep cuts to defence, already below the 2% of GDP Nato demands? How will Michael Gove and Theresa May cut prisons and police again, as court delays lengthen and prisons burst at the seams? This time, permanent secretaries may be less acquiescent: many should say no, minister to cuts beyond what’s safe or sane. New ministers arriving full of bright ideas will find nothing happens and no one is there when they pull on levers to build the new infrastructure Osborne promises: create new apprenticeships, fix broadband and so on. His northern powerhouse councils may wake up to find that all they have had devolved to them is the axe and the blame – not just for social care but now for the NHS too. This government’s record for competence is slender. Gove’s record in education suggests there is a rhinoceros in a china shop at justice.
  A government that has won an unexpected majority, casting its opposition into a state of existential crisis, can do whatever it damn well pleases. Five years is longer ahead than anyone can imagine. Last time, Osborne’s 2010 austerity budget stifled over 1% of growth at a stroke: expect similar results as the same experiment is repeated. Last time one reckless bungle followed another, including the omnishambles budget, forcing U-turns and embarrassments: expect many more in this triumphally reckless mood. Cameron’s government has nothing to fear – except its own errors.
  copy  http://www.theguardian.com/