Or perhaps not.
Last week Head Teachers staged a march to inform government that the cuts in school funding had reached such a crisis point that they could no longer provide decent education. Heads aren’t known for their political activism. It takes an extraordinary level of concern to get them out marching on the streets. They were ignored and cynically told that education spending has never been higher. Which is only true if you ignore inflation and don’t look at spending per child. That has gone drastically down. That’s not my idea of ending austerity.
The situation is worse when it comes to caring for the elderly or the vulnerable. Local authorities, including virtually all of the Conservative run local authorities, are telling central government that they can’t afford to look after those who need care properly. Elderly people who can’t get up their stairs or get into their bath or feed themselves regularly are being neglected for long periods of time because there are too many other people with more urgent needs. Funding for local authorities has been cut by over half in real terms since 2008 and up and down the country either their care services or their finances are on the verge of collapse. Conservative run Northampton council has already gone bankrupt to all intents and purposes and there are several others teetering on the brink. That’s not my idea of ending austerity.
In the NHS the situation appears to be a little better. Spending is genuinely going to go up in the next 3 years in line with expected inflation. But not in line with expected rises in demand for services as the population ages and technology makes new treatments available. And not sufficiently to cover the additional expenses of losing a lot of qualified nurses and doctors who have left the service because of uncertainties over their post Brexit visas. Ten years of significant cuts in real terms funding per operation are being followed by three years of much smaller cuts. We have therefore seen record waiting times for a summer and across the NHS staff and their managers are dreading winter and have no real idea of how they would cope with a flu epidemic. That’s not my idea of ending austerity.
In the private sector millions of poorly paid workers have seen the removal of all significant rights at work and live with a complete loss of any job security. Zero hours contracts and forced self-employment have proliferated. To fix that the government is to allow workers to request, repeat request, a proper contract. Millions of people can therefore be laid off tomorrow without any income and the government has held a review into the problem and decided that it wants to do nothing of significance to help them. That’s not my idea of ending austerity.
Should those zero hours contract workers lose their job or get ill or suffer mental illness or live in an area where their work pays too little to cover the rent then their only option in most parts of the country is to throw themselves on the mercy of universal credits. An aggressive regime of constant pressure to search out any kind of employment accompanied by long delays in payments that generate serious money worries is not exactly the best way to support someone back to work who is feeling vulnerable and underconfident. Nor is allowing them to be preyed on by legal loan sharks as their only method of surviving until their payment comes through late. That’s not my idea of ending austerity.
There is, however, one area of life where austerity does seem to have ended. Banks are back to profitability. They are back to creating complex new financial devices which enable them to gamble with customers’ money. They are laundering large amounts of cash from Russia and from Saudi Arabia through the city of London. They are back to paying out large dividends and even larger executive salaries.
Ten years after the deregulated chaos of the London financial markets helped to generate the longest lasting and biggest financial crash in history the ordinary people in Britain are still living with the every day impact of the huge cutbacks in government funding that followed. Living standards are still not back to where they were in 2008, unless of course you happen to be one of the very rich. One trillion pounds was spent on bailing banks out whilst the rest of us were told to tighten our belts.
So when the Prime Minister tells us that she is going to put an end to austerity we are entitled to be cynical about what she really means to do. Does she perhaps intend to foster a “give-away” budget and then call a General Election on the back of it? Is this more evidence that she wants to stagger through to some form of Brexit compromise and then go to the country claiming to be an economic success and a source of strength and stability in difficult times?
If so I can offer one piece of consolation. When a Prime Minister says something as stupid as “Crisis – what crisis” or “We’ve put an end to boom and bust” it rarely goes down well with the public who know the reality. It tends to result in them getting kicked out at the next election. “Austerity is over” might just prove a real hostage to fortune for Theresa May. She might yet get her just deserts for promising us “Strong and stable” government before delivering a chaotic disunited shambles and promising us “An end to austerity” before presiding over a Brexit deal that pushes interest rates through the roof and leaves large numbers of those who voted Conservative last time round struggling to pay their mortgages.