I co-signed this letter published in the Guardian this morning:
Seven years of austerity has destroyed lives. An estimated 30,000 excess deaths can be linked to cuts in NHS spending and the social care crisis in 2015 alone. The number of food parcels given to impoverished Britons has grown from tens of thousands in 2010 to over a million. Children are suffering from real-terms spending cuts in up to 88% of schools. The public sector pay cap has meant that millions of workers are struggling to make ends meet.
Alongside the mounting human costs, austerity has hurt our economy. The UK has experienced its weakest recovery on record and suffers from poor levels of investment, leading to low productivity and falling wages. This government has missed every one of its own debt reduction targets because austerity simply doesn't work.
The case for cuts has been grounded in ideology and untruths. We've been told public debt is the outcome of overspending on public services rather than bailing out the banks. We've been told that while the government can find money for the DUP, we cannot afford investment in public services and infrastructure. We've been told that unless we “tighten our belts” we'll saddle future generations with debt — but it's the onslaught of cuts that is punishing an entire generation.
Given the unprecedented economic uncertainty posed by Brexit negotiations and the private sector's failure to invest, we cannot risk exacerbating an already anaemic recovery with further public spending cuts. We've reached a dangerous tipping point. Austerity has failed the British people and the British economy. We demand the chancellor ends austerity now.
Joseph Stiglitz Professor, Columbia University
Ha-Joon Chang Professor, University of Cambridge
David Graeber Professor of anthropology, LSE
Ann Pettifor Director, Prime Economics
Danny Dorling Professor, University of Oxford
Saskia Sassen Professor, Columbia University
Sir Richard Jolly Emeritus professor, Institute of Development Studies
Mike Savage Co-director of International Inequalities Institute, London School of Economics
David Blanchflower Professor of economics, Dartmouth College
Richard Murphy Director of Tax Research UK, City, University of London
Kate Pickett Professor of epidemiology, University of York
Richard G Wilkinson Emeritus professor of public health, University of Nottingham
And many others
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I would be very surprised if Hammond would do this.
It is very simple Phil: everyone’s income (benefits or pay) is someone else’s pay. Do you get it?
And even if he did – the Tories would do exactly what Thatcher did in the early 80’s after Brixton et al – quietly move away from the policies they had advocated whilst still proclaiming to support them and only then after some time deny that they ever thought that way.
I’m already picking up in Housing that the Tories are taking a softer line on the U35 rent allowance issues and even HCA grant fates for affordable/social housing might be going up.
But it maybe too late. I hope so. But so much for the progressive to capitalise on.
Pilgrim, my dear chap,
You say you will be … “very surprised if Hammond would do this.”
I will be very surprised if the Hammond budget does anything at all beyond a bit of cosmetic tinkering.
I am expecting to be disappointed and even I expect to be disappointed when I see his proposals.
More to the point Andy, the issue is how the Left work together and capitalise on this uncaring harshness.
If only
Labour voted to leave the EU last night
Why, oh why, oh why?
To believe that we mustn’t leave debts for future generations – when those debts are only unreal government created money, but it’s fine to leave for future generations everything from holes in the road to a shortage of doctors, teachers, libraries and decent affordable housing, all things that ARE decidedly real, is, literally, complete madness.
It is regression not progress.
The children who, through no fault of their own, grow up undernourished and in poverty are literally storing up trouble for future generations that will in turn take decades to put right.
So much polishing is now going on that my pitchfork has acquired rather a menacing glint.
🙂
That’s a great comment. Will put on Facebook.
Never mind glints – I’ve got two pitchforks – one for backup.
Very good comment, @Peter May.
Apparently Hammond told Marr there are no unemployed people (later modified), so presumably austerity worked in his world view and everything’s fine – just the small matter of Brexit to sort out, but that’s coming along nicely. http://www.thenational.scot/news/15670918.Hammond_claims___39_there_are_no_unemployed_people__39__as_SNP_urge_him_to_ditch____failed_Tory_dogma____in_Wednesday___s_Budget/#comments-anchor
Someone commented that what he meant to say was: in his circle there are no unemployed.
To be fair, what Hammonds said, in context, albeit admittedly inelegantly, was that technological change means the end of some jobs, but it creates others. There are tens thousands of people doing jobs today that literally did not exist a decade or two ago. And more productively too boot.
He specifically mentioned the absence of a cohort of long-term unemployed shorthand typists, who lost their jobs when people started using computers to do their own word processing. Which may be true, as far as it goes, as long as there are other opportunities and the people affected have the skills to take up them up.
The decades of long-term depression in some parts of the country (former pit villages, mill towns, industrial towns) shows that everything is not necessarily so rosy.
A little like Brexit, austerity is a self-inflicted wound that impoverishes almost everyone.
Inelegantly?
Really?
Incompetently, surely?
“…… in his circle there are no unemployed”.
Au contraire G Hewitt.
What “Someone [should have] commented [was] that what he meant to say was:” most of the government and Parliament are unemployed at present because the only thing of consequence that is going on is Brexit. And that only seems to involve David (Dickie) Davis the one-man-band, the pied piper whistling (as per Boris’s suggestion) all our children to perdition.
Good letter, Richard.
I would have signed that too if I’d been asked.
As long as you and the other signatories are not holding your breath awaiting the outcome, that’s fine Richard, as I wouldn’t want to loose you or anyone else on that list to asphyxiation.
Seriously, it isn’t going to end. It’s the new normal. Perhaps a bit of tweaking around the edges dressed up as something else to maintain the mantle of ideological purity. But a government that can’t fund the NHS appropriately despite its obvious impending collapse; that can’t admit Universal Credit has and is creating untold suffering and is likely the worst policy disaster since the Poll Tax; is clearly set on and wishes for hard Brexit but is too cowardly to say so; and with a Prime Minister who (shades of Tony Blair) takes her lead from anything the editor of the Daily Mail promotes (because she knows her survival depends on it), is never going to drop austerity.
So, no change until we have a change of government and as I’ll bet that doesn’t happen until after we crash out of the EU they’ll be other far more urgent matters to deal with. Ultimately, we’re in a very nasty place which is going to get a whole lot nastier – except for the few – before we’re in a position to start repairing the damage done since 2010. And being realistict that may take at least a generation.
Ivan
No breath being held
But I believe in change
And I think doing so is a lot more rational than those who believe in the status quo, which is the one thing we can be sure is not sustainable
I don’t know when we will get change, but I remain confident we will and I intend to be around to see it
Richard
And climate change is not going away.
It is rather hard to be optimistic at the moment.
Ivan Horrocks,
sadly, that’s the most perceptive and frank comment I’ve read so far in this somewhat gloomy conversation. The current austerity really does have to end somehow and soon!
V. Harris
You’re probably preaching to the choir, having that letter in the Guardian, which incidentally still prefers handwringing to any real action to correct the evils of neo-liberalism, but well done for keeping up the anti-austerity narrative anyway.
Perhaps a bit more detail on exactly *why* and *how* austerity can be ended without ‘increasing our debt’ may not have gone amiss?
But maybe that wouldn’t have achieved consensus among the signatories!
I think you may have found a hammer and a nail
I did not draft the letter
I agreed to sign it
[…] tax abuse and real increases in taxes on wealth. I seriously doubt either will happen. I also want an end to austerity and again expect to be […]
What baffles me, is why the informed commentary that you and your colleagues (and commentators on this blog) so eloquently promote, so clearly have zero impact, not only on the government, to be expected, but with the Andrew Marrs of this world who still whitter on about “where will the money come from”.
It’s hard not to despair. We can cram more than the computing power that took us to the Moon into a mobile phone but we still resist any notion that austerity is naught but an unforgivable myth.
I have endless conversations with friends, and my MP, who simply smile – the “there,there” variety – and expect, are utterly convinced, that the powers that be know what they are doing and will sort things out. Do they, really?
I will still follow your blog Richard, and do my best to keep myself informed, and I will caste around at voting times to find a candidate that has a glimmering of economic sense about them. My heartfelt opinion, right now, is that the lunatics are truly in charge of the asylum, and that those that have the knowledge to bring about a cure for our complicit madness are casting stones at the locked and barred door.
Bob
The lunatics are in charge, pretty much across the spectrum
But that requires small voices of sanity to still speak up
Just in case one day someone might hear
You never know
Richard