Injustice and ideology
This set of five chapters begins with reactions of shock to the Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne’s budget of 2010 and ends with the recording of immediate disbelief over the callousness of David Cameron’s government’s Comprehensive Spending Review, announced towards the end of that year. In between these chapters, in Chapter 7, is a piece published in the journal Local Economy, written during the summer of that year, as a reminder that although the new Coalition government was particularly brutal in its actions, it can be argued that such brutality had only been made possible because of how New Labour had moved British politics to the right. This rightward shift included (as it turned out) Nick Clegg and Danny Alexander of the ‘Orange Book’1 Liberal Democrats and enough of their colleagues to ensure ineffective opposition within the Coalition to cutting immediately and cutting deep. If you also accept the argument made in Chapter 7, that in many ways New Labour was Thatcherism continued, then it is in hindsight not so hard to see how, slowly but surely, what was acceptable had shifted to make the present attack on the poor possible.
There are generations to politics. Tony Blair was born in 1953, the same year as Margaret Thatcher’s twins. David Cameron was born in 1966 into what was, in effect, a new generation. Had he been an average British schoolboy, he would have been looking for work at the age of 16 in 1982, and would not have easily found it. Had he waited until he had taken his A levels he would have entered a job market in which over a million people aged 25 and under were claiming what was then still called the dole. This was the highest ever recorded number. Shortly after 1984 Margaret Thatcher’s government changed the rules so that far fewer could claim. Many hundreds of thousands ended up destitute, tens of thousands of young adults at one time or another started begging on the streets in those years. David went up to Brasenose College (Oxford) after taking a few months off to travel around the world. Just like many of the rest of Britain’s elite, he had very different experiences in comparison with the vast majority of his generation. At Oxford he was taught (or ‘read’) philosophy, politics and economics (PPE), at roughly the same time as both Miliband brothers were taking the very same course.
Chapter 8, the third paper in this section, was published in Public Policy Research, in the house journal of the left-leaning think tank IPPR. It summarises the argument that inequality can be perpetuated by the wrongheaded thinking instilled early in the minds of many people in power, often by their parents, teachers or tutors. It also discusses how such a curse can be overcome. Chapter 9 tells a short story of meeting David Cameron’s contemporaries when I was a ‘sixth-former’ growing up in Oxford, and narrowly missing having a strange-shaped glass hit my head, just after it had been thrown from a college window.
This section ends with Chapter 10 on the plan that was announced in autumn 2010 to – in effect – clear the poor from the more prosperous of southern English cities. By July 2011 it became clear that the government both knew this would be the implication and how much suffering it would cause.2