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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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Letters From |
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London |
Austerity Britain
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| A half-million take to the streets to protest government cuts |
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PETER MACDIARMID / GETTY IMAGES |
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| A woman outside the Parliament in London on 26 March during the largest demonstration the UK has seen in nearly a decade.
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MONG MANY CUTS FORCED by the imminent
loss of government funding, the BBC
World Service discontinued the weekly programme
Politics UK on 25 March. It was, in
fairness, a grey, fusty show whose presenters
turned over the mundane and the less
mundane in British politics with gravelly equanimity. Listeners
around the world will have
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to make do with bite-sized bits of British news, but one doubts that the programme’s disappearance is much mourned in Lagos or Lucknow. The sceptred isle is now well and truly an isle, its sceptre (despite the monstrous pomp of the royal nuptials) not nearly as weighty as it once was. In an age of economising, the World Service can no longer afford the luxurious 30 minutes once allotted to parochial discussions of alternative voting reform, child tax credits, incapacity benefits and the other issues that periodically ruffle Britain’s political class.
There is a clear symbolic shift in the suspension of the
programme, over and beyond the exigencies of BBC beancounters.
If the World Service—the very institution meant
to project Britain to the world—deems Politics UK expendable,
it suggests a recognition that the UK has diminished in
the eyes (and ears) of a global audience. Even executives at
the BBC believe that the internal concerns of Britain are of
tepid interest to those beyond its shores.
Yet it is striking that just as British politics continue to slide
from view, events within the country are bringing it in line
with upheaval and tumult elsewhere. On 26 March (a day after
Politics UK crackled to a quiet end), the UK saw its largest
demonstration in nearly a decade. In a march organised by the
country’s leading unions, an estimated 500,000 people took
to the streets of London to protest the severe cuts planned by
the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government.
I was with the motley horde of students, workers, artisans,
parents and babies that day, though I marched (or shuffled,
such was the density of the crowd) through central London
more out of sociological interest than conviction. By the
standards of contemporary global dissent, it was a sedate,
tidy affair. But media attention invariably focused on the actions
on London high streets by small groups of anarchists
and activists peripheral to the march (deeds that included plopping a massive replica of a Trojan horse on the middle
of Oxford Circus, a vivid, albeit ambiguous, symbolic act).
The day marked an important moment in the defence of
the British public sector, marrying the defiance of the union
struggle in Wisconsin in the United States to the youthful
exuberance of the Arab Spring. It also fit into a wider debate
about the fate of Europe’s postwar “social democratic
settlement”. Similar unrest has rocked countries across the
recession-hit continent, including Greece (still the scene
of protests, a year after riots ground the country to a halt);
France (riots and student demonstrations in 2010); and Portugal,
where a combination of left agitation and centre-right
chicanery forced the resignation of the socialist prime minister
in March. These conflicts cannot be understood simply
as the friction between forces of the left and the right in
European politics, since traditionally left-wing parties are
often the ones in the awkward position of forcing “austerity”
on their populations. At stake, in the view of many protesters,
is the very identity of the European welfare state,
with its delicate balance of rights and certainties, on the one
hand, and market logic, on the other.
In Britain, which has left itself far more open to international
market forces than much of the rest of the European
Union, the battle lines are being drawn. Prime Minister David
Cameron and his chancellor, George Osborne, claim the
cuts are necessary. They seek to trim the deficit of £150 billion
and the national debt of over £1 trillion that was inherited
from the former Labour government in 2010, in the wake
of the deeply divisive “bailout” of Britain’s faltering banks.
Cameron’s opponents condemn the cuts as “ideological”, as
thrusting at the jugular of British social democracy.
The government’s policy leaves largely unscathed the
banks and financial institutions that many Britons blame for
plunging the country into an economic crisis. Instead, proposed
cuts attack the edifice and foundations of the welfare
state. They target the huge public sector (approximately onesixth
of the work force), promising reductions and a drastic
shakeup in the National Health Service; slashing funding
to transport, education, housing and other civic infrastructure;
eliminating numerous programmes for the poor; raising
university fees (the spark that inflamed furious student
protests last year and set in motion the broader protests this
March); scaling down environmental programmes; closing
libraries; privatising post offices; and axing funding for the
humanities and arts at the university level. Other casualties
include the august BBC World Service, once funded by the
Foreign Office, now cut adrift, forcing the loss of numerous
languages (such as shortwave broadcasts in Hindi) and programmes
(including the aforementioned Politics UK).
Supporters of the government’s assault on spending argue that the cuts will usher in much-needed “fiscal common
sense”, trimming the country’s debt while freeing the dynamism
of the private sector to drive growth. Its critics claim
that it will merely create unemployment, drain money from
the economy and plunge the country into a recessionary spiral.
They point to the uncomfortable fact that the government
has already revised downward its growth estimates from
last year, with the economy offering few signs of revival. In
21st-century Britain, the economics of Milton Friedman and
Maynard Keynes roll up their sleeves and do battle.
The long narrative of the struggle for the welfare state
was visible amid the protesting throngs. Railway workers
held aloft social-realist murals of the “crows of privatisation”
picking apart the angular, block-jawed corpse of “the
national rail”, an image that would have seemed a relic of a
bygone era were the paint not so fresh. Another species of
sign merged the faces of Cameron and Margaret Thatcher,
a grisly bit of Photoshop magic. Actors dressed in green
hose and sporting plastic bows and arrows—a nod to Robin
Hood—stalked through the column, firing pretend salvos at
Parliament. Samba bands livened proceedings, a welcome
change from the limited songbook of protest chants, dreary
in their righteous drone. An elderly couple passed around
biscuits and oranges. There was passion and mirth, and the
footsore camaraderie of hundreds of thousands of people
not all sure where the march was going, in several senses—Was it Hyde Park? Trafalgar Square? With Labour or without Labour? Opposition to all cuts or just the scope and pace
of cuts?—but very resolved in being there.
The attention of the media has turned to upcoming local
elections on 5 May, now the subject of growing anticipation.
A year after their downfall, Labour stands to make significant gains in councils across the country, with the Liberal
Democrats, in particular, expected to suffer.
Obscured by the plodding buildup to these elections (and
the frenzied confection of the royal wedding), it may be difficult to espy the roiling currents of unrest in Britain. The
anti-cuts movement does not principally aim to strengthen
Labour. Its critique is too visceral and systemic to sit easily
within the framework of party politics (an important contrast
between the left-wing populist turn in the recession-hit
UK and the right-wing populist turn, represented by the
Tea Party, in the recession-hit US). Labour leader Ed Miliband
did address the gathered demonstrators in Hyde Park,
but his party, now in opposition, is still resented by many as
responsible for the deregulation and market fundamentalism
that pushed Britain to the financial precipice.
As the cuts begin to take effect this summer and workers
begin to lose their jobs, the mood in the country will likely
grow more sour, the movement begun by students and unions
will swell in size and appeal, and a struggle with global resonances,
between the imperatives of marketisation and the
defence of the welfare state, will intensify. More’s the pity
that Politics UK will not be there to tell us about it.
Kanishk Tharoor is a writer and a scholar based in New York City.
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