For a good year now, and even more so since May 6th 2010, every UK news bulletin,newspaper and magazine has been pretty well guaranteed to carry the latest shock, horror "government cuts" story.Before the Election, despite most of the Labour leadership's,- yes, that included our two now reycled Eds,- apparent reluctance to acknowledge that there was much of a problem, the debate was mostly about how much and how fast to cut. All spoke about reducing or getting rid of the defecit by which many of the electorate thought they meant the accumulated mountain of economy sapping interest paying National Debt. In fact none of the parties meant that. They were just talking about reducing or eventually eliminating the annual increase to it caused by annual overspending since 2000 by Gordon Brown,one of the spend, spend, spend school of economists whose understanding of basic sums, never mind maths, is somewhat suspect.Any old fashioned housewife in charge of a domestic budget could have put him right but sadly his meetings with real housewives weren't a notable success.
Once in sort of power and having had a chance to see even a summary of the books, the Con/Lib coalition leaders must have been horrified. The figures, worstening by the second, included substantial expenditure like new aircraft carriers designed mainly to protect employment on the Clyde which was locked in for years to come thereby shifting the burden of cuts disproportionately to other things.
In fairness the coalition didn't help themselves in this skewing the zones for cuts by red ringing the NHS and overseas aid, both items which are poorly controlled in total and in use.
Unless the citizens of UK Plc. are prepared to accept debilitating and ever rising taxation for mediocre public services,nothing short of a revolutionary approach to government spending and the size of the state will do the job.
The coalition had no option therefore but to go for a revolution in thinking and resultant spending which would go right back to the roots of the introduction of the now crippling Welfare State in 1948. Uncosted in any great detail and certainly not understood for its medium and long term implications,it was an economic millstone from which the UK has never recovered. Nobody would argue with the need for a safety net to ensure that the poorest in society were provided with a reasonable basic standard of living and good healthcare and education. The Welfare State however went far and astronomically expensively beyond that, providing for all in society, from top to bottom usually via inevitably inefficient state run monopoly suppliers.And this was at a time when the country, exhausted by two World Wars was exhaused and broke and needed every penny it could muster to rebuild its infrastructure and industry. Instead of using schemes such as the Marshall Plan and more recently the huge windfalls of the North Sea oil bonanza to do ,that the UK failed to seize the opportunity with the result that it has little or nothing of lasting value to show for the money that has passed through its national coffers. If the UK had red ringed the North Sea income for major long term national projects we could have had a wonderful infrastructure, schools and hospitals as memorials to our temporary geological good fortune. It didn't do that. Instead it continued to spend more on more on out of control state expenditure and welfare to all and social engineering while government and local authority payrolls ballooned with countless superflous and some almost laughably titled new jobs.
All this has given the coalition a wonderful opportunity to state clearly a new philosphy of a very different way of life, much less dependent on the state, much more self sufficient and ultimately with much lower (ideally straight rate,-it works) taxation and much more efficient and higher quality public services, competitively supplied to those who need them. It has in fact embarked on this but without the courage to lable it as a revolution rather than cuts and explain the whole deal and its advantages in simple terms. The label "The Big Society " just doesn't cut it. As result the coalition is losing the PR battle for what should be seen as a dynamic, essential and visionary new approach to life which will bring big long term dividends to us and our children. A new version of Alistair Campbell , less some of the features, is needed to get a grip on Government communication of the perfectly simple, logical and reasonable as is an understanding of how the man and woman in the street see things. Unfortunately, like Royalty, top level politicians particularly on the government side, quicky become isolated from reality and hearing what real people are saying. By the nature of the animal this affects the Conservative Party more than Labour or the Lib Dems. Very few, if any ,of the top tier sit in cafes, pubs, commuter trains and other places where they might hear "normal "people chatting, grunbling and worrying. They become isolated amongst their own kind, be they old Etonians or socialist party aristocracy. When cabinet members and their shadows use the NHS do they wait in A&E on plastic seats for 4 hours? When they want to go to Manchester by train on a Friday evening do they queue in the pens at Euston? It is unlikely. As result maybe they lose sight of the need to communicate, communicate, communicate with the electorate in straightforward, simple non spin terms? At the moment the coalition certainly seems to have a poor feel for bear traps which they should avoid. They don't have the right listening devices,- called people,-out there and feeding back reality to the stratified leadership. They are never going to win the sale of forrest argument against those who fear the loss of Squirrel Nutkin's home.They should have seen that and dismissed the idea as simply not worth it for the saving however good the real argument may be. The same goes for other perfectly good, sensible and even essential cuts. Properly packaged into a strong well explained philosophy of a real non welfare dependent society and they are saleable. The lable "The Big Society" is failing because it is too nebulous, weak and does not excite.
It's time for the coalition to get a grip on its message or risk five years of pain only to hand back the mended economy to Balls & Co (forget the other struggling Ed) to go on another binge of borrow and spend for which we and the next generation at least will pay an appalling price.
