A friend in the Labour Party talked to me recently (via zoom) about post coronavirus politics. She said that the tremendous efforts by the NHS staff and other carers, including those working in care homes but spreading much further, from dustbin workers to supermarket staff, meant that Boris's Tory government would have to accept at least some sort of mild social democratic - Keynsian approach in the coming years. After the corona experience, my friend thought that the big majority of people would simply not accept another austerity regime. The role of the state, even under the Tories, had dramatically proved its usefulness to British people, which would also restrain the Tories' traditional 'anti-state' mantra.
It sounds inviting. But a great contradiction is already emerging across British politics - and economics. Here, for example, is one small indication that begins to open up what really happens next.
George Osborne, Chancellor under ex-Prime Minister Cameron, and now the editor of the London Evening Standard, enjoys his often stated claim that the current spending programmes, under Chancellor Sunak, are only possible because he, Osborne, imposed austerity and 'fixed the roof while the sun was shining.' The truth is the complete opposite. (See LRB., 16 April.)
Everybody in Britain knows (except Osborne) that the NHS was on its knees before coronavirus. It had had no investment program for staff or for equipment for a decade. The Nuffield Trust (8/5/2019) pointed out 80% of nurse vacancies were covered by temporary staff. 1 in 12 posts were vacant in hospital and community services. There were 40,000 adverts for nurses. The OECD put the UK as 20th for nurses, behind Slovenia, the US, Ireland, Iceland, and of course France and Germany. The UK was 22nd for doctors per patients. As a result, when the coronavirus struck, the government had first to take desperate measures to close the gap created by its own previous policies. The government scrapped the £35 billion debt from its own service and bought 10,000 nurses from private hospitals. That, at least temporarily, covered the Tory hole in Osborne's roof.
And that was just one, result of austerity Britain. Many British companies were already against the wall before corona. Britain's economy remains dominated by the City of London; the main funnel for selling international wealth across the globe - and for sheltering corporate wealth in the mainly British-held tax havens. Many British regions have collapsed. Investment in the UK is the lowest and slowest in comparison with both the EU and the US.
But does the present change the future? Will Boris's Tories' now shift their anti-state orientation? How will the developing contradiction between major state action today and the next 4 years rebuilding the economy, via profit and private ownership, develop?
First we need to look more carefully at the Tories' spending today. By far the largest chunks of Sunak's largesse are formed by the offer of loans - loans to major corporations in the main, but the vast number of small businesses are also offered rent. When it comes to workers, Sunak's famous furlough amounts to about £7 billion. It was late in delivery (end of April) and stops in June. The desperate bridging for the NHS's collapsing structure (roughly £35 billion) like the furlough, could not be a loan. But most of the rest of Sunak's offers are made of loans. We are far away from President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal.
There are the previous Tory promises in the 2019 General Election regarding new Hospitals and new railway development into the North. And they remain essential given the public support for the NHS and the catastrophe of Britain's railways since privatisation. But other than these very late actions, the only other major economic offer to the UK people is a trade deal with Trump.
So can Boris and his playmate Cummings dream up a new Tory austerity?
Austerity 1 has clearly failed, but its title can easily be changed. George Osborne can be stuffed away into history. The real energy that the Tories, under Boris and Cummings, will end up using (and creating Austerity 2 in all but name) has three faces. Boris (and Cummings) are now considering their words carefully.
When Boris says ( No 10 Speech on his return from hospital) that he wants to 'work together with opposition parties' it is because he wants to develop a shared outlook in relation to the economic steps he will need take after coronavirus. He is fully aware of how close Corbyn's economic program came to fruition. Boris rarely fought Corbyn's economic program in 2019, he fought Corbyn the politician (along with every other anti-socialist forces.) Boris's effort to 'bring in' the likes of Keir Starmer is simply the means to extinguish for once and for all the remains of the alternative Corbyn program. Boris will require as much cross-party support for serious tax increases which will be focussed mainly on white collar and blue collar workers. It means agreeing to break the holy grail of locked pensions. And, following all the new right policies across the West, the big reduction of corporate taxes.
Second; the Tory duo are beginning to weave an ideological framework through the corona disaster that they have helped made worse They now stand for a new 'unity' that dealing with the illness has aspired. The constant application of the war-like battles - with a virus (!) - that Boris and his ministers spout is a new framework of the UK's potential social and political unity. Brexit is now completed. Britons are standing together supporting 'the front line.' Re-building the victory is the cause now. And in case you need a diverting enemy to keep things together, you have no greater target than China!
Finally Boris will prepare for his answer to the state solutions so essential in 2020. Boris (and Cummings) will claim that the true dynamo of Britain's future economy already is and will be the huge emergence of small businesses. This will be delivered as the model for economic advance for everyone. Stirring this layer in society will start from the call to 'set free' those future entrepreneurs, to get the state (read important regulation) out of their hair, to reinforce the single-mindedness and individual enterprise that they require and provoke. Unravelling the grip of the EU bureaucracy, the Tories will now seek to tear down the deadly range of laws and rules that block enterprise. And start to build the Singapore-on-Thames - courtesy of the US trade deal.
In reality this will all suit the larger corporations. The rising tide has yet to elevate any boat - except the billionaires' yachts. And, at this moment, Labour's new leader shows every sign of signing up for the new austerity trip.
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