Charlie Beckett discusses the public’s perception of this week’s cuts announcement, and offers some advice to Cameron and Clegg.
The idea of fairness has suddenly become the central concept in British politics. The Big Question at the moment is whether the Coalition’s cuts are being shared equally amongst us all.
The debate reveals a lot about the difficulty of having a ‘rational’ political discussion in today’s frantically over-managed political media world.
Of course, the cuts are not fair. Life’s not fair. If you are on, say £15,000 then a cut of 10% will be much more painful than someone on say £50,000 who loses 15%. Statistically, the richer person is sacrificing more, but in the real world, the poorer person has less leeway.
One person has to give up their only annual £500 holiday, the other has to give up their £2,000 second holiday – who suffers most?
Enormous Grief
That is why the Coalition government is going to get enormous grief from the mass of the electorate over the next few years. Of course, the British public may well admire their toughness. And if George’s Gamble works then the credit they will eventually get will be all the greater. May. If.
In the end the figures don’t matter. Perhaps the IFS are right to say that cuts in welfare and in public spending will hit the poorest hardest. But the statistics are too complex for even experts to say anything with certainty. And it’s missing the point.
In the end it’s how the public perceive the cuts personally. Even if they lose services and income they may feel pride in a government prepared to do the Right Thing and cleanse the Augean stables of the UK public sector, clearing the sclerotic bureaucracy grown fat under New Labour.
Or they may feel hurt, fear and deprivation.
Stop Soft Soap
I would advise Cameron and Clegg to stop attempting to soft soap the public about how ‘fair’ the cuts are. They simply aren’t in the wider, real sense of who feels most pain. All that stuff about We’re In It All Together simply grates when it emerges from such elegantly educated lips with such comfortable backgrounds. Better to concentrate on the longer term self-interest of putting Britain’s finances back on track.
Funnily enough, it is Ed Miliband that has an intriguing problem here. The easy meat is for him to become the Victim’s Friend and Scaremonger General. But if he does that he will end up looking like a very one-dimensional, unaspirational politician. What is his alternative? higher taxes? levies on banker’s bonuses? More borrowing?
The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland has suggested one way for Labour to rescue its reputation. He suggests that they tell the public how the deficit was created to save the economy. Cue grateful applause? Hmmm… I suspect ITV’s Tom Bradby’s Titanic metaphor is closer to the realities of contemporary politics. He suggests that Labour admits that a) it was at the helm when we hit the iceberg and b) the ship was not as well prepared as it should have been. As I said earlier in this piece, Life’s Not Fair.
Retrench Warfare
We are in for at least a couple of years of grim (re-)trench warfare as the re-ordering of the UK’s public sector proceeds. The politicians and journalists are going to be wading up to their waists through the mud and blood of this economic battle.
This was, of course, the debate that some journalists tried to raise during the election campaign and that was studiously avoided by all the parties. Once again, official political discourse in the UK has failed us.
I suspect that come the next election no-one will care about the facts and figures. The reality of ’fairness’ will be a very personal product of experience. But whichever party defines it most imaginatively in the next few years might just have the edge as we emerge blinking into the aftermath of all this sacrifice.
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This article first appeared on Charlie Beckett’s Blog on 21 October.
To access the Government Spending Review source documents and key commentaries, see the clickable list here.
Cuts logo is courtesy of Eric Tastad and the Creative Commons.
This “Once again, official political discourse in the UK has failed us.” is the key point. During the election campaign, most, though not all politicians sought to narrow the debate. Crucially, the other key players in political communication – media organisations and the journalists therein, whether through political expediency, ideological agreement, or just plain inability to critique, allowed this discursive narrowing to take place. The upshot is that we are now in the position whereby the ruling coalition (class) are able to say “look at the mess left by the last administration” ad infinitum; and “look the cuts are essential, they’re not our fault”. With regards the first point, it’s wearing rather thin and thankfully, people in the public sphere are now beginning to tire of this narrative and explicitly stating so. With regards the second point though “look, the cuts are essential/necessary” it’s a bit more of a struggle to propose an alternative narrative and it’s a further demonstration of discourse in action. What it demonstrates is that the elite political class have managed to impose upon events their own (partial, class interest, capital based) frame through which to view the political debate. Witness BBC Economics editor Stephanie Flanders reproducing the long established discursive “logic” that the IMF are mere impartial, rational agents, neutral observers of nations’ economic well-being. In a recent report, by way of explaining who and what the IMF are/do she was able to say, straight faced, the following: “The IMF provide a sort of economic health-check”; “the IMF gave Osborne’s plans the ‘thumbs up’” and the IMF said Osborne’s plans “demonstrate good housekeeping”. These linguistic tropes are important, and they’re in the service of dominant ideology. Locating them in the logic of the domestic – “good housekeeping”; the medical – “economic health-check” and the informal – “thumbs up” frames them as non partisan, rational and at worst, neutrally interested in “our” wellbeing…as opposed to what they actually are which is a collection of neo-liberal interest groups whose only wish is that the system of socialisation of risk and privatisation of profits is maintained and further strengthened. It’s not that Flanders herself is *the* problem, she’s just an example.
“Cutting the deficit” has been conflated with “cutting the public sector” It’s a subtle trick – although of course has been the desire and dominant theme of all neo-liberal, conservative ideologues since the days of Friedrich Von Hayek and Milton Friedman – and it’s working a treat. So we end up with vox-pops on evening news bulletins with members of the public saying “Yeah, we know the cuts are coming”; “I don’t know much about politics but I know we’ve been living beyond our means” and such like – the tortured metaphor of the good housekeeping/ good housewife invoked by George Osborne, an analogy so lame it can be dismissed and critically interrogated by an undergraduate economics student, is allowed to stand (almost) unchallenged. This is not to say that these are the only narratives – “it’s all the fault of the banks” is occasionally allowed to be heard. However, this locates blame on a (bad) practice as opposed to shedding light on a barely regulated, neo-liberal system of economic and social organisation, that tends to subordinate human need to capital interests. It’s a version of “a few bad apples” as opposed to a bad cart. Of late, I’ve noticed the phrase “deficit deniers” being used by the Tory govt, again, another subtle discursive trick that associates the desire to provide an alternative narrative with appeasement.
So yes you’re right, “official political discourse in the UK has failed us” and it’s not only the politicians. It is also a failure of political communication reporting, broadcasting and journalism. As your title suggests “the public’s perception of cuts is what matters in the end”, quite so, but so long as the frames are so tightly drawn, possibilities, alternatives and “public perceptions” are ‘managed’ and similarly narrowly framed.