Eyes on Power’s Guide to the Cuts

The government’s Comprehensive Spending Review has outlined some of the most extreme and – in the view of EoP– aggressively regressive and unnecessary cuts in the history of modern Britain. We’ve picked out some of the most important areas and tried to get behind the spin.

Defence: 42 000 armed forces personnel and MoD civil servants to lose jobs
Who will it affect? Private sector growth is meant to absorb public sector workers – but there are few private sector equivalents to the army, RAF and Royal Navy. A significant proportion of homeless people in the UK are ex-armed forces whilst ex-serviceman disproportionately struggle to find work when they return to civilian life and can often struggle with drug and alcohol dependency. But as least we have money for a brand new aircraft carrier – even if we can’t afford any aircraft to go on it.

Benefits #1: Council Tax Benefit to be cut by 10%
Who will it affect? Everyone in receipt of Council Tax Benefit – from pensioners to people with disabilities. The effect will price low income families out of affluent areas and will exacerbate the divide between the prosperous South East and the rest of the UK. Local authorities will determine rules for paying benefit – which feels like a major cop-out from the government and attempt to shift blame.

Benefits #2: Housing Benefit, Jobseekers Allowance, Incapacity Benefit, Employment Support Allowance and Disability Living Allowance to be merged into Single Credit
Who will it affect? Everyone in receipt of state benefit – from those incapable of working to single parents. The “catch-all” approach of a Single Credit will abandon all bespoke benefits aimed at helping different people with different needs. This will make it harder for people to return to work, particularly those furthest from the labour market – including young people, ex-servicemen, care leavers, ex-criminals, people with substance abuse problems, lone parents and people with mental and physical health issues.

Benefits #3: Claimants will face a reduction in benefit after 12 months of unemployment
Who will it affect? With £20bn of immediate cuts to the benefit system, long-term unemployment will become entrenched. There is reduced state support for back to work schemes whilst all incentives to encourage employers to recruit long-term unemployed people – including the Local Employment Partnerships, Employer Subsidies and Future Jobs Fund – have been abandoned. The new measures will force people out of affluent areas, ghettoise communities and unfairly hit young people and women.

Health: NHS budget to rise every year
Who will it affect? Protecting health spending was a key Tory election pledge – but we have already demonstrated in whose interest the decision was made.

Economy: 24 quangos to be axed
Who will it affect? As George Monbiot demonstrated, the government have carefully abolished quangos associated with protecting the environment, animal welfare and the arts but have protected – or adapted – those which promote and protect corporate profit.

Arts funding: 30% cut to Arts Council but free entry to museums to continue
Who will it affect? Mainly regional arts-based projects including theatres, orchestras arts venues and festivals. Only 15% of the cuts from £449.5m to £349m in the next four years are supposed to affect “front-line” funding, but in real terms the Arts Council estimates over 100 organisations will lose financial support. The pledge to keep free entry to museums will favour the national London-based museums, with regional museums and arts projects being left behind.

Media: BBC licence fee frozen for 6 years
Who will it affect? Everyone paying for a TV licence will not see any increases and free licences for over 75s have been protected. But these concessions can only be afforded by the government relinquishing responsibility for the World Service, and Welsh Language broadcaster SC4. The BBC will now have to swallow these budgets. There were hints that the corporation feared worse, but the 16% cut in funding will undoubtedly have a negative effect on programme quality, employment opportunities, and niche radio services like 6Music.

Transport: Cap on rail fares removed from 2012 but Crossrail stays
Who will it affect? People who cannot afford the running costs of a car and commuters who buy season tickets. The current price cap limits fares to 1% above inflation, but from 2012 this will increase to 3%, meaning fares are likely to rise by 5.8%. This may not sound like much, but for a Brighton to London commuter, it will mean a £1,000 increase on their season ticket. Meanwhile the £16bn Crossrail project that will bring faster trains on tube routes has been retained, another project that will benefit Londeners and perhaps a political move to help Boris Johnson get re-elected as mayor 2012.

Science: Research budget ringfenced at £4.6bn
Who will it affect? Academics, practitioners, everyone? The benefits of scientific advances over the years are unquestionable. When rumours emerged that the research budget may be cut up to 25% weeks ago, it caused outrage from scientists in the UK. Even 'Scientists for Labour' sent a delegate to the conference last month to raise their concerns about budget cuts. Today's announcement that the research budget will be kept at £4.6bn for the next four years appears to be good news for scientists. It actually represents a cut in real terms of 10% over the four years.

Local Government: Council funding to be cut 7.1%pa and ring-fenced grants abolished
Who will it affect? The government are championing local government reform as devolving power but it really means shifting responsibility for cuts. Many councils will use the auspices of government restrictions to outsource services, cut departments and privatise provisions. Those hit hardest will be those most in need of state support and areas dependent on the public sector for employment – such as the North-East and Wales.

Education : Real-term cut of 3.4% funding over four years. Direct funding protected with school budgets rising from £35-£39bn. £2.5bn pupil premium for ‘disadvantaged’ pupils. Sure Start protected. EMA scrapped.
Who will it affect? This is an interesting mixture and of course does not tell the full story. On the surface it would appear that the vulnerable are protected but if you couple these announcements with previous Tory policies of building less schools and encouraging ‘independent’ academies, the true picture emerges – more money in private hands and an insufficient amount of funding for the state sector. Again, the undermining of the universality of what should be a fundamental right underpins the Tories’ whole approach here.

Justice: 14 000 jobs to be axed – 20% from frontline prison, probation and court services. Extra prison building programmes scrapped. Police budget to be cut by 4% a year.
Who will it affect? Cuts in legal representation will of course hit poor people the hardest. In addition, less prison places will not mean that there is likely to be an appreciable drop in the numbers of people being sent to prison, just that an even more overcrowded, unsafe and generally unfit prison system will be created. Cutting the police budget will have effects on front-line services from police response times to victim support.

Spending: Government departments to be cut on average by 19% over parliament
Who will it affect? An estimated 500 000 public sector workers will lose their job – not to mention local government employees and private sector contractors dependent on public finance. Employees on fixed-term contracts and part-time hours (mostly women) will be the likeliest to go. The cut in public services will adversely hit poorer and more vulnerable people as they are reliant on state provisions.

We will of course be returning to the subject of cuts in more detail, but in the meantime why not let us know what you think of the cuts? Do you agree that cuts are necessary to reduce the deficit? Or do you think the fetishisation of deficit reduction is distracting from the need for a real structural change in our society?

Prevention is not the cure

American charity Project Prevention sounds like the sister organisation of Fight Club’s Project Mayhem – but their incentivised sterilisation of drug addicts draws parallels with darker and more misanthropic dystopian fiction.

Project Prevention “offers cash incentives to women and men addicted to drugs and/or alcohol to use long term or permanent birth control”. 3,500 addicts across the United States have already been treated, and they are now offering users within the UK £200 to be sterilised. Project Prevention’s founder, Barbara Harris, argues that addicts are offered a free choice whilst sterilisation, or long-term contraception, helps solve many drug related problems – such as abusive and broken families, crime, inherited health problems and inter-generational addiction.

Project Prevention’s message is confused and muddled on a number of levels. There is obvious flaw in the affirmation that addicts are offered a “free choice”. A drug users’ already questionable judgement is impaired by their addiction and their frequently desperate need for money – either to pay bills or buy illegal substances. Harris concedes that paying addicts inevitably means some will spend it on drugs – yet she sees it as more desirable than an addict committing crime. But how ethical is it for an anti-drug charity to hand over money knowing that a person will use it to buy drugs? £200 amounts to little more than a two-day heroin binge, but it could mean a lifetime of shame and regret. Offering an addict a quick fix in exchange for ‘voluntary’ sterilisation does not represent a free choice, it represents a cynical bribe.

Removing someone’s ability to procreate and undermining their freedom to choose dehumanises and debases addicts. As Harris says herself:

We don’t allow dogs to breed. We spay them. We neuter them. We try to keep them from having unwanted puppies, and yet these women are literally having litters of children.

Dehumanising victims and championing the greater good has been used throughout history to justify eugenics – from Nazi Germany to 1930s America. If you treat someone like an animal, is it any surprise that some people start acting like animals? The whole rhetoric surrounding Project Prevention is fundamentally flawed and, although it may stop some addicts reproducing, it will do more damage by reproducing and deepening existing prejudices and misnomers. Drug users don’t need to be ghettoised and disenfranchised by society, they need support and compassion. Further alienation can only lead to increased social problems.

The overarching problem with Project Prevention is that their message is erratic and their justification is in disarray. They concede that “many drug exposed infants will not have long lasting problems from their prenatal exposure to drugs, but the problems that come with being in foster care are just as damaging if not more so”. It is unclear who their target is – drug users, the children of drug users or the foster care system. After all, why not target resources and support at developing America’s foster care system?

The reason that Project Prevention doesn’t concentrate on revolutionising America’s foster care system is because their perplexing rationale is predicated on economic – rather than social – exposition. Improving foster care would be costly – and that’s clearly not a price worth paying for drug-addled children.

Project Prevention’s contention assumes that babies exposed to illicit drugs within the uterus are more likely to be born prematurely and have a low birth weight:

The cost of hospitalization for a very low birth weight baby in need of intensive care can be as high as $150,000 .... The annual medical cost of caring for cocaine-exposed babies nation wide has been estimated at 33 million for neonates, and as high as 1.4 billion during the babies' first year of life.

Children born with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome need comprehensive long-term, integrated interventions that include social, health, emotional and educational services. These services place additional strain on the economic and social resources of society.

The polemic is in very dangerous territory when sterilisation is being determined by economic factors – because the logical conclusion is that it should be extended to other ‘costly’ groups. After all, why not pay criminals to cut off their hands? Or euthanise pensioners, obese people and smokers when they become a drain on the NHS?

It is important to recognise the cost of drug addiction to the tax payer – such as child care, hospital treatment and prison – but the answer is not to remove someone’s rights. No respectable stake-holder should promote forced sterilisation and it is a dangerous fallacy if Project Prevention’s programme is seen as an objective choice. Most internet critiques of Harris’ programme focus on the “slippery slope” which leads to state-sponsored eugenics and it is important to recognise Project Prevention’s deliberately vague and confusing message mixed with emotive rhetoric. The logical conclusion of much of Harris’ argument is totalitarian social engineering. For instance, what happens if a parent develops a drug dependency when they already have children – should they be forcibly taken from them?

Thankfully, the UK has a much more developed and progressive welfare system than the US. The way we treat the most vulnerable people in society is much more advanced and we have much more comprehensive and accessible drug treatment programmes – many of which focus on long-term contraception. But the problem of drug dependency and its affect on children cannot be solved by treating symptoms or removing choice through financial incentive - it is about addressing the causes of drug abuse and supporting parents. If a drug addict isn’t in a fit state to have children, then they certainly don’t have the capacity to make a decision which will permanently remove their ability to start a family.

Welfare state under attack

George Osborne’s announcement that child benefit will be cut for high earners is a blatant and cynical example of political prestidigitation and policy misdirection. Osborne’s contention that “it’s very difficult to justify taxing people on low income to pay for the child benefit of those earning so much more” threatens to end welfare state universalism and reduce it to a safety net. The move erodes the legitimacy of a welfare system which relies on universal benefits to give mandate to redistributive state spending. If middle and high earners no longer receive universal benefits then it fundamentally undermines the intellectual premise of our welfare state and questions other overarching benefits such as the state pension and the NHS.

But the curbing of child benefit is not just about challenging universalism, it also acts to mask more punitive welfare cuts. The vocal middle-classes affected by the cuts will distract media attention from other austerity measures and, as Deputy Political Editor of the BBC James Landale states, the move gives Osborne “political cover for other cuts that will affect the less well off”. It gives credence to the dictum “we’re all in this together” and attempts to justify Draconian benefit cuts for the most vulnerable. After all, if those horribly oppressed middle-class parents are paying the price of recession, why shouldn’t an impoverished pensioner in Middlesbrough?

The subsequent proposal to cap state benefit at £26,000 further demonstrates the government’s desire to attack not just the welfare state, but the most unprotected and defenceless in society. The planned cap will apply to combined household income from benefits including Jobseekers’ Allowance, housing benefit, council tax benefit and child benefit but without variations to correct for regional differences in the cost of living, it will serve to further ghettoise the country. With housing benefit to be reduced year on year, it will not be long before London and the whole South East is purged of all those reliant on benefits.

The Conservative cuts are not simply about tackling the deficit. At best they are aimed at reducing the welfare state to an unrecognisable husk and, at worst, they are aimed at cleansing the South of undesirables. The government may advocate a small state – but when the state determines where citizens can and can’t live through social engineering – it seriously challenges positive and maximalist conceptions of liberty, freedom and equality of opportunity.

Missing Manchester?

Manchester is a wonderful city, and outside the frenzied security island of the Labour Party Conference last week, there was a beautiful city waiting to be discovered.

Here's a few of the sights passed every day walking to and from the Conference venue.



Opponents to the ConDem cuts were also out in Manchester on the European day of action against cuts. It was good to see over 100 people marching against local cuts to Law Centres and Greater Manchester Immigration Aid Unit.



And of course, who will forget Ed Miliband's inaugural speech as leader of the Labour Party. Worth missing lunch to queue for it? Absolutely. Although we did manage some bloody-mary flavoured crisps, thanks to a random lady in the queue who offered to go in search of food.


Ed made a very good statement about taxing the (super-)rich. Here's a little sculpture I came across that puts the sentiment across nicely.

Labour Conference 2010: Where did the vision go?

Monday 27th September, 19:30-21:00, Mechanics Institute

At a fringe meeting hosted by the Socialist Campaign Group, Kelvin Hopkins MP championed Diane Abbott’s leadership campaign as shifting the area of debate. Hopkins declared that “Ed Balls changed his view on the economy because of Diane’s presence” and suggested that Ed Miliband’s victory over his brother can be attributed to Diane’s intervention.

Katy Clark urged the left to draw strength from Ed Balls’ assertion that there doesn’t need to be a timetable for deficit reduction and use it as a springboard to build bridges across the party. Hopkins noted that people on the street agree with left-wing policies – such as cancelling Trident, taxing the rich and protecting public services – but they do not recognise them as socialist. Therefore, it is the responsibility of the left to formulate and package these policies and this, as John McDonnell asserted, can only be achieved if the left “engages in dialogue and discussion in non-sectarian way” – even with those responsible for 13 years of New Labour.

The Campaign Group understand that the deficit cannot be ignored but, as Hopkins argued, “unemployment is the problem, not the deficit”. The Labour left needs to concentrate on winning the debate within the party and this needs to focus on growing the economy through investment – in jobs, housing, transport and renewable energy – and reducing the deficit by tackling tax evasion and tax avoidance.

Socialist stalwart Tony Benn described the Campaign Group as the “real opposition to the Tories” in parliament and urged Ed Miliband to work closely with the group as there is a real sense that there is a growing gap for socialist policy. The parliamentary Labour Party has been distracted by the leadership contest but, as former Campaign Group member Alan Simpson noted, inertia has also resulted from relief that the general election result wasn’t as bad as anticipated. Furthermore, as Simpson argued, there is a consensus that the coalition should be allowed to fight itself because, if the Labour Party is vocal and provocative, it could lose votes. The danger with this analysis is that the Cameronite Tories and Lib Dem right are fairly solid and it is the Conservative right which is really agitated – particularly as their ministerial positions have been taken by fluffy liberals. As Simpson recognised, however, if the coalition does fail and there is a snap election, the only people who could afford to fight another election would be the Tories.

There is a real opportunity for the left to formulate new ideas and policies. John McDonnell outlined some ideas on how to do this at the Labour Representation Committee but there are cracks emerging in the upper-echelons of Labour. At the Campaign Group meeting Jeremy Corbyn declared that “never again must there be a Labour government that takes the country into the illegal war” – and the next day Ed Miliband said Labour’s decision to invade Iraq was wrong. Time will tell whether Ed’s admission was a cynical attempt to attract Lib Dem voters or a genuine shift to the left.