Vindication emanates from microphones in insulated televison and radio studios. There is glee among directors and chief executives in cushioned boardrooms. The retreat has been sounded from the Cabinet, where too many of the places at the table are still occupied by advocates of neo-liberalism.
A quartet of guilty bankers may have muttered their apologies to the Treasury Select Committee after the global financial meltdown, but contrition was soon replaced by relentless efforts turn the heat onto public services. The argument has been framed yet again around the public sector versus the private sector. Aided and abetted by their allies in the media, the Tories are winning the propaganda battle.
We hear repeated calls for honesty in politics, yet we are witnessing the mother and father of all distortions. It wasn’t the public sector that created the worst economic crisis in 100 years. It was the failure of the financial sector. And it wasn’t the public sector that was out of control. It was the casino bankers high on the extreme sport of risk-taking and reaping astronomical rewards for peddling toxic loans.
The national debt is not public sector debt, but failed financial sector debt. Those who rely on public services should not be made to pay the price of a crisis caused by greedy bankers.
So-called business experts advance their easy, predictable and self-serving solutions. Take a scythe to the public sector, they say, cut jobs, freeze the wages of public sector workers and hack away at public sector pensions.
It is reminiscent of the 1970s when the International Monetary Fund demanded massive cuts. While the current crisis is of a different order, we are in danger of going down the same miserable route followed in the ’70s and ’80s, which resulted in the serious neglect of public services and infrastructure. We have seen a restoration of those services and this must not be reversed.
However, we now have to endure a testosterone-fuelled competition about who would cut most and fastest. Even the sainted Vince Cable advocates a review of whole swathes of the public sector, while Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg brags about wanting to implement bold and savage cuts.
Alistair Darling says he wants to be humane and wise. David Cameron just wants to get
on with cutting without a care for the consequences.
While the Government was right to do everything possible to stimulate the economy and stabilise the situation, it should have extracted a price in terms of tackling excessive executive pay and bonuses and tax avoidance. If huge salaries are paid, then those who get them should be taxed accordingly. If cuts have to be on the agenda, we should start by doing something that is morally right: scrapping Trident.
According to Peter Mandelson, that would not save as much some people think – between £13 billion and £20 billion. However, Greenpeace has come up with a figure of as much as £97 billion. Greenpeace says the difference between the two estimates can be explained by the Government’s failure to factor in the likely extent of lifetime costs of the proposed new missile systems, focusing instead solely on development and production costs.
Even General Sir David Richards, the new head of the British Army, has said: “Those focused on high-tech but traditional inter-state conflict often confuse their case by asserting the need to be seen for power projection reasons to posses impressive amounts of traditional combat power.”
A false debate is taking place. If you ask the wrong question, a wrong answer is inevitable. If we want to avoid an early repeat of the 2008 banking crisis, we must get meaningful economic discourse back on course. That doesn’t mean worthless arguments about whether old people’s travel should be cut or that the principle of universal benefits should be sacrificed.
Finally, there is a public institution that needs to be defended to the hilt from the bombardment being heaped on it by the likes of the nakedly self-interested James Murdoch. That is the BBC, which is also at risk from the misguided interventions of Culture Secretary Ben Bradshaw.
Despite the absurd salaries of some of its executives and “talent” and notwithstanding the lamentable decision not to broadcast the appeal for Gaza, the BBC must be supported. Sometimes it may have a woeful lack of alternative narratives to the accepted view, but it is emphatically not state-sponsored journalism, as James Murdoch outrageously called it.
While Cameron wants to freeze the licence fee, Bradshaw wants to top slice it and hand over a significant portion to commercial operators. Universal access would be at risk and free-to-air broadcasting undermined. Yet again, the wrong question about the economic and structural problems facing an industry is being asked. The way is being paved for across-the-board pay-to-view TV.
There are alternatives. The unions have suggested a levy on the profits of companies which produce no public service broadcasting and those that reap benefit from re-transmitting public service content.
The debate about the media revolves around the same neo-liberal economic policies as the debate taking place in the media. It is important that the left does don’t lose either argument.
