Austerity in the UK*

Nor is there the lure of the big privatisations that put a few pounds in a lot of pockets, and millions in others. A generation who knew not Atlee was thrilled to be offered the opportunity to treat the post-war settlement as a great big Monopoly board. There were those handy oil revenues, too–helping pay out unemployment benefits to ex-workers, contrite after years of maverick industrial action.

Nor is there the lure of the big privatisations that put a few pounds in a lot of pockets, and millions in others. A generation who knew not Atlee was thrilled to be offered the opportunity to treat the post-war settlement as a great big Monopoly board. There were those handy oil revenues, too–helping pay out unemployment benefits to ex-workers, contrite after years of maverick industrial action.
We need to spoil the royal wedding by getting this back on the top spot:

I suspect the difference is between governments that are seeking to minimise the damage to public services – who see a period of austerity, but plan to return towards a norm – versus a government that are using ‘the crisis’ to wield an ideological wrecking ball (and lest we forget, have even less of a mandate from the public for these policies than the early Thatcher government).

I’ve been very pleasantly surprised by the scale of the response to the cuts in education and, in particular, by the way the media have responded: there doesn’t seem to be any appetite for a “union bully-boys”/”outside agitators”/”enemy within” narrative.

It’s not like the late 70s, because it is a Tory government: back then people felt that the Labour government had let them down and betrayed them, not that they were the enemy. It’s not like 1984-5, when it really felt as if battle had been joined, but unfortunately a lot of people were on the government’s side (including, when push came to shove, the Parliamentary Labour Party). It’s more like 1989-90, when just about everyone was united in hating the Prime Minister and wanting her to go (including most of her own party). But that was after ten years in government; this lot have turned the country against them in six months flat.

They will be good at pinpointing who the troublemakers are and very unconstrained in dealing with them

That’s certainly a possibility, but I’m not convinced the political conditions are there.

Could someone who knows their stuff explain the figures that Nick @5 links to (or link to an explanation). I’ve seen them around the web elsewhere, and they look crazy wrong to me – but I am not an economist.

[The fact that the data’s compiled by this guy (“I instinctively revolted against the suffocating left-coast culture of the Soviet of Washington”; “With the failure of the welfare state, it is time to consider what comes next”; “Our Democratic friends have been averting their eyes from the success of supply-side economics for a generation”) doesn’t inspire huge confidence. But I’d like to know what the deal is with the actual numbers.]

Technology has to be watched. It has to be repaired. New talent has to be hired every so often. Don’t be so sure that a fantastic anti-plebe apparatus is going to work, long term.

The only way to do this long term (and only for so long) is with snitches and a culture of snitching.

Also, people can’t be allowed to vote with their feet.

There is much that goes into creating a police state. You can’t just start one up willy-nilly, and most stable ones are the outgrowth of terrible wars where the state has incredible credibility–literally.

Martin – I just think the climate of opinion is very different now, for reasons I confess I don’t quite understand. If the guy who dropped the fire-extinguisher off Millbank was all over the front pages, Winston Silcott-style; or for that matter if pictures like this one and this one had become media icons, instead of popping up for a couple of days and being forgotten again; then, I think, we might be in for some scarily effective policing.

But this isn’t the 1980s, or even the 1970s. I keep flashing back to the Lindsey strike – mass pickets(!) by wildcat strikers(!!), and still we didn’t end up with another Grunwick’s or Orgreave. The police could have gone in hard, but they know how to pick their fights. They did go in fairly hard last Wednesday, and it helped the protestors more than it did them.

Interesting times. Paddy Power are currently giving 3/1 on a general election in 2011.

My impression of the UK’s internal security infrastructure is that it’s not optimised for countering a very large and sometimes violent wave of protest, a la Poll Tax. They’ve not yet automated the filters in their data-processing. Also, they are very low on humint.

They’ve not yet automated the filters in their data-processing.

I liked the story in Private Eye at the time of the miners’ strike. The setup was that MI5 supposedly had a semi-automated phone taping system set up to avoid monitoring overload: the tape would start rolling whenever one of the individuals being monitored said one of the key words, and not before. The story was that one of the magic words was “picket”, and all the people they were listening in on were basically saying it all the time, to the point where the system had actually broken down (literally rather than organisationally).

I have no idea of the voracity of this story; apart from anything else I’ve always wondered where it came from. But it has the ring of credibility; it’s the kind of problem an organisation set up to deal with a small & identifiable subversive threat would have at a time like that. Of course the monitoring technology’s better now, but equally, hey, Twitter.

Martin – Another point is that police credibility is still low after the Stockwell shooting and the various fiascos at the G20 summit. When you combine that with ubiquitous phone cameras it makes it very difficult for them to construct a narrative about “dangerous anarchists” that would justify the kind of measures you’re predicting. (And which, incidentally, I thought were pretty common in non-very-panopticon Italy. Maybe the UK isn’t as unique as all that?)

Plus, of course, students often have rich and/or well-connected parents, which makes it harder to beat them up without someone objecting.

Alison – I’d stake my freedom that you’re correct. Luckily, I’m elsewhere, so I don’t have to.

Phil – hang on, d’you mean that GCHQ chaps were listening to all calls but only hit ‘record’ when someone said ‘picket’? If so, you’d’ve thought that’d be fairly easy to get round (“err, guys, they’re saying ‘picket’ all the time” / “ok, let’s move to a list of ‘probable cause’ words”). If you’re suggesting automated voice technology existed in the 1980s that would’ve been able to actually detect people saying ‘picket’ in real-time on the phone, err, no^(10^1000).

Ajay – yes, quite. Also under the imaginary scenario where the public sector growing below incomes doesn’t involve cuts, average pay is growing, but nobody in the public sector is getting a pay rise. In Tabloid World, this is delightful; in the real world, it’s nonsense.

Eh, now that’s just weird. d^(2), maybe?

If you’re suggesting automated voice technology existed in the 1980s

Not suggesting so much as dimly recollecting a contemporaneous story, but I am pretty sure that was the claim I dimly remember being made. And no, it doesn’t seem very likely.

Re the CPGB pensions. Infiltrating the CPGB, with its command-and-control organisation and matching desire to control all the organisations it was involved in, was both easy and useful. But, precisely because of the extreme weakness of the organised left in the UK, it’s harder now.

Some ageing footy hooligans (they don’t appear to have anyone in the EDL…), several score lads in the ‘radical mosques’, a bunch of treasurers of Trot front organisations, some of the ALF, and one or two in the anarchist left (one of whom came out recently, to much wailing and gritting of teeth in Nottingham) isn’t going to be much help in infiltrating the hundreds of thousands who are about to lose their EMA. New informers are going to have to recruited, or cops planted, very quick.

(they don’t appear to have anyone in the EDL…),

Does anybody? There’s a strange degree, and I think I mentioned this down the pub, of vagueness about their background. (This isn’t paranoia, just that it’s surprisingly unclear to me about who they are and what they believe in.)

John b’s sorta right. But this is hardly the overthrow of the post war order. Govt has been, on average, 38-39% of GDP over that period.

And this leads to the answer to Jon Q’s question: why is the UK cutting so much more?

Because the current govt wants to overturn the order New Labour created. Essentially Gordon Brown’s order. And that involves reversing his increase in govt as a % of GDP.

As to the cuts in education: it’s much more of a replacement of the funding source than it is cuts. From tax cheques being sent to a uni to a fee cheque being sent, that money being borrowed from the taxpayer by the student. It’s not even clear that there will be less money spent on tertiary education at the end of the process.

_It’s not even clear _

Well you can say that again. It isn’t clear how much universities will be permitted to charge, what the rules on WP will be, or how this impacts on costs, it is coupled with very large cuts to capital spend in HE and “flat” (i.e. eroding) research funding. It is however clear that the drop in income will come earlier than the arrival of the fees “replacement”, so there will be a trough we will have to get through. All looking pretty ghastly from where I’m sitting.

cjcjc 11.29.10 at 1:20 pm

“UK Institute for Fiscal Studies projects that govt. share of GDP will be around 40% in 2015…higher than it was in Labour’s first term and (more or less) its pre-crisis average.”

How much more will be spent on bailouts? I don’t have the figures, but the UK gov’t has been spending between [OMG] and [OMFG] on making sure that rich criminals stay rich.

36: it’s difficult to say how much the bailout will eventually cost, but note that the answer could be a negative number. You need to make a difference between accounting value and cashflow. Things like loan guarantees have an accounting value – having the British government back your debt is a valuable thing! – but, as long as you don’t default, it won’t actually result in a cash outflow from the government. Buying shares in RBS and Lloyds may end up yielding a cash profit, depending on how good UKFI is at its job. Providing toxic asset insurance might also prove to be profitable.
IIRC the latest overall cost estimate was £6 billion as of March.

The thing about politically-motivated cuts (‘ideological’ seems an inappropriate description) is they are not just about saving public money, at least not in the short term. That’s what it is for them to be politically-motivated rather than an unavoidable and uncontroversial reaction to the need to reduce teh Deficit. Looking at headline (supposed) spending levels is not very useful in this context.

One issue is sources of revenue – aren’t they selling off the forests, for example? Further sell-offs permanently (and irreversibility is the key thing here) impoverish the res publica, but obviously don’t show up as spending cuts.

There’s also the question of how public spending is structured – and as we know right-wing governments are willing to spend money upfront on sweetening the pill of structural changes that they think will make cuts easier – ideally, automatic and unobstrusive – in the future. The ‘big society’ stuff is an excellent candidate for this kind of treatment – money may be spent in making various schemes work while they gain acceptance and become established, but the whole idea is that this money will not continue to be supplied. (S0me comments on HE funding come into this category.)

On the other hand, I have a pet theory/suspicion that Cameron and Osborne are for a variety of reasons not really too bothered about the next election, and in a mirror image of 1997, are going to try and get everything done – subject to placatng Lib Dems, career MPs, to some extent Tories like Ken Clark – before the electorate can do anything about it.

(Anything electoral, that is. FWIW, note this statement by the head of MI5, re: other responses. BTW I don’t think the lookout for the watchers is as poor as some are suggesting. Much of the public have become heavily reliant on electronic comms – often easily accessible, e.g. Facebook, and sweeping powers to get hold of such info (because the legislation has a capacious definition of trrism into which ‘extremism’ or Evans’s ‘radicalism’ can fit pretty easily – even if corporate info-holders were inclined to resist any requests in the forst place). Further, even (pan-) optical surveillance is being digitised via face- and gait- recognition methods. With computerised databases, the capability to keep a pretty close watch on people is there, given a modicum of competence. Also I don’t think the deployment of agents provs. is limited by public cameraphones, nor that the police reputation is a problem in that regard. In fact the rep of the police is pretty strongly polarised, I’d have thought – many people are pretty evidence-proof in their approval 0f the police, and tend to think that any one who gets done over was asking for it. Those who do notice strong evidence of worryingly excessive force are likely to be those who have reason to fear it – and that means if anything that they don’t turn up to be kettled and possibly even killed in the first place – which suits the authorities just fine.)

Also, as the US experience demonstrates, free market types are much happier with government spending when it goes to their mates supply side wealth-creators – which is public spending alright, but not a very appealing form of it.

The history of rail privatisation illustrates quite a few of these points, and can’t be understood properly without noting the two-tier system with intercity and commuter traffic receiving fare protection and relatively high investment, local and ‘leisure’ traffic not so much.

Obviously the incidence of taxation and more generally the distribution of wealth and income is also invisible to headline spending figures.

The point is not really how much money passes through government books, but where the money comes from, where it goes, and what happens to public goods and services, incomes and wealth distribution in the long run.

That’s beside what others have said about the source of these figures, and the adjustments needed to put them in real terms. I’d add that these figures are presumably based on what the government currently say is going to happen.

(john b – re: exponents – that’s one of the undocumented ‘ features’ of the site – flanking a character string with carets formats it as ^superscript^ (unless the string begins or ends with whitespace e.g. ^ this ^.) That’s why comments sometimes have unwonted strikethroughs in them: hyphens work in the same way, mut. mut.. )

I think some people are overreading what I’m saying. The Brits seem to be in a position to be unusually efficient at suppressing civil unrest, but all societies seek to suppress civil unrest. That’s not enough to make Britain a police state. They may also use the situation to target a few people who seem to be particularly problematic, but that is not unusual either. Although it went through with the program, Greece does seem to have been genuinely spooked by the riots; other continental countries also seem concerned about riots; the British government seems to be acting as though potential riots are not a factor. It is worth asking why.

John’s post here seems an elaboration of an argument he made in another recent thread (comment 41), which was a response to a question I raised: whether Leftist European Union advocates were having second thoughts given the damage the Union currently seems to be imposing on various European welfare states. John’s response was that what is happening to Britain is more extreme than what is elsewhere in the EU, but is not being pushed by the EU. That’s not entirely germane, as it doesn’t change the fact of what is being pushed by the EU elsewhere, but is nonetheless a good question: why are British conservatives going further than continental ones? Well, they usually do, but beyond that, my answer is: for the same reason dogs lick their balls. And the reason they can is because they do not fear civil unrest. Their actions show that they do not. Phil seems to think they have misread the situation. Perhaps so. He is apparently on the ground there in England, and I am not. I hope he’s right.

On more specific points, this business of the surveillance system being overwhelmed by people saying “picket” more often than expected: scaling problems are real, but almost always in response to exponential, not linear, changes in input. They said it twice as often? 7 times as often? Very short-term problem at worst. 10,000 times as often would be a problem, but that does not strike me as realistic. I don’t smell the air of credibility. If anything, this strikes me as a “nothing to see here” story the police might plant.

Repairing the technology is mostly a non-issue. One doesn’t repair micro-circuitry, one replaces it, and it is pretty cheap these days. And if British talent is unavailable (unlikely, even police states have their supporters), Russian and Malay talent is available. And I’m not necessarily talking about anything long term. Just long enough for the changes to be irreversibly made.

Sam, phone cameras generally cannot distinguish provocateurs from the real article. And how much people fear the police is of more salience to rioting than how much they believe in them, though there are always a lot of people who will reflexively believe the police.

Despite the obvious logic of this reasoning, aid to the poor is rarely seen as the crime-prevention measure it actually is.

That was one of the things New Labour almost got right. Unfortunately, largely as a result of listening to the wrong criminologists, they implemented “help the poor to become less feckless, amoral, anti-social, rude and horrid” instead of the more intuitive “help the poor to become less poor” – which would have had more durable effects and would probably have worked out cheaper.

John B., about that speech recognition, I dunno. Dragonsoft had speech recognition for PCs in 1990, based directly on the DRAGON program developed under DARPA in the early 1970’s (The founders of Dragonsoft had worked on DRAGON. DRAGON was limited vocabulary and very slow on the available hardware, but had a lot of the fundamentals down. And we’re talking ’75 now, not ’85). The notion that the NSA with its huge banks of supercomputers and the largest staff of mathematicians in the world might have been 5 or 10 years ahead of the commercial software industry for PCs in the days of DOS doesn’t strike me as far fetched. And the NSA and M15 cooperate quite a bit. It is true that Dragon must be trained for individual speakers. That’s consistent with the miner’s strike where specific individuals could have been targeted. Monitoring everyone this way is a harder problem. And the original version was not continuous speech. OTOH, Dragon has to try to transcribe anything you might happen to say. Searching for matches to a list of 50 or so keywords is a lot easier than that.

Oh, you can call, and so can any man; but will he come when you do call for him?

Haha, apparently creating a summoning that isn’t on Twitter, but which makes Richard J tweet me about it, is Highly Effective. And apologies for the digression on MSP and Oasis. If I’m drunkblogging, I tend to reduce All That Is Good to 1990s guitar music.

Martin: OK, I’m *slightly* more convinced than I was – having used the kind of speech recognition things that my dad occasionally tested and rejected for his business in the mid-1990s, I was well aware that sticking a speech recogniser on a wiretap was complete scifi then. I hadn’t considered that you might actually record Scargill’s speeches, manually transcribe every word, and stick it into the program.

However, if you’re restricting your tapping-‘n’-taping to a small enough sample of people that you can manually monitor their conversations and/or public speeches, and stick those into dedicated software borrowed off the Yanks, you’re also restricting your tapping-‘n’-taping to a small enough sample of people that you can listen to their bloody phone calls.

And from what I understand of cross-border technology begging among allies (limited to t’internet, spy memoirs and alleged-spy friends-of-friends, so mine-of-salt time), it’d be easier and involve less loss of face to stick 100 junior spooks on bugging every miner going than to try and persuade the Yanks to let you use their latest technology on a labour dispute.

Unless Thatcher was actually *sleeping* with Reagan, which I suppose is possible.

Alison P: Cameron and Osborne are prepared to trash the Conservatives. No, ‘trash’ is too strong a term, but let us say I think they are not overly concerned about the long term political outlook of the Conservative party. It is not their main goal.

I think that may be right – after all do they really want to spend 8 years on this shit when they have no need of such a career? But there are other reasons not to concern themselves with it. Labour are not looking too clever, first-term incumbency, the el;ectoral benefits of looking decisive, the Lib Dems being finished as a single indpendent force (themselves being a coalition of coalitions in the first place), events, dear boy and the vagaries of electoral politocs in particular. Much of the fretting about polls that politicians do is bordering on the superstitious, for want of any better means of predicting and controlling things, and boldness may actually be as good a strategy as any. Which is deeply worrying, given that a PM with captive backbenchers and no concern for the next ballot is remarkably close to a dictator.