The Westminster addiction to austerity crack is killing the country

After 13 years of ruinous addiction, the Westminster establishment class still won't give up the austerity crack.

Much like forming a crack habit, austerity economics never made any sense.

You don’t improve your life by taking up one of the most harmful and addictive substances, and you don’t improve your national economy by impoverishing millions of your people and deliberately cutting investment in the things that actually generate future economic prosperity (education, infrastructure, quality public services, transport, research and development, environmental protections, public health …).

Economic history is absolutely clear that investment in times of crisis helps economies recover, while penny-pinching when the economy needs a boost ends up prolonging the misery.

But somehow, after the bankers wrecked the economy with their reckless gambling in 2008, the Westminster establishment class and their capitalist media cheerleaders decided that George Osborne was an economic genius with the cure the British economy needed (despite his only real world work experience being towel re-folding and a spot of NHS data entry!).

This deadbeat loser with virtually no experience outside of Tory HQ came up with a plan to reverse conventional economic thinking and impose draconian cuts in a recovery period, and amazingly, the vast majority of Britain’s establishment class decided that turning to Osborne’s austerity crack pipe was a great idea.

In 2010 Osborne and the Tories promised that their austerity agenda would balance the books and completely eliminate the budget deficit by 2015.

This obviously didn’t happen, because:

• When you deliberately repress wages, less money gets paid back into the system via taxes than if workers were paid properly.

• When you deliberately slash investment in public services and infrastructure projects, you reduce the amount of demand in the economy.

• And when you treat all public spending as if it’s all essentially waste, you end up cutting things that create far more economic activity in the long run than the initial investment actually costs.

But when 2015 rolled around, capitalist media and the BBC let Osborne and the Tories off the hook completely by allowing them to redefine their glaring economic failure as a success by moving the goalposts. Wildly missing their deficit elimination target became the wonderful success story of “we cut the deficit by a third” (from the massive high point it was at in the wake of the bankers’ crisis).

Labour didn’t help public understanding of this astounding economic failure at all by joining the Tories in huffing the austerity crack pipe too, with their ludicrous decision to imitate Tory austerity ruination, rather than opposing it. A strategic error that cost them a general election that should have been an absolute walkover.

The Labour membership reacted by electing the only overtly anti-austerity, pro-investment candidate in the wake of the 2015 general election failure, and for a while it actually seemed possible that Westminster could be weened off the austerity crack pipe.

Corbyn was endlessly undermined and sabotaged by the austerity addicts and privatisation fanatics within the Parliamentary Labour Party, but despite this relentless internal wrecking, and unprecedented media hostility, Corbyn pulled off a miracle by achieving the biggest swing towards Labour since 1945 and wiping out Theresa May’s majority in a general election most commentators had written off as a massive Tory landslide as soon as it was announced.

In the wake of the 2017 Corbyn Surge, Theresa May furiously insisted that she didn’t want to hear any more about “austerity”.

She knew that under-investment, wage repression, and the economically damaging cuts agenda were profoundly unpopular, but despite this change in rhetoric, she kept on quietly imposing more austerity cuts.

Just like a crack addict hiding their addiction.

Boris Johnson took this deception even further, concocting a fake investment agenda of imaginary new hospitals and the fantastical rhetoric of the “northern powerhouse” to pretend that the Tories had weened themselves off the austerity crack and converted to the healthy lifestyle of investment and rising prosperity instead.

Sadly millions of people bought Johnson’s investment deceptions just as easily as they swallowed his nonsensical presentation of Theresa May’s hopelessly botched Brexit shambles (which he even resigned to vote against in crucial parliamentary votes) as his own homework.

After losing so heavily to Johnson in 2019 Corbyn had to go, but all of his potential successors knew that they couldn’t admit to being austerity crack addicts in the race to succeed him.

It’s probably fair to say that Rebecca Long-Bailey was being honest when she said she opposed austerity and wanted to invest for the future, but Keir Starmer was brazenly lying through his teeth when he positioned himself as an anti-austerity, pro-investment politician who wanted to undo the terrible consequences of the Tory government’s ruinous austerity addiction.

After tricking the Labour membership into making him leader by pledging to give up the austerity crack, Starmer has now binned and watered down all of his pro-investment and public ownership pledges, and started raving on about how there’s “no money” to reverse any of the Tory austerity damage.

There’s “no money” left!

Where have we heard this austerity-addled rubbish before?

After the fall of Boris Johnson, Liz Truss went austerity mad, promising even more lavish handouts for corporations and the mega rich alongside more brutal cuts to wages and public services.

The markets hated it so much that she tanked the economy and had to resign in disgrace after only seven weeks in the job, but unbelievably, Keir Starmer and the right-wing idiots he’s surrounded himself with decided that the dire consequences of Truss’s “handouts for the rich and austerity for everyone else” madness meant that the country was too broke to invest in fixing any of the problems, meaning more austerity!

"The last government screwed up so we can’t afford to invest in the drivers of future economic prosperity" is exactly the same message pushed by Cameron and Osborne in 2010, and the only difference now is that it’s being hawked by a Labour opposition waiting for their turn in power, rather than the Tories.

All of Labour’s glitzy propaganda boasts about how they’re going to bring back growth and make Britain prosperous again, but if you look under the bonnet they’re promising to stick to Tory spending restraints for years, refusing to undo even the worst of the Tory austerity cuts, and shying away from the large-scale investment that’s sorely needed in order to help Britain recover from such a sustained period of damaging under-investment.

Starmer and his inner circle are just as addicted to the austerity crack as the Tories, and all the optimistic and uplifting rhetoric about making things better is nothing more than the lies of junkies hiding their addiction.

What Starmer’s offering is essentially the same deceptive snake oil Johnson was peddling to win the 2019 general election.

Since 2010 the country has sunk into a seemingly terminal decline of falling living standards, failing public services, soaring poverty, catastrophically low rates of investment, and crumbling local communities.

And what do we have to show for all of these cuts? The national debt has tripled!

The deficit that was meant to be eliminated by austerity in 2015 is still massive in 2023, and will be impossible to wipe out until this self-harming austerity addiction comes to an end.

But instead of recognising the damage that’s been done and seeking to rectify it, both main political parties are intent on reaching for the austerity crack pipe again, for another toxic dose of “more of the same”.

Just as the malnourished junkie with teeth falling out, riddled with sores and infections, social life in ruins, refuses to give up the addiction that’s gradually killing them, the Westminster establishment cabal insist that there’s no alternative but to administer another hit of the economic toxin that’s been gradually killing the country.