You can't cut your way to prosperity

Rachel Reeves' austerity agenda isn't as extreme as George Osborne's in depth, but in a way it's more extreme to keep doing it after Osborne's agenda delivered such stagnation

The lesson should already have been learned, but the diabolical Westminster establishment class outright refuses to learn it.

When Cameron and Osborne introduced austerity in 2010 they promised that their massive across the board cuts to public spending would bring back prosperity and completely eliminate the budget deficit by 2015.

What they actually delivered was an unprecedented period of economic stagnation, and when it became clear that they had spectacularly failed to deliver their promise to eliminate the deficit, they cynically presented their failure as a success story by boasting that they’d "cut the deficit by a third".

Despite Osborne’s austerity agenda delivering economic stagnation, failing public services, crumbling infrastructure, falling real terms wages, ever more unaffordable housing, and soaring inequality, the Tories stuck with it until 2024, and Starmer’s Labour have decided to persist with the delusion that it’s possible to cut their way to prosperity too.

Rachel Reeves has just announced another punishing round of public spending cuts, mainly targeted at Britain’s already miserly and Kafkaesque disability benefits system, and at our desperately underfunded public services.

The Starmer government’s stated reason for driving millions of sick and disabled people deeper into poverty is the rising numbers of people off work on long-term sickness and disability benefits, but there are a couple of obvious reasons for this trend.

One of the main reasons so many people are ending up on disability benefits is the austerity cuts that have devastated the NHS and left it unable to provide timely treatment for millions of patients, especially when it comes to mental health issues.

Millions of people on NHS waiting lists, means millions of people with untreated conditions that restrict their ability to work.

The obvious solution would be reversal of the austerity cuts, and serious investment in the NHS to help those who could work again to recover and get back to work.

Rachel Reeves idea is to punish those who cannot work by cutting disability benefits for all disabled people, including those who have no prospect of working, and making the disability benefits system even more draconian and Kafkaesque than it already is.

There are multiple problems with this approach beyond the outright cruelty of snatching money from the poorest and most vulnerable in society in a futile attempt to balance the books.

It’s been shown time and again that impoverishing people doesn’t actually help people find work, in fact it does the opposite.

Taking away disabled people’s mobility vehicles and forcing them deeper into poverty obviously doesn’t help them find work, it makes it even more difficult.

Then there’s the fact that the poorest people in society spend practically all of their income back into the economy straight away. This means that taking £5 billion out of the pockets of sick and disabled people simply means that there’s £5 billion less in economic circulation, meaning less spending, less demand, and fewer jobs.

More cuts to infrastructure investment, public services, and local government budgets might save money on paper, but that doesn’t account for the costs either.

Not only do the costs tend to appear elsewhere as a result of cuts, like the NHS cuts resulting in greater reliance upon long-term sickness and disability benefits, or police cuts resulting in increased crime, there’s also the long-term future to consider too.

What large companies are going to want to invest in creating jobs in the UK when the country is beset by crumbling and outdated infrastructure (outside of London), failing public services, and bankrupt local councils?

It is possible to cut the education budget by scrapping free school meals and eliminating lessons on music, art, and physical education, but again, it comes at the cost of future economic prosperity.

You only need a fleeting grip on reality to understand that hungry kids struggle to concentrate properly and achieve poorer academic results than well nourished ones, and that starving kids to save a tiny fraction of the education budget is storing up problems for the future.

The cultural industries is one of the few economic sectors in which Britain genuinely still punches above its weight in the global economy. Saving a few quid by denying huge numbers of kids access to music, sports, and the arts is a false economy, because how many of those kids might have gone on to join the next generation of musicians, artists, actors, and sportspeople who generate over a hundred billion pounds per year for the British economy?

Britain desperately needs to move away from the failed economic model of short-term austerity cuts to public spending aimed at balancing the books, without consideration of the long-term economic consequences.

Reeves cuts aren’t quite as destructive as George Osborne’s in terms of scale, but in a way they’re even worse because they’re being imposed on an economy that’s already suffered a decade and a half of austerity stagnation, and because the political class should surely have learned their lesson by now.

Prosperity is driven by strategic investment, not by short-term spending cuts and futile book balancing exercises.

The Tory austerity years were characterised by endless missed targets and downgraded economic forecasts, each time provoking another round of spending and investment cuts.

This week the OBR have downgraded Britain’s predicted 2025 growth rate from 2% to 1%, alongside Reeves’ announcement of more austerity cuts and more futile book-balancing exercises.

The rotten Westminster establishment class clearly haven’t learned a thing.