Cheaper Than Bombs

I opened a load of post this morning. The telephone bill, the electricity charges. My old passport returned to me with a few sentimental stamps in red or green ink (New York, Dublin, Calais), and a new one with pages bearing faint baroque illustrations of English landscapes. Tottenham Hotspur want to sell me leisurewear – I can do without that, but I wouldn’t mind a look at their best of The Big Match. Council Tax bill and explanatory booklet. A quarter of the sum goes to the GLA. I wonder how this worked before we had a GLA. I suppose I could go back to old bills – I tend to keep things a long time. The accompanying booklet lacks the colours and pictures of previous years. Austerity. It begins with the borough’s Mayor talking of tightening the budget and taking tough decisions. Later, a GLA page says that Mayor Boris Johnson’s administration continues to deliver on its pledges and provide increased value for money. I’m surprised and dubious to see such partisan claims in this colourless booklet. It also tells me that each household is paying 38p a week towards the Olympics. That’s about a third of the cost of a carton of banana milk. It’s not much money, but I’m not sure why I, let alone poorer people, should be paying it. I don’t mind the idea of the Olympics; I like the idea of encouraging sports other than football, for they have tended to be marginalized in the era of satellite TV soccer and its idiot billionaires. But the Olympics are supposed to be for amateurs, so I can’t see why we need to pay anything for it, especially as our city already contains lots of running tracks and stadia. Nor do I want to pay a quango 38p a week to tear up Greenwich Park, a decision that was made over the heads of local people. I tear up the booklet and throw it in the pile of paper to recycle.

In Britain today, cuts are part of the intellectual landscape. Austerity is a background assumption. Every day arguments rage online (but not, perhaps in person: argument has all been outsourced to online space, no one really argues about politics face to face anymore) about whether we have the money to pay for anything. If anyone proposes new services or social improvements, the retort is: ‘There’s no more money’. People like to affect a world-weary, wise, resigned attitude. They state that Gordon Brown’s Labour Party bankrupted the country through a decade of unaffordable spending. They claim that for every £4 spent, £1 is borrowed. They sigh that spending more and more on nurseries or pensioners may sound desirable, but that in the real world we must all accept the limitations brought on by our country’s late profligacy. Austerity has become the site of the cool, tough stance. The austerity Briton shakes his head at others’ foolish desires for the state to provide services out of the money it takes by taxing us. Those desires may be well-meaning. But you see, the figures just don’t add up. Sometimes we are also told that state spending is only going back down to where it was five years ago. Calm down, dear; it’s not a great slash and burn of the social fabric, just a correction.

In writing these things down, I know that I encounter the limits of my own knowledge and understanding. Like many people, I don’t really know about the state’s finances, and I lack the expertise to interpret the relevant data if I had it. And even if I understood a given set of figures, it might be partial, incorrect or tendentious. So many of us are concerned about austerity and cuts, but are also in the dark about it. We fall back on the odd figure that’s been much repeated, like the ones above. We don’t have much of a context for the figures. We go on thinking about a hundred other things, while forming a position on the economic climate that accords as far as possible with our affiliations. Here is mine: wasn’t this financial crisis primarily caused by the irresponsibility of bankers? I remember that the day after Mr Brown and Alistair Darling announced a bail-out of the banks, we were told that this had plunged the country into a financial hole from which it would not emerge for 25 years. The state, I thought, had bought up controlling shares in a few large banks. Would the banks pay the money back to the taxpayer? I think they were supposed to, in the initial claims about the policy. I don’t suppose they ever will. I get the impression that they have robbed us all. But I mostly only deal in such impressions, for like many others, I can’t or don’t follow the details. If I did, they probably wouldn’t make me feel better.

After the banking crisis, there was talk of an important political struggle to apportion blame and responsibility. People on the centre-left wrote that we needed to insist that the banks had caused the problem, even while the Conservative Party was blaming it on the previous decade of government spending and asserting that public spending must be slashed. The two versions seem so different. Perhaps both had an element of truth – perhaps public spending had become high in relation to the tax take, but manageable, and the banks were what caused the dramatic financial deficit? It seems that the story of blame matters, because it is on this basis that cuts in public spending have been announced in 2010-11. Thousands of cuts have been announced, discussed, reviled. You hear that theatres face cuts; the arts face cuts. The entire budget for teaching Arts and Humanities in universities vanishes overnight. Sure Start faces cuts (I only have any idea what this is because Polly Toynbee has gone on about it for a decade – a New Labour nursery scheme, I suppose). Local authorities must administer cuts. Swimming pools and job centres will be cut. Depending on who you are, you might feel able to ignore lots of these decisions. You might think they’re a pity, but then pay them no more heed. But for a lot of people, there will be some particular barrage of cuts that will hurt and offend. For me, cuts to public libraries tend to be in that category. Authors and readers across Britain have gathered and complained about the philistinism of closing libraries. Blackheath Library will close at the end of May 2011. This library has fond associations for me. In February I went to a demonstration against its closure.

Some have suggested that there is a case for cutting libraries down; that their traditional purpose becomes outmoded as books are overtaken by e-readers and so on. I think there is something in this case. But the specific function of libraries is not the only issue. There is also the sense that public places are being taken away; that in withdrawing provision for publicly owned spaces, the state is damaging the social fabric in which we live. I think that’s true.

The news that has most troubled me is the report that the animal centre will be closed in a public park next to the street where I grew up. Among all recipients of public spending there could hardly be a more primal scene for me. I think of it now and can smell the summery hay and the reek of the peaceful goats and donkeys. I was very saddened to read of this threat. I was also touched by a letter about it in the local paper, from a child who is equally concerned.

You could say that I haven’t made use of these animal enclosures in years or, in truth, decades; that for me to argue for their retention is mere Proustian self-indulgence. Again there is something in this. We cannot rely on society to preserve everything that existed when we were children. But there seems to me a much simpler case against the cut. Why now? This park was intact through the recession at the start of the Thatcher years, the days of laid-off steelworkers and the economists’ letter to the Times. It survived the miners’ strike, while people on the local council estates were donating tins of food toward the NUM’s cause. It continued through the era of repossessions that closed the 1980s; through the Gulf War and the dot com bubble. The animal park has survived all this turmoil. To think that it cannot survive the bankers’ gambles makes the heart sore. Are we so much poorer now than we were in 1981? Look around you. Our country seems richer than it’s ever been. The average person is more comfortable than thirty years ago. I can’t credit that we can’t afford to do things we did then. And once these things are cut – they will not return. The norm will be adjusted downward and we will forget what we once enjoyed.

I wanted to write something here about the cuts. At one point I was going to discuss a sense I had, which somewhat disturbed me. It was that our society is no longer in a state to be serious about these things. My feeling, or fear, was that people of, for instance, my generation are both insulated and distracted – by technology (the phones everyone carries around and fidgets with all the time; the multiple tabs open and flashing their latest updates in the corner of your eye) and by the culture that it has brought. I suppose by this last I mean primarily social networking: people broadcasting themselves, always on, always distracted, everything becoming a joke within 15 minutes, every phrase become an ugly acronym, newspapers solemnly reporting on something someone tweeted. I had a feeling that many of us today were too distracted and too trivialized by all this, to pay real attention to the political situation and the assault that is being made on the public realm. You get angry for 5 minutes, then there’s a video of a dancing kitten to watch. I know that technology and indeed social networking have been politically effective in certain circumstances, possibly including the Middle East; you don’t have to tell me that. But I still thought that the balance of their effect might be, let’s say towards such over-stimulation that they might as well be narcoleptic. I still think there is something in this intuitive case. But I won’t dwell on it further, because I may just have been projecting my own jadedness, my own ignorance and inability to engage. No need to assume that everyone is so toothless. This Saturday a march will be held against the common sense of cuts. We’ll see who turns up and how determined they are.

I thought the time had passed for me to write all the above – that I would never get round to it. But something entirely different has provoked me to go back and dredge it out, as a record of where we are and a prelude to this conclusion. In the last month or two, the Middle East has witnessed a series of popular uprisings against authoritarian regimes. Many people in this country have applauded as Arabs have campaigned against their rulers in Tunisia, Egypt and beyond. The spirit of uprising spread to Libya. Colonel Gaddafi’s regime was threatened – and here, by the way, is a blast from the past: Colonel Gaddafi, for goodness’ sake, a character who was being painted as a clown in our media when I was a boy; who allegedly gave money to the striking NUM, whether they wanted it or not; who took power when the Beatles were still together. When so many names and faces change in politics, it’s funny how some hang around. Being a dictator untroubled by electoral defenestration helps, of course. Well, Gaddafi fought back and sent his troops and tanks to crush what had become an armed rebellion. By the end of last week, they said he was on the point of overcoming them. Then a UN resolution was passed against him, and out of the sky came the bombers of the West – of France, Britain, the United States, Italy, Denmark. Last night they struck Gaddafi’s compound; this morning the radio chatter is of the ethics of targeting a dictator for assassination. A former diplomat says you can’t do that, but can’t explain why not. I think it’s probably better than killing thousands of soldiers and civilians. But I don’t have a clear view of this conflict, don’t have a line to offer, save the one that loops back to what I’ve been saying. How can we afford it?

When libraries, pools, parks close, when civil servants are fired, we are told it’s unavoidable; there’s no more money; books must be balanced, debts paid. It sounds grimly plausible. But then a military scenario appears out of the blue, unpredicted, unexpected, a contingency not part of our plans and budgets. Not a contingency that we urgently need to respond to, like a German invasion force or asteroid heading for St Albans. No real threat is posed to British people or territory. The distance from London to Tripoli is, wait for it, 1,448 miles – a distance greater than the length of the UK or France. But here all the hard-headed economic calculation, supposedly uncircumventable, is shelved. The cold-eyed realists become sentimentally expansive. Infinite riches are promised to keep military jets in the air. I once saw an Air Ambulance helicopter land at a fair in Northampton. They were appealing for funds. Just to keep the Air Ambulance in the air for an hour, they said, cost – and the figure was impossible, thousands of pounds, many times more than they could hope by passing their bucket round. So how much more does it cost to keep fighters and bombers in the air over a distant country full of strangers? How much does it cost to launch one cruise missile, and how many cruise missiles would pay for a librarian, or vice versa? I don’t think it makes sense. I think we should probably avoid burning money on bombing distant countries, righteously or wrongly, until we can pay to keep our own country as a place where we’re happy to live in peace.