DOCSLIB.ORG

Britain Back to Austerity Upon Whose Shoulders?

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Britain Back to Austerity Upon Whose Shoulders? British Politics Review Journal of the British Politics Society, Norway Volume 5 | No. 4| Autumn 2010 Britain back to austerity Upon whose shoulders? CONTRIBUTORS Helen Goodman • David Kynaston • Siv Jensen • Simon Lee Jane Waldfogel • Nick Sitter • Daniel Clegg • Harry Cheesman • Chris White British Politics Review Editorial Volume 5 | No. 4 | Autumn 2010 Austerity and a new regime ISSN 1890-4505 “Severe self-discipline or self-restraint; moral strictness, rigorous abstinence, asceticism”. British Politics Review is a quarterly Thus reads the lexical definition of austerity according to Oxford English newsletter issued by the British Politics Dictionary. On the collective level, Britain has seen such times before, particularly Society, Norway. With contributions during the Second World War and in its immediate aftermath. Yet, the asceticism from academic and journalistic sour- that is now demanded does not come as the result of war, but marks the end of a ces, the British Politics Review is aimed long era where low inflation and steady growth had become almost the natural at everyone with a general interest in order of things. political developments in Britain. The position that cuts in public spending were inevitable was one that was British Politics Society, Norway is shared by all three leading parties at this year’s General Election. Following politically neutral and has no col- the rapid increase in the public deficit from 2008 to 2010, fundamental changes lective agenda apart from raising the would have to be made. Yet, disagreement over the scale and speed of cuts was interest and knowledge of British evident and has grown since then. How should the burden be distributed, politics among the informed Norwe- socially and geographically, to restore the health of public finances? What gian public. mandate – politically and morally – can the coalition government draw upon in its programme for deficit reduction? Editorial team Øivind Bratberg [Editor] Ideological disputes have abounded since the longer-term consequences Kristin M. Haugevik [Associate Editor] for the public sector and the welfare system became known in October’s Atle L. Wold Comprehensive Spending Review. Critical voices among economists claim that Jannike Elmblom Berger the risk of renewed recession will increase with the cuts. Others point to the danger of Britons taking to the streets and a return to the social conflict of the Postal address Thatcher era. Deficit reduction, they argue, is a smokescreen for an ideological P.O. Box 6 Blindern programme, challenging the public welfare system rebuilt under Labour’s 13 N-0313 Oslo, Norway years in government. Email Meanwhile, the grave economic challenges facing Britain could also be seen to [email protected] open new opportunites. A few weeks ago, the Ministry of Defence presented its Strategic Defence and Security Review announcing severe cuts in equipment, Website personnel and military capability. Shortly after, Prime Minister David Cameron www.britishpoliticssociety.no and French President Nicolas Sarkozy signed an unprecedented bilateral treaty ensuring cooperation between Britain in France in precisely these areas. A Print “pooling of sovereignty”, as the euphemism goes, is easier to accomplish in dire Reprosentralen, Oslo, Norway times. Here, austerity could be seen to entail a new climate of cooperation. Cover photo Cool-headed analysis of the present political debate in Britain is hard to come by. Prime Minister David Cameron tal- In the present issue of British Politics Review, we have sought to balance political king to workers at GE Aviation in contributions with a broader set of academic analyses. The articles cover different Cardiff, 17 May 2010. aspects of the present crisis, the path that led to it and the consequences it will Crown copyright © The Prime Minister’s Office [Published under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCom- have. mercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic Licence]. Øivind Bratberg and Kristin M. Haugevik, Editors Manuscripts Within a relatively broad framework, What next for Britain´s war British Politics Review welcomes arti- Contents on poverty? cles on British politics and society, Jane Waldfogel p. 8 preferably related to the thematic A change for the better area set for each issue (announced in Siv Jensen p. 3 Defending the realm from an empty purse? the previous issue and on our web- Strategic choices in the Defence Review site). Please contact the editors at The Coalition´s welfare policies: Chris White p. 9 a threat to Beveridge? [email protected] Helen Goodman p. 4 The illogical extension of a model: UK labour market policy and the crisis Austerity was hard to sell in the 40s. Daniel Clegg p. 10 Subscriptions Today it is harder still 100 NOK pr year David Kynaston p. 5 Making coalition politics work in Please contact us at mail@britishpoli- a harsh fiscal climate ticssociety.no or visit our website. The path to austerity Nick Sitter p. 11 Simon Lee pp. 6-7 Cameron and Osborne: radical policies in soft wrapping Harry Cheesman p. 12 2 British Politics Review Volume 5 | No. 4 | Autumn 2010 A change for the better By Siv Jensen, Fremskrittspartiet (the Progress Party) Siv Jensen is global income has increased by more than ideas have consistently failed. However, the 50 per cent, and hundreds of millions only problem is that the financial crisis was Leader of Frem- of people have left poverty behind. The not a proof of the failure of the free market skrittspartiet policies of Thatcher helped break up the and capitalism. Rather, it was the result and chairs its Soviet Empire and reverse socialism in of too much and wrong regulation and of parliamen- the West, and it did not stop there. One of politicians that just could not keep their tary group. The the most important moves, I believe, was hands off. libertarian- her reform on housing policy in Britain. It conservative was ingenious in being simple and market The failure of multiculturalism. As oriented. The policy of denationalisation the Chancellor of Germany, Angela Progress Party or privatisation as part of the remedy for Merkel recently said: Multiculturalism is the second Britain’s poor economic performance was has failed. David Cameron has said that largest party in Norway and the another important and tough move from the “state multiculturalism is a wrong-headed leading opposition party. Jensen Thatcher administration. History has shown doctrine that has had disastrous results.” has been elected member of the that individuals can make a difference and I agree with Merkel and Cameron on this. Storting since 1997, representing she surely did. I have to admit that alongside But let us be clear: A multiethnic society the district of Oslo. She is is mem- Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher has is a great thing, a multicultural one is not. inspired me more than any political leader. I believe that some principles are more ber of the Standing Committee on Earlier this autumn I had the honour of important than others. I will not accept Foreign Affairs and Defence and meeting with her in London. That was a any compromise on these principles, and member of the Enlarged Foreign Af- moment I will never forget. that is why it is so important to establish fairs Committee. clearly what the idea of multiculturalism Power to the people. In 1971 John Lennon is all about. It is about compromising After having led the Conservative Party to released the song “Power to the people”, on certain values and principles that we their best election result since 1992, David allegedly as a follow up to an interview he cannot compromise on. I believe in a multi- Cameron was appointed as Britain’s new gave to the Trotskyite magazine the Red Pole. ethnic society, but I do not believe in a Prime Minister on 11 May 2010. I was excited I find both the song title and the song itself to multi-cultural society. Multiculturalism to see Cameron succeed in leading his party be excellent, although Lennon himself was has failed. As already said, the individual to victory in the elections. A Conservative seen as belonging to the political left. To me has certain rights. I believe these rights victory in Britain was of course a boost to a politics is all about giving power back to the go above characteristics such as ethnicity, party struggling to get a change of political people, and that means reducing the power gender, sexual preferences, and religious direction here in Norway as well. It is both that now belongs to politicians or bureaucrats. beliefs. Relativism with regard to basic important and interesting for me to follow Inspired by the ideas of classical liberalism, human rights is a dangerous path that can the steps that Cameron’s new Coalition the Progress Party wants to transfer political lead to serious consequences. A successful Government are now taking. After the and economic power from the government integration policy is not about allowing end of the cold war we witnessed the to the people. Limited government is about parallel societies, but the opposite. dismantling of “hard socialism” in Europe, respect. Respect for the decisions made by now we witness the dismantling of “soft the people. After the financial crisis hit us, Goodbye nanny state, you won`t be missed. socialism” in Europe. Apart from the shift we heard that capitalism had gone bankrupt Britain`s new leader has characterised what in UK we should note the new or continuing and that what we needed now was more is about to happen in Britain under his centre-right victories in Denmark, Sweden, regulations and more government control. I leadership as “a shift in power from state Germany and the Netherlands. can fully understand that old leftists would to society”. Cameron has also promised to like to rewrite history because their own take on the bureaucratic burdens facing Many remember how the Conservative entrepreneurs, and the new Secretary of Party in the UK was portrayed as the State for Education, Michael Gove`s plans “nasty party”.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • What Remains After Brexit? a View from the Outside
    Copyright @ 2017 Australia and New Zealand Journal of European Studies Vol9 (2) ISSN 1837-2147 (Print) ISSN 1836-1803 (On-line) What Remains after Brexit? A View from the Outside Filip Kokotovic University College of International Relations and Diplomacy Dag Hammarskjöld, Zagreb, Croatia [email protected] Dr Petar Kurecic University North, Croatia [email protected] Abstract The British referendum result to opt for exiting the European Union (EU) has left both the United Kingdom (UK), as well as the rest of the EU with questions regarding the future of the integration and their future economic development. While the EU member-states present a united front in regards to the leave process, there are deeply rooted divisions on all other relevant policy questions. The issues of migration, foreign policy, and the level of cohesion within the EU itself represent the questions where there is little or no consensus. The paper concludes that both the UK and the EU need to address a deep political divide and find a way to coexist in the aftermath of Brexit. Keywords: United Kingdom (UK), European Union (EU), Brexit, political implications, immigration Introduction Brexit was an event that shocked the political elite of the United Kingdom (UK), the leaders of the European Union (EU) and the EU bureaucracy. It shocked the Britons as well, no matter what option they supported – Remain or Leave. It also surprised, shocked, and/or scared many Europeans. It led to the immediate resignation of Prime Minister David Cameron, who firmly supported the Remain option, despite the fact that his government initiated the referendum.
    [Show full text]
  • There Is No Alternative: a Discursive Analysis of Past and Present
    There Is No Alternative: A Discursive Analysis of Past and Present By Senne Vandevelde Introduction There is no alternative, or in short: TINA. One would be hard pressed to find a phrase that is so ideologically charged and at the same time so widely used in the world of politics. To disprove it seems straightforward in all circumstances. The starting point of this dissertation is therefore unequivocal: there is always an alternative. Even if a given socio-economic framework does not permit alternatives, it is always possible to alter the framework itself. As such, TINA or any other argument in the same vein is considered to be absurd. Yet both the use of such arguments as well as their appeal have by no means diminished since they were popularised by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. On the contrary, with the advent of the sovereign debt crisis in Europe and the austerity policies that ensued, TINA has only grown in importance. However, several people who used TINA during this time have no political affiliation with Thatcher whatsoever. To illustrate, this dissertation studies TINA as it was inserted into the social democratic prime ministerial discourse in Greece and Spain (which were led by George Papandreou and José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero respectively). To find out what this insertion might mean for the Eurozone and Europe today, this dissertation first goes back in time to uncover the discursive history of TINA. While TINA as an expression was coined originally by Herbert Spencer in the middle of the nineteenth century and eventually became part of regular political discourse with Thatcher, the logic of no alternative has been a recurrent theme for generations of advocates of economic liberalism, a discourse which adheres to the free market, free trade and a minimal state.
    [Show full text]
  • The Neo-Liberal Revolution by Stuart Hall.Pdf
    The neoliberal revolution Stuart Hall Thatcher, Blair, Cameron - the long march of neoliberalism continues. ow do we make sense of our extraordinary political situation: the end of the debt-fuelled boom, the banking crisis of 2007-10, the defeat of H New Labour and the rise to power of a Conservative-Liberal-Democratic Coalition? What sort of crisis is this? Is it a serious wobble in the trickle-down, win-win, end-of-boom-and-bust economic model which has dominated global capitalism? Does it presage business as usual, the deepening of present trends, or the mobilisation of social forces for a radical change of direction? Is this the start of a new conjuncture? Gramsci argued that, though the economic must never be forgotten, conjunctural crises are never solely economic, or economically-determined ‘in the last instance’. They arise when a number of contradictions at work in different key practices and sites come together - or ‘con-join’ - in the same moment and political space and, as Althusser said, ‘fuse in a ruptural unity’. Analysis here focuses on crises and breaks, and the distinctive character of the ‘historic settlements’ which follow. The condensation of forces during a period of crisis, and the new social configurations which result, mark a new ‘conjuncture’. My argument is that the present situation is a crisis, another unresolved rupture of that conjuncture which we can define as ‘the long march of the Neoliberal Revolution’. Each crisis since the 1970s has looked different, arising from specific 9 Soundings historical circumstances. However, they also seem to share some consistent underlying features, to be connected in their general thrust and direction of travel.
    [Show full text]
  • Beauty and the Beastly Prime Minister John J
    Marquette University e-Publications@Marquette English Faculty Research and Publications English, Department of 10-1-2014 Beauty and the Beastly Prime Minister John J. Su Marquette University, [email protected] Published version. ELH: English Literary History, Vol. 81, No. 3 (Fall 2014): 1083-1110. DOI. © 2014 Johns Hopkins University Press. Used with permission. BEAUTY AND THE BEASTLY PRIME MINISTER BY JOHN SU If there was any doubt whether former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s shadow continues to loom large over Britain, the events of 2011 provided the answer. The riots over the summer in London, with their echoes of the Brixton riots 30 years before, have meant that comparisons between Prime Minister David Cameron and Thatcher are now inevitable. Thatcher’s image in popular culture continues to circulate in musicals such as Billy Elliot and has recently been given new life in the biopic The Iron Lady, starring Meryl Streep. References to her have been increasing in conservative media outlets in Great Britain and the United States. The American Senator John Kyl, for example, declared in the National Review that his country “can find inspiration in what she did.”1 Congresswoman and Republican presidential candi- date Michele Bachmann branded herself “America’s Iron Lady” in an attempt to shore up her candidacy, underscoring the cultural capital that continues to be associated with the image of the former Prime Minister. Restored within the Conservative pantheon—now perhaps more unambiguously than at any time since she was forced to stand down by members of her own party—Thatcher demands renewed attention from literary and cultural theorists.
    [Show full text]
  • PAVOL JOZEF ŠAFÁRIK UNIVERSITY in KOŠICE Faculty of Arts Department of British and American Studies on the REPRESENTATION OF
    PAVOL JOZEF ŠAFÁRIK UNIVERSITY IN KOŠICE Faculty of Arts Department of British and American Studies ON THE REPRESENTATION OF AN INTERNATIONAL EVENT IN A NATIONAL NEWSPAPER Mgr. Karin Sabolíková, PhD. Košice 2020 This research was supported by VEGA Project 1/0447/20 The Global and the Local in Postmillennial Anglophone Literatures, Cultures and Media, granted by the Ministry of Education, Research and Sport of the Slovak Republic. ON THE REPRESENTATION OF AN INTERNATIONAL EVENT IN A NATIONAL NEWSPAPER Monograph Author: Mgr. Karin Sabolíková, PhD. Faculty of Arts, Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice Reviewers: Prof. María José Coperías-Aguilar, PhD. University of Valencia, Spain Doc. PhDr. Edita Kominarecová, PhD. University of Prešov, Prešov Science Editor: Dr.h.c. Doc. Mgr. Slávka Tomaščíková, PhD. Faculty of Arts, Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice © 2020 Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice All rights reserved. No part of these pages, either text or image may be used for any purpose other than personal use. Therefore, reproduction, modification, storage in a retrieval system or retransmission, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or otherwise, for reasons other than personal use, is strictly prohibited without prior written permission. The author is fully responsible for the scientific, linguistic and formal quality of the textbook. The text has undergone a process of proofreading. Available at: www.unibook.upjs.sk Publication date: 23.12.2020 ISBN 978-80-8152-951-1 (e-publication) Contents Introduction
    [Show full text]
  • Brexit and the British Growth Model Towards a New Social Settlement
    Brexit and the British Growth Model Towards a new social settlement Christopher Bickerton Responses by Warwick Lightfoot, Graham Gudgin and John Mills About the Authors Christopher Bickerton is Reader in Modern European Politics at the Department of Politics and International Studies, Cambridge University, and a Fellow in Politics at Queens' College, Cambridge. He has published widely on the European Union and European politics, and was the author in 2016 of the best- selling book, The European Union: A Citizen's Guide (Penguin). John Mills is both an entrepreneur and an economist. He has built up a substantial trading company – John Mills Limited or JML – which sells consumer products in both the UK and throughout the world. He has written many books on economics, all focused on why the UK's economic performance – and that of the West generally – has been so relatively poor, and what can be done to remedy this situation. Graham Gudgin is Policy Exchange’s Chief Economic Adviser. He is currently Honorary Research Associate at the Centre for Business Research (CBR) in the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge. He is also visiting Professor at the University of Ulster and Chairman of the Advisory Board of the Ulster University Economic Policy Centre. Warwick Lightfoot is Director of Economics and Social Policy at Policy Exchange and was special adviser to Norman Fowler the Secretary of State for Employment 1987-89 and to the Chancellor of the Exchequer 1989-92 for Nigel Lawson, John Major and Norman Lamont. He is the author of Margaret Thatcher: The economics of creative destruction.
    [Show full text]