Rip Van Winkle awakes to find:
the scars of austerity are all around...100,000 unfilled vacancies for overstressed NHS staff, with 2 million more people on hospital waiting lists.... 1.4 million fewer frail people getting any social care, due to local councils stripped of half their funds.... Schools, many dilapidated, have lost funds of 8% per pupil, with sixth forms and colleges cut by 16%, losing teachers....Sure Start children’s centres barely exist...Children are hungry, he finds, as the threshold for free school meals has risen steeply....Pay has stagnated, and incomes still haven’t caught up with a decade ago, unknown since Napoleonic times...four in 10 children are living in poverty, the highest proportion for 60 years...longevity is falling not rising... infant mortality has risen for the past two years...The number of children in care has doubled...he can see rough sleepers huddled against hospital walls: sure enough, he checks to find them up by 250%...Graphs for growth, per-capita income and public spending are too depressing to go on reading. But he notes there are twice as many billionaires as a decade ago, and 30% have avoided tax by keeping their cash offshore....
Van Winkle turns to the leadership election:
He notes the rank hypocrisy of Gove snorting coke and the next day writing a bombastic anti-drug column in the Times. But even that seems less outrageous than Johnson’s sociopathic knack for cheating, lying and misleading voters, mysteriously forever invulnerable...Dominic Raab will cut 5p off the basic income tax rate, set the top rate at 35% and now hurries to cut national insurance for the lowest paid. Jeremy Hunt will drop corporation tax to just 12.5% – from 28% a decade ago – and abolish tuition fees for graduates if they become entrepreneurs (expect a steep rise in bogus “self-employed” people). And he will double defence spending, yes double!...
Johnson deserves double the scorn, of course:
Johnson will refuse to pay our £39bn debt to the European Union, [unless he gest a better deal was the real emphasis] making Britain a rogue state, while he cuts tax for the 3 million best-off, raising the 40% threshold from £50,000 to £80,000. The IFS says this will especially benefit rich pensioners – and costs £9.6bn – yet Johnson proclaims: “I am a One Nation Conservative!” He recently called for cuts to stamp duty and capital gains too – bonanzas for the well off. His promise of £5,000 for every pupil exploded as it turned out to add just 0.1% to the schools budget. But that’s just naughty Boris.
But the others are nearly as bad:
Gove will abolish VAT, swapping it for a lesser sales tax....Esther McVey would also purloin the £39bn owed to the EU, to spend on a public sector pay rise. [Pretty sensible I think, accepting that some of the £39bn is a proper debt]...
Above all though:
Van Winkle sinks into gloom at candidates’ familiar boasts that Britain will rule the waves again. ...The Brexit reflex is just another twitch of the old imperial fantasy, Van Winkle notes. Why can’t our politicians express a dignified patriotic love of country without world-class bragging that only makes us look absurd in our current state?
She is right to point to the calamity of having all the running over Brexit dominated by right-wing agendas, with silence or waffle from the left (and imagined European communities of cosmopolitans from liberals). Good to see the right sort of politics at the centre again, after Toynbee's own unfortunate excursions into identity politics and petit-bourgeois class hate. Still not a word about how the EU neo-lib regime has encouraged, or at least permitted, all this austerity and polarisation though, in Europe as well.
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