Osborne’s autistic outburst

Newspaper headline

Headline from The Independent

The media are full of it. Thursday:

The Daily Telegraph: Tories at war with ‘biased BBC’ . Subheading: ‘David Cameron and George Osborne furious over Autumn Statement coverage which they claim contained ‘systematic exaggeration’.

The Daily Mail: Osborne goes to war on the BBC after reporter claims ‘utterly terrifying’ spending cuts will take Britain back to 1930s squalor

The Guardian: ‘ George Osborne rattled by tax experts’ accusations of colossal scale of cuts

Can it get worse? Yes, according to the Daily Telegraph today:

Under seige, the ‘biased’ BBC fights for its life

And so on. Of course we have all learned to judge these claims by where they are published. The BBC itself subsumes them under an article on newspaper headlines .

The following information is gleaned from the above Telegraph and Guardian articles. On Newsnight, Evan Davis described Osborne’s Autumn Statement:

You have to go back to the depression of the 1930s to find a crisis comparable to the one we are in — it is one of those once-in-a-lifetime experiences.

The Today programme compared the forecasts from the Office for Budget Responsibility to ‘a book of doom’, saying Britain was heading back to the time of George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier .

Osborne replied:

I would have thought the BBC would have learned from the last four years that its totally hyperbolic coverage of spending cuts has not been matched by what has actually happened. I had all that when I was interviewed four years ago and has the world fallen in? No it has not.

These complaints are directed to a BBC whose upper echelons are riddled with members and supporters of the Conservative Party, as Owen Jones describe in his The Establishment.

A few hours later the Institute of Fiscal Studies, hardly a Marxist organisation, joined in but with more measured language. The planned cuts would amount to a ‘fundamental re-imagining of the state’. According to its Director, Paul Johnson,

The chancellor is right to point out that it has proved possible to implement substantial cuts over this parliament. One cannot just look at the scale of implied cuts going forward and say they are unachievable. But it is surely incumbent upon anyone set on taking the size of the state to its smallest in many generations to tell us what that means.

The IFS’ criticisms are quite detailed, drawing attention to the implications of another six years of even greater cuts. Osborne replied:

I’m not pretending these are easy decisions or that they have no impact. But the alternative of a return to economic chaos, of not getting on top of your debts, of people looking at Britain across the world and thinking that is not a country in charge of its own destiny, is not a world that I want to deliver.

Apart from the Freudian slip (what sort of world midwife does he think he is?) one wonders what he is trying to achieve.

This is where I can’t help suspecting an element of autism. In the world of ordinary people’s lives, the last four and a half years have witnessed more and more polarisation of wealth with ever-increasing numbers of less well-off people having lower incomes and more stressful working lives, while the unemployed are driven to ever greater desperation.

No, the world has not literally fallen in, but countless numbers of people have seen the quality of their lives deteriorate, often substantially. Of course the prospect of the situation getting worse and worse for the next six years is bound to generate comparisons with the worst periods of our history: how could anyone expect otherwise? Yet it is as though Osborne just doesn’t see why people are responding like this.

Of course Osborne himself, like all the Government, are not suffering at all from the present deterioration. Most of them are doing extremely well out of it. Nevertheless one would expect him to know about, and sympathise with, the people at the sharp end. One would especially expect expressions of sympathy just before a general election, even from politicians who do not really feel it.

It is as though Osborne does not take the suffering at all seriously. I suspect this is true of all the Cabinet, but it comes across more strongly with him. Part of the reason may be that, never having experienced extreme poverty, he does not know what it is like; but most people have enough imagination to sympathise with the misfortunes of others. His responses come across, to me at least, as a bit autistic – as though he lacks the emotional awareness to appreciate what other people are going through.

Even so, it still remains to be explained why he thinks his plans for the economy justify what he is doing. What is it that, in his mind, makes what he is doing worthwhile?

To me what comes across from Osborne is characteristed by the final quote above. What matters to him is that Britain is a country ‘in charge of its own destiny’. He thinks in terms of Britain as a metaphysical entity in its own right, an entity which can be measured and described by its financial state. The statistics he has at his fingertips describe Britain. To him, that is what Britain is.

So the distress of having to queue up at a food bank, the sleepless nights worrying about how to feed the children, the shivering of those who cannot afford heating, are not part of Osborne’s world because they never get measured. They are not the Britain he knows.

How have we ended up being governed by people who think like this? A large part of the answer, I believe, is the deification of the economy. 40 years ago, while training to become a social worker, I attended an Economics course. In those days economists like Mishan and Galbraith debated the pros and cons of economic growth. There was a consensus that the living conditions of the bulk of the people needed to improve. There were two possible ways to do it. One was to take from the rich. The other was to increase the total amount of national wealth, so that the poor could have their lives improved without taking from the rich. The latter was of course more politically acceptable.

In those days we had much more of a welfare state and redistributive tax policies, so when the nation’s total wealth increased ordinary people could benefit. This has long since ceased to be the case. However, attitudes change slowly. Just as the reputation of the BBC for balanced reporting survives even though these days it only expresses views acceptable to a narrow establishment, so also economic growth still has a positive reputation even though it now does far more harm than good.

We seem to be governed by people who think that if only they can get the economy right, everything else will get sorted automatically. Their belief is a faith in a god – the economy deified. In practice, the economy turns out to be a harsh god with an insatiable appetite for human sacrifices.

We would be better governed by people who demote the economy to what it really is, just a set of abstract statistics. Then we could concentrate instead on meeting people’s needs.

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