Lesley Riddoch: ConDem cuts can cause memory loss

Published on Sunday 6 February 2011 11:58

Budgets on a par with 2001, before spending went stratospheric, sounds good but delivers nothing

NEWLY published council budgets seem to be axing all the wrong things.

The world-renowned Centre for the Traditional Arts in Plockton could shut if Highland Council removes its grant. Libraries in Edinburgh may have been saved by weekend demonstrations - but others elsewhere are under threat. Respite care for carers in Glasgow has been cut despite the provision of extra Scottish Government cash. How will that save human dignity or cash if distraught carers hand hard-to-handle relatives into state care?

E-mail inboxes across Scotland are filling up with petitions and appeals for support from deserving causes facing closure.

There are two things which connect almost all of them. They serve the disadvantaged - a sector set to grow as unemployment and retrenchment continues - and they were functioning perfectly well in 2001 - the Year Zero of current public spending plans.

How is that possible?

Coalition cuts were famously meant to take us back to 2001 levels of spending. Wise men advised us not to use words like "austerity" to describe our collective predicament - because the "A" word exaggerated the severity of the cuts that lay ahead. We would simply be tightening belts after a decade of over-consumption. A bit like dieters after Christmas excess, we would simply wind the clock back to the year before public spending went bonkers.

And 2001 wasn't so bad, was it?

Compared with those grim years in the late 80s and early 90s - forever associated with closure and hardship - 2001 did not immediately strike fear into the heart of the average taxpayer.

Even if the cuts would effectively wipe out all the wage, pension and employment gains of Labour's second and third terms in office - the mention of 2001 was somehow reassuring.

It wasn't a bad year - not a bad destination for a society compelled to go Back to the Future.

After all, what would there be to mourn about losing the noughties - or were they the zeroes? The last decade was hard to characterise: what were the musical highlights? What were the politics about - except the long decline of Blair and New Labour? What was its memorable core?

Nothing much - except for the disastrous war in Iraq. Everyone but Tony Blair can agree we'd all have better off without that colossal and expensive mistake.

Documents released to the Chilcot Inquiry show that Tony Blair believed the 2003 invasion would cost the same as the 1991 Gulf war - 2.5 billion. In fact, from 2003 to 2009 it cost 8.4bn. By now Britain has probably spent four times the amount envisaged by Tony Blair - and yet we are poorer and less safe.That's been the pattern of the noughties - much spent for little tangible gain.

In 2001 total public spending was 362bn. In 2011 it will be around 681bn. Spending in every budget area has doubled during the noughties - with as little tangible benefit to the nation as the 8bn spent on Iraq.

No wonder 2001 feels like a relatively acceptable place to be - it predates our collective craziness. It brings us back to the years of hope. The Scottish Parliament was young then. The country was not stained by illegal involvement in Iraq. Above all, citizens believed our government(s) would invest wealth wisely to end century-long scourges of inequality and poverty.

Now we know the truth - Britain blew it. Scotland blew it. We all blew it.

Who wouldn't want to go back to 2001 and try again?

So there's been a strange subliminal hope that the ConDem cuts might somehow restore sanity and equilibrium - an economic gastric band for a society that simply cannot control its self-destructive appetites. That hope is finally being proved wrong. Cuts are being applied - to misquote David Cameron - to essential parts of our "muscular liberalism". We are losing services which form the backbone and the very shape of Britain - not the flabby underbelly we know we need to lose.

North Ayrshire Council is considering the idea of a four-day week for schools to save cash. Why? Because it was possible.

The law does not prescribe the length of a school week but simply requires schools to be "open" for at least 190 days a year. So even though a four-day school week would cause chaos for working parents, business and children, the plan is on the table. Is it the best idea? Or just the only possible one? Is a four-day school week the best way forward for parents, children and teachers - or just the best way to avoid conflict with vested interests?

Will future public service provision be the product of a join-the-dots exercise - linking services with similar levels of statutory protection, union backing and public profile? We trust that politicians are not choosing the paths of least political resistance. Are we naive?

Who would be a councillor facing such choices? The men and women at the end of Britain's democratic food chain have the fewest levers to effect fundamental change. Yet they are being forced to boldly go where higher tiers of government fear to tread.

The public is a varied bunch. Council services are used by the poorest but financed by the richest in society - and the most affluent are the least likely to use council services but the most likely to kick up a fuss. So at a time of cutbacks, whose voices should be heard? Service users, council tax payers or unions? Or - since we are less than 100 days from Scottish elections - spin doctors at Holyrood?

Britain has changed since the turn of the century - we are older, fatter, more suspicious and less likely to set up new business. Peak oil is arriving.We've had two terrible and expensive winters.

We need vigorous, ideas-based, vested-interest-free debate about the future. Instead we have professionals accustomed to working in "silos" and political parties unable to support one another's better ideas.

As a result, many service and funding practices have simply become self-perpetuating and un-assailable - whether they serve the needs of the future or not.

If the present council cuts packages take us back anywhere near the heady days of 2001 it will be nothing short of a miracle.