Why even pragmatists should support the protestors on #26march

The major barrier that movements around #march26 and other major UK protests need to address is the silent army of pragmatists.

Now, a pragmatist is basically an idealist who thinks that the way the world is currently is pretty much the way it should be. It’s an odd ideal to have, but there you are. A pragmatist feels that we should be doing stuff that supports the way things are – making things that are already happening them cheaper/easier/more efficient/fairer. The important point here is a pragmatist is far more influenced by the dominant ideas around the way the world works than anyone else. 

The dominant idea about UK public policy at the moment is that the UK has too much debt, and we need to save money that we would otherwise spend on public services to pay it off. A pragmatist may be very upset about closures, cuts, and job losses, but fundamentally accepts that we have to do *something* to pay off the national deficit or debt, and that spending less is the way to do it. And, in a clever bit of marketing, the coalition has sold the restructuring of public services as “cuts” that will help pay off the national deficit/debt.

It’s a classic logical fallacy:

* we must do something (we must pay off the deficit/debt)
* this is something (let’s massively restructure the way public services work)
* therefore we must do this (changes to public services are the way to pay off the deficit/debt.

I’m not going to get in to the discussions about why we don’t need to be worried about paying off the national deficit or debt, or why cutting public services is not a good way of doing this, simply because it has been done very well elsewhere. The trouble with it, is it is one website against the entirety of the mass media telling us that we need to start paying debt off. It’s right, but for most people it’s not compelling compared to what everyone else is saying.

So, let’s (as a thought experiment) accept that we need to cut public services to pay off the national deficit/debt. What are the key coalition policies for doing this – and what do they actually mean in terms of public spending..

The big election promise here was that NHS funding was to be stable in real terms. However, a recent estimate puts the cost of the proposed NHS structural reforms close to £3bn, effectively taking £3bn pounds away from what we would be spending on actual healthcare. 

Closing organisations means transferring staff and functions to new locations, covering redundancy payments, and covering incidental costs. It is very unlikely that we will see any savings at all from cutting the quangos over the next 10 years. And it’s estimated that reorganisations in Whitehall (where senior civil servants work) cost £760m in the last parliament… how much will continued, and far more radical, reorganisation cost in this one?

To take a glaring example from the main Civil Service, cuts to Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs will mean less tax collectors who are collecting taxes (and thus meaning more taxes are avoided or uncollected.) To give one example, HMRC has been unable to fill 100 posts required to pursue large companies known to be skilled in tax avoidance because a 25% budget cut means it does not have the funds to pay staff. So the tax we are collecting is lower than expected.

Cuts to housing benefits put more pressure on the government to provide temporary accommodation. Cuts to incapacity benefits mean more people who are not physically or mentally fit enough to work are forced to work, leading to more pressure on the NHS. Cuts to unemployment benefit lead to more people working cash-in-hand, which means less tax is collected.

We’ve been all over this on this blog. The new funding method costs the tax payer at least £3bn more in this parliament than the current system, even more than that if (as seems to be happening) the average yearly course fee is greater than £7,500.

The big idea here is free schools, and less central control for “academy” schools, with more budgets deferred direct to head-teachers. Free-schools (effectively giving random strangers large sums to open schools with few safeguards, and funding surplus schools places) are unlikely to be a means of saving money and are simply a means of allowing the private sector (rather than parents) to start new schools with government funds, at a time when existing schools need £8.5bn of structural repairs. And the demise of centralisation has a cost – for example, £80m was “saved” by closing BECTA, an organisation that delivered an average £28bn yearly saving to the education sector by centralising procurement in IT.

As an example, if every library was closed tomorrow, we would “save”  £1.2bn . However, that would be 25,000 less employed people paying tax,  and 25,000 more unemployed people claiming benefits. And there is the unquantifiable number of people who use library services to get back into employment, through re-skilling, self-education or finding work. Close libraries and that’s more tax gain lost, more people still claiming benefits.

You really can’t even estimate the soical cost to this kind of cut. A Sure Start centre closing means parents can’t hold down jobs whilst caring for their children, means children grow up with less chance to do what they want in life. A local leisure centre closure means people can afford to take less exercise, pushing the national healthcare bill up.  Cut subsidised bus services and ensure that many people can no longer travel to their place of work… less tax, more benefits.

To conclude, every single one of these “flagship” spending cuts costs the country more than it saves. If you are a pragmatist, if you do believe that we need to cut public spending, get out and march. Because what the government is doing is the opposite, whilst we still lose services and support that the country badly needs.

I’m not marching today, I’m caring for my son whilst my wife marches. But I support everyone who is protesting against these disastrous policies, in London, in their own homes or online.