Brother B in the Twilight Zone

JERRY: You know, this is like that 'Twilight Zone' where the guy wakes up and he's the same, but everyone else is different!

KRAMER: Which one?

JERRY: They were all like that!

It's the morning after the cuts before and I'm a baffled bystander, or bysitter, as a table full of people discuss the various intrigues of the 'X Factor.' I don't watch it. I have no opinion. Elsewhere in Europe there have been days of action, strikes and demonstrations. Here the front pages are filled with Wayne Rooney's contract negotiations. I awoke on Thursday morning expecting a universal expression of umbrage and ire and was instead presented with 'X Factor' speculation. I'm just waiting patiently to ask:

"So, what do you think of the Spending Review?"

When, eventually, the question is posed (there's loooooaaadsss to talk about with 'X Factor') it is met with a look redolent of Gamu being threatened with deportation. Until I reference the Institute For Fiscal Studies summary that the Spending Review is essentially, and at its very core, regressive - penalising and punishing the poorest. This provokes a vigorous colloquy amongst the assembled parties as they agree fundamentally with this notion and are of the opinion that the scrounging poor should be hit even harder.

3:00am the following morning and I still can't sleep, so I hit youtube, put my head on my unquestionably adequate hotel pillow, close my eyes and listen to Gideon Osbourne's Spending Review speech in the House Of Commons. Later I wondered, on my facebook status, how we let this happen. A friend responded:

Labour did it. Like they buggered up the country in 1978. They can't govern, then its up to the Tories to sort it all out, furthering their unpopularity in the process. Can't we just print more money Mugabe-style?

Genius! Although I don't quite agree.

The ConDem Coalition has successfully created a great myth that this present mess is Labour’s fault. It goes something like this: New Labour ran up huge public debts by wasteful spending on unnecessary public bureaucracies. The task now is to rebalance the economy by shifting resources out of the public sector and into the private.

However, a dispassionate independent observer would see this is as a ridiculous half-truth at best, if not a downright lie. Public spending, as a proportion of national wealth, was not excessive under New Labour. It was running at the forty year average in 2008 as Our Tone and the Capital G stuck religiously to the Tory spending blueprint. Nor was the cumulative debt – at about 40% of GDP – high. Many other "developed" industrial nations countries had far, far higher percentage levels of debt. Indeed, the Tories until recently insisted that they would not shift from the financial path set out by New Labour.

What caused the crisis in Britain to explode so abominably? The answer is the greatly skewed nature of the British economy and its largely amoral, derugulated-by-Thatcher Financial Sector. As the international financial system headed for meltdown, the tsunami of disaster swept through the British economy, leaving the rubble and the stagnant pools we presently survey.

The Coalition further embellish their myth that it’s all New Labour’s fault, by asserting the need to "roll back the public sector," and to make bigger and deeper cuts: the worshipping of The Big Market as we dismantle The Big State. The belief that the Coalition government is merely trying to sort out the country’s public finances has been unmasked for the sham it is. This is 19th century government, wanting a small state with little or no compassion for the ‘deserving poor’ and as little socialised provision as possible. It is setting out to achieve what Margaret Thatcher attempted: reversing much of the great liberal-social democratic reforms of the 20th century. There is no such thing as 'Society', it's every man for himself.

Spending on public services is set to reduce by 25% in real terms by 2014-15. That is the equivalent of around a fifth of all public sector staff or well over a million jobs. But the real impact is not going to be on public jobs, as vital as they are, it's going to be on the services that people get. The poorer you are, the more dependent you are on public services and provision.

I'm guessing you don't do this too often, but if you listened to Radio 4 this week you would have heard a rising chorus from those whose benefits will be cut. For example, the tearful mother of a disabled man who lives in a home rang in. At present he has an adjusted car so that she can drive him about. Under these new measures he will lose this vehicle. The more money you have, the more options you have to provide for yourself if you need to and public services fail to deliver. The effect on many vulnerable people will be devastating. But hey, they deserve it.

Another plank of the New Fiscal Orthodoxy is as follows:

“Public borrowing is only taxation deferred, and it would be irresponsible to accumulate substantial debts that would have to be paid off by subsequent generations in decades to come.”

In 2006 Great Britain finally finished paying off the debts accumulated through ‘Lend-Lease’ that allowed us to buy weapons and armaments from the USA during World War II. Only a buffoon or a cretin would say "I think we should have surrendered to Hitler because we shouldn’t be accumulating substantial debts to pass on to subsequent generations."

An extreme example, but one which works on the mind more forcibly than a precept and merely ponders whether the long-term benefits are worth the long-term borrowing. Our children and grandchildren who have carried on paying off the debt also benefitted from the original spending, unless you would have preferred living under the Third Reich.

This principle can easily be extended to some other obvious areas of public spending – schools, hospitals, roads, bridges and other infrastructure built today might be expected to last for decades and our children and grandchildren will benefit from them, so what’s so bad about asking them to contribute something to the costs of these benefits?

Mrs Thatcher may well be ill and languishing in hospital, but her wickedly divisive world view is in rude health. The current British fiscal problem was created not by profligate spending by the Big State but by an economic crisis caused by the Big Market. The more deleterious effects of this Big Market were then ameliorated by the very State which we're told now needs rolling back.

Do-do-do-do Do-do-do-do

Sorry, that was me singing the 'Twilight Zone' theme to wrap this piece with a pretty pink bow.