Like George Osborne before her, chancellor Rachel Reeves has branded austerity as ‘efficiency savings’. If successive governments have already starved public services of funds, further cuts won’t help. Reeves has now instructed each government department to find 5% savings on their current budgets over the next five years – despite claiming departmental budgets “will increase”. So, which is it?
The austerity backdrop
Since 2010, a lack of health spending growth has resulted in a cumulative austerity of hundreds of billions of pounds. This has led to waiting lists for treatment of 7.54m cases as of October.
When governments ask for so-called ‘efficiency savings’, departments sometimes eat out of capital budgets. If the UK spent the same as the average investment of 14 EU countries in NHS technology and buildings, we’d have spent £33bn more between 2010 and 2019.
Also under the Tories, education spending per pupil in England faced a 9% cut from 2010-2020. This was drastic for school sixth forms that faced cuts of 26%. The lack of funding forced 47 school sixth forms to close from 2016-2019.
Austerity also meant the closure of courses, departments and mass redundancies in Further Education colleges.
It didn’t end there. The Conservative government cut the justice department’s budget by a huge 25% from 2010-2020. This has led former lord chief justice Thomas to declare that the right to trial by jury may end in some cases.
He said last week:
You have to accept that if you want to keep the jury trial, you have to pay for it. It’s a choice, and a choice politicians are very reluctant to make. Do you make a major reform, or do you provide more money?
The Labour right’s idea of being “straight up”
And now Reeves wants every department to find further cuts of 5%. Nonetheless, the chancellor claimed during the September Labour conference:
Let me say one thing straight up. There will be no return to austerity. Conservative austerity was a destructive choice for our public services and for investment and growth too
For the Labour right, it’s one thing to try and placate the activists and then one thing for actual government. That harks back to prime minister Keir Starmer lying his way to the Labour leadership through abandoning every hollow pledge he made to the membership. It looks like austerity 2.0 is incoming.
Featured image via Guardian News – YouTube
