Breaking Bad: the fiction of the Coalition

Hubris

Bluster

I was flabbergasted at Chancellor Osborne's performance yesterday as he welcomed the IFS report on how living standards had changed since the recession in 2007-08. The report provides even more evidence that we have been duped by the claims of the Coalition Government that things are getting better. Nevertheless, the Chancellor welcomed the IFS report and argued that it was a"milestone" in the UK's economic recovery and that "inequality has fallen." Does he live in a parallel universe or is he just breaking bad?

Osborne spoke on the Today programme in his measured style and kept at bay the normally forensic and acerbic John Humphries. He has a self-assured hubris that has been honed to spin yarns, big yarns. He has a far better grasp of the statistics and facts that he abuses than the PM, David Cameron, who merely blusters and harangues interviewers or opponents at the onset of any challenge. The PM's panic-induced responses are based upon scanty knowledge and often have to be refuted by his office a few days later. No wonder he is desperately seeking an escape route from any pre-election televised debate. Listening to either of them, hubris or bluster, there is a common theme: Britain is dismantling its public services and the well-being of the many is being sacrificed to the benefit of wealthy citizens, large corporations and foreign investors.

What the IFS research said was that:

• Median income levels are now at about the level of 2007-08 but still 2% below their 2009/10 peak. 
• Living standards have risen more slowly than in previous recessions. Household income fell by 4.0% from its peak in 2009 to its trough in 2012, driven by falls in both employment and workers’ pay. 
• Since then employment has recovered strongly (mainly through self-employed, part-time work and zero-hour contracts) but real pay has not. 
• This is consistent with the absence of any productivity growth since 2011. 
• The coalition (through Ian Duncan Smith) has implemented a large package of tax and benefit measures taking money away from households. 
• The slow recovery in household incomes has been just 1.8% in total between 2011 and 2015. Remarkably slow in contrast to the first three years of recovery in the early 1980s and early 1990s saw median income grow by 9.2% and 5.1% respectively. 
• Consumption of non-durables (things such as food and fuel) was 3.8% lower in 2014 than in 2008. At the same point after the 1980s and 1990s recessions, it was 14.4% and 6.4% above pre-recession levels respectively. 
• Low-income families have faced higher-than-average inflation since 2007–08. They were hit harder by rising food and energy prices and benefited less from falling mortgage interest rates. 
• Median income among those aged 60 and over is 1.8% higher in 2014–15 than in 2007–08, compared with a 2.5% fall for those aged 31–59 and a 7.6% fall for those aged 22–30. 

So unpacking all of this perhaps the PM and Chancellor should explain why:

• GDP per capita is still 5.6% lower in 2014 than it was in 2008?
• The national debt has grown every year since 2008 from 43% to 90% of GDP in 2014?
• Councils have been clobbered with an 8.8% cut in real resources for 2015-16, taking the cuts to over 30% during the coalition years? 
• Eric Pickles and the Chancellor blame the Councils for cuts to roads, nurseries, libraries, sports etc. "It is up to Councils to decide their priorities"? The coalition has delegated opprobrium whilst claiming the kudos for any resources that they have stealthily ring-fenced.
• Companies have avoided or evaded paying £35bn a year in taxes according to the Public Accounts Committee?
• Leveson has been quietly ignored and the press is still self-managing their malpractices?
• UK assets continue to be sold, from Northern Rock, Lloyds, the Post Office, the Tote (now Betfred), East Coast Trains and now Eurostar to the Canadian teacher's pension fund? (The tide has turned and the vast majority of the electorate, 67%, want the railways renationalised.)
• Geographic inequality across the UK, measured by income or house prices, has widened with the London and South-East bubble diverting recovery from other regions?
• This has been further escalated by the pernicious redistribution of public expenditure grants this year from run-down urban areas (-3.8%) to the leafy shires (-0.6%)?
• In England up to a third of all pupils in major cities do not get into the school of their choice, is it that academy schools operate independently of local education authorities? At least Scotland is exempt from this Education lottery and the creation of autonomous and unregulated schools.
• Cameron pledged that the NHS was safe in our hands and would be subject to "No more tiresome, meddlesome, top-down restructures'. So why impose a destabilising top-down change that made NHS governance opaque and complex with many more services commissioned from private health providers? It cost £3bn and 90,000 staff were made to reapply for jobs in the new structures of the NHS. 
• The promised savings have not materialised and the reforms have created chaos from GP waiting times to bed shortages and declining performance? 
• Jeremy Hunt, fresh from attempting to allow Rupert Murdoch to take over BSkyB, and who replaced the damaged Andrew Lansley as Health Secretary, seems to revel in every problem that emerges in the Health Service. Is it because he wrote in 2007 that "The NHS is a 60-year-old mistake"?
• Housebuilding has declined despite the shortage of social housing and new housing suitable for the younger buyers and older buyers, who could release family homes, has stalled.  Osborne has directed resources at mortgage support via the banks thus revamping the housing price boom rather than incentivising house building and encouraging the building of social housing? 
• Promises to reform the constitution and electoral processes were cynically assigned to a cul-de-sac by the warring factions within the coalition?

The questions could go on but the gist is clear, the UK's much-vaunted public services from the NHS, universities, schools and institutions have been salami sliced and flogged to the friends of the coalition. Councils have been squeezed mercilessly with consequent long-term damage to local services as well as the small local enterprises that depend upon councils for contracts. Councils along with the DWP have been made the executioners of the welfare state and treated with contempt by Cameron, Osborne, Gove, Pickles, Duncan Smith and fellow travellers. This should not play well on the day of reckoning.

Cameron and Osborne know that they are mistrusted by a sizeable majority of the electorate. Why should we when they have perpetuated so many decisions that have reduced the well-being of young people, families with young children and the most vulnerable? We are not all in it together, those who were at the epicentre of the banking crisis are still flouting tax laws, offshore private equity funds are wiping out small local businesses and designing new money-making scams against the "hard-working" taxpayers and holding the most vulnerable to ransom. 

If the PM is not prepared to debate his record there is a precedence for substituting an inanimate object on the lectern. Perhaps a beetroot would best represent his embarrassment for probably being the worst post-war prime minister (but there is even worse to come). He has savaged the public service legacies of not just Attlee but also his idol, Harold McMillan, who understood the need for housing and quality public services as the foundation for a more just society and a growing economy.