http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/com...cle5998537.ece
Someone has to say it - austerity must reign
We owe a debt of gratitude to Jacqui Smith's husband. He has thrown a lurid light on all the excesses that must end
In all things there comes a tipping point. The wobbly table spills your coffee again, this time on white cashmere; the loose doorhandle comes off, the bent car boot flies open on the motorway. At this point tolerance is revealed as the blind laziness that it always was, and the householder takes action.
We have reached that point nationally, and this week may bring a change of mood about living within our means. It is not the G20 summit that prompts this: that is just a windy waste of money surrounded by irritatingly unfocused demonstrations. No, it is an agglomeration of small things that tips any scale: and it culminated over the weekend in the collapse of another building society and the fingering of the Home Secretary's husband as a porn freeloader whose - er - fiscal stimulus was on the taxpayer.
Take that first: the nation owes a debt of gratitude to Richard Timney, spouse and £40,000 “adviser” to Jacqui Smith. Despite the torrent of evidence about the corrupting world of John Lewis lists, free rockeries, plum jobs for relatives and back-bedrooms masquerading as main homes, there is a sense of tipping point about Mr Timney's porn habit and his wife's embarrassed promise to pay back the money claimed for his treats. We should be grateful, simply because if anything gets these soft, secretive allowance rules changed this will be it. It is far from being the worst abuse, but its hilarious and embarrassing nature throws garish light on all the others.
Similarly, if anything makes the Prime Minister really understand public dismay, it will be the voices from his constituency after the collapse of the Dunfermline Building Society, expressing on the news their scornful disbelief in his promises. Throwing good money after bad is no longer impressing anybody, certainly not the Governor of the Bank of England. Stimulus has its place, but what grows ever more attractive is the other side of the coin: austerity.
It cannot be staved off any longer, and to be accepted it must start at the top. No cheese must remain unpared. As one Spectator commentator wrote, a tough call faces any Chancellor - “if he were to raise VAT to 25 per cent, double corporation tax, close the Foreign Office, cancel all international aid, disband the Army and the police, release all prisoners, close every school and abolish unemployment benefit he would still be unable to close the gulf between what the Government spends and what it raises in taxes”. I cannot confirm the calculation or endorse those measures. But austerity is not optional: we are deeper in hock than any European country except Romania and Ireland, and face a likely deficit of 10 per cent of national income. The only way to avoid revolution is to make economies visible, and fair: a wartime regime.
This does not mean just taxing the rich and chucking the money up the wall. Government waste must end. Think of the dodgy £20 billion IT system in the NHS, of the £2.3 billion refurbishment of the Ministry of Defence's offices where so many duff contracts were drawn up, the failed privatisation of London Underground, the PFI projects that we now shore up, and the myriad overgenerous outsourcings and cancelled computer schemes (remember the £140 million Child Support Agency fiasco? The “Independent Learning Grants” fraud?”)
It must stop, from the top. Austerity does involve tax rises: but the watchword must be frugality, a culture of not wasting one side of paper, one train fare, one government pen, not sanctioning one stupid leaflet run telling us to blow our noses and eat fruit. It has to involve painful, iconic public cuts.
Easier to impose pay restraint and redundancies if big, vain projects are cancelled - the Olympics, ID cards, Trident. It will be more acceptable to be strict on benefits and tough on idlers if a new deal is seen within the Civil Service: no new posts, employees redundant in one area told to take vacancies elsewhere even at a less skilled level. It will be easier to accept the comparative poverty coming to most of us in old age if public sector pensions are reformed, fast and drastically and if necessary by Act of Parliament, to bring them closer to the shrunken private sector.
It goes from big gestures to small ones: the pensioners who are now (rightly) being denied free use of long-distance tourist buses would be less grumpy if they weren't so painfully aware of the ritzy free travel of well-paid public servants.
Austerity must visibly affect the great. I am broadly in sympathy with the idea of paying MPs a bit more on condition they fund their own living arrangements; but nowhere near £40,000 extra. You can rent a Central London bedsit for less than half that, and honest MPs already do. If they need more money let them flog articles to the privately owned media. Or take in washing. I don't care.
Drastic economies need not damage the core responsibilities of the State. Three billion could be saved by axing most national and local government “advisers”, spin doctors, czars and quangocrats. It might raise the unemployment figures a bit, but I hear there are plenty of fruit-picking jobs going. Public sector salaries can be sharply revised downwards, away from boom-time silliness: there is no justification for paying £220,000 a year to the chief executive of Suffolk County Council. If, as she indignantly says, the lady concerned could earn more in the private sector, let her go out there and try.
Whatever happens, there will have to be cuts in services that boomed in the spendthrift years. The NHS must state the limits of its remit - preserving life and avoiding pain and disability - and make unpopular economies. It could give up IVF and much cosmetic work, impose means-tested “hotel” charges in hospital, take a harder line with long-term addicts. But until it cuts back savagely on its fat useless layers of management, nobody will accept that. Go further, upwards and outwards: how much is it costing us to meet every weird perfectionist EU regulation, and how many of them could we derogate from, in the spirit of President Sarkozy “repatriating” his car industry?
In the end they'll get the idea: every austerity that hurts ordinary joes must be balanced and sweetened by a humbling, visible public pinch. Westminster and Whitehall must shrink; the armies of inspectors, enforcers and designers of idealistic interference must be decimated (how much did it cost to invent the footling 69-target early years curriculum, how much to enforce its box-ticking on every childminder?). Sure, this nonsense creates jobs: but, as I said, there's always fruit-picking.
There will be humiliation in it. But we do not need windy promises and twittering econo-jargon. We need the mother in The Railway Children, saying briskly: “Jam or butter dear, not both... we've got to play at being poor for a bit, my chickabiddies.” Who'll have the nerve to say that?
==========================================
Everyone knows it to be true. Now who will tell the electorate?
Someone has to say it - austerity must reign
We owe a debt of gratitude to Jacqui Smith's husband. He has thrown a lurid light on all the excesses that must end
In all things there comes a tipping point. The wobbly table spills your coffee again, this time on white cashmere; the loose doorhandle comes off, the bent car boot flies open on the motorway. At this point tolerance is revealed as the blind laziness that it always was, and the householder takes action.
We have reached that point nationally, and this week may bring a change of mood about living within our means. It is not the G20 summit that prompts this: that is just a windy waste of money surrounded by irritatingly unfocused demonstrations. No, it is an agglomeration of small things that tips any scale: and it culminated over the weekend in the collapse of another building society and the fingering of the Home Secretary's husband as a porn freeloader whose - er - fiscal stimulus was on the taxpayer.
Take that first: the nation owes a debt of gratitude to Richard Timney, spouse and £40,000 “adviser” to Jacqui Smith. Despite the torrent of evidence about the corrupting world of John Lewis lists, free rockeries, plum jobs for relatives and back-bedrooms masquerading as main homes, there is a sense of tipping point about Mr Timney's porn habit and his wife's embarrassed promise to pay back the money claimed for his treats. We should be grateful, simply because if anything gets these soft, secretive allowance rules changed this will be it. It is far from being the worst abuse, but its hilarious and embarrassing nature throws garish light on all the others.
Similarly, if anything makes the Prime Minister really understand public dismay, it will be the voices from his constituency after the collapse of the Dunfermline Building Society, expressing on the news their scornful disbelief in his promises. Throwing good money after bad is no longer impressing anybody, certainly not the Governor of the Bank of England. Stimulus has its place, but what grows ever more attractive is the other side of the coin: austerity.
It cannot be staved off any longer, and to be accepted it must start at the top. No cheese must remain unpared. As one Spectator commentator wrote, a tough call faces any Chancellor - “if he were to raise VAT to 25 per cent, double corporation tax, close the Foreign Office, cancel all international aid, disband the Army and the police, release all prisoners, close every school and abolish unemployment benefit he would still be unable to close the gulf between what the Government spends and what it raises in taxes”. I cannot confirm the calculation or endorse those measures. But austerity is not optional: we are deeper in hock than any European country except Romania and Ireland, and face a likely deficit of 10 per cent of national income. The only way to avoid revolution is to make economies visible, and fair: a wartime regime.
This does not mean just taxing the rich and chucking the money up the wall. Government waste must end. Think of the dodgy £20 billion IT system in the NHS, of the £2.3 billion refurbishment of the Ministry of Defence's offices where so many duff contracts were drawn up, the failed privatisation of London Underground, the PFI projects that we now shore up, and the myriad overgenerous outsourcings and cancelled computer schemes (remember the £140 million Child Support Agency fiasco? The “Independent Learning Grants” fraud?”)
It must stop, from the top. Austerity does involve tax rises: but the watchword must be frugality, a culture of not wasting one side of paper, one train fare, one government pen, not sanctioning one stupid leaflet run telling us to blow our noses and eat fruit. It has to involve painful, iconic public cuts.
Easier to impose pay restraint and redundancies if big, vain projects are cancelled - the Olympics, ID cards, Trident. It will be more acceptable to be strict on benefits and tough on idlers if a new deal is seen within the Civil Service: no new posts, employees redundant in one area told to take vacancies elsewhere even at a less skilled level. It will be easier to accept the comparative poverty coming to most of us in old age if public sector pensions are reformed, fast and drastically and if necessary by Act of Parliament, to bring them closer to the shrunken private sector.
It goes from big gestures to small ones: the pensioners who are now (rightly) being denied free use of long-distance tourist buses would be less grumpy if they weren't so painfully aware of the ritzy free travel of well-paid public servants.
Austerity must visibly affect the great. I am broadly in sympathy with the idea of paying MPs a bit more on condition they fund their own living arrangements; but nowhere near £40,000 extra. You can rent a Central London bedsit for less than half that, and honest MPs already do. If they need more money let them flog articles to the privately owned media. Or take in washing. I don't care.
Drastic economies need not damage the core responsibilities of the State. Three billion could be saved by axing most national and local government “advisers”, spin doctors, czars and quangocrats. It might raise the unemployment figures a bit, but I hear there are plenty of fruit-picking jobs going. Public sector salaries can be sharply revised downwards, away from boom-time silliness: there is no justification for paying £220,000 a year to the chief executive of Suffolk County Council. If, as she indignantly says, the lady concerned could earn more in the private sector, let her go out there and try.
Whatever happens, there will have to be cuts in services that boomed in the spendthrift years. The NHS must state the limits of its remit - preserving life and avoiding pain and disability - and make unpopular economies. It could give up IVF and much cosmetic work, impose means-tested “hotel” charges in hospital, take a harder line with long-term addicts. But until it cuts back savagely on its fat useless layers of management, nobody will accept that. Go further, upwards and outwards: how much is it costing us to meet every weird perfectionist EU regulation, and how many of them could we derogate from, in the spirit of President Sarkozy “repatriating” his car industry?
In the end they'll get the idea: every austerity that hurts ordinary joes must be balanced and sweetened by a humbling, visible public pinch. Westminster and Whitehall must shrink; the armies of inspectors, enforcers and designers of idealistic interference must be decimated (how much did it cost to invent the footling 69-target early years curriculum, how much to enforce its box-ticking on every childminder?). Sure, this nonsense creates jobs: but, as I said, there's always fruit-picking.
There will be humiliation in it. But we do not need windy promises and twittering econo-jargon. We need the mother in The Railway Children, saying briskly: “Jam or butter dear, not both... we've got to play at being poor for a bit, my chickabiddies.” Who'll have the nerve to say that?
==========================================
Everyone knows it to be true. Now who will tell the electorate?
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