Blaming austerity masks real problems

Austerity is now the Left’s excuse for everything that goes wrong. The Grenfell Tower disaster was apparently all to do with cuts rather than the alleged failure of the local authority and regulators to do their jobs properly. Now austerity is being blamed for stopping people living longer. One Left-wing newspaper columnist yesterday said an “ideologically driven programme of cuts is almost certainly robbing us of life”.

Austerity was always an ill-judged slogan. In 2009, with the financial crisis raging and a recession looming, David Cameron, then in opposition, delivered a speech with the arresting title “The Age of Austerity”.

What he was proposing was not the wilful imposition of swingeing spending cuts but an acknowledgement of our huge indebtedness and the case for radical public sector reform.

“We need a complete change of direction,” he said. “I’m not just talking about changing one group of ministers for another. Or one set of policies, plans and proposals for another. I’m talking about a whole new, never-been-done-before approach to the way this country is run.”

Fine words but unfortunately they were never followed up. We have not had the fundamental reform to the way we organise our public services and have carried on pretty much as before. We are twice as much in debt as we were in 2010. Indeed, overall public spending has hardly come down at all since 2010. But in some departments there have been huge reductions to finance spending rises in, say, the overseas aid budget and the NHS.

The paradox is that greater longevity puts people at greater risk of suffering from dementia. This increases the pressure on health and elderly care budgets and also leads to premature death, which is one reason why life expectancy has slowed down. Yet the same people who demand more money is spent on everything under the sun are unwilling to agree to the reforms that would ensure services are organised in such a way to deliver better value for money.

The Left complain about the impact of austerity yet always stand in the way of the changes that would allow resources to be used and services organised to everyone’s advantage.

In reality, blaming everything on austerity is just another excuse for refusing to deal with public sector failings.