Seumas Milne: The Bullingdon boys want to finish what Thatcher began
[Seumas Milne is a Guardian columnist and associate editor.]
The savagery unveiled today by George Osborne doesn't only amount to the deepest programme of public spending cuts since the 1920s. As the chancellor's fog of spin started to clear, the scale of the political ambition behind them also became apparent. The Tory-led coalition is using the economic crisis not only to rein in the state, but to reorder society.
This is to be Britain's shock therapy. It is the culmination of the Conservative project to dismantle the heart of the welfare state – or, as Osborne put it today, to "reshape" public services – that began more than 30 years ago.
Neither the Conservatives nor their Liberal Democrat cheerleaders have a mandate to do any such thing – or for the string of decisions they have handed down in blatant violation of pre-election pledges, from the abolition of universal child benefit to the privatising top-down transformation of the NHS. This is what most people at the May general election in fact voted against.
So coalition leaders have used the absurd claim that the country is on the brink of bankruptcy to force through an array of sweeping changes, any one of which would normally be the focus of a prolonged political battle. It is a kind of political coup, and the result has been policymaking chaos, with a 16% cut in the BBC's budget imposed in the middle of the night and a Ministry of Defence deal that promises aircraft carriers without any actual planes.
But when it comes to choreography, the Bullingdon boys, Osborne and David Cameron, a former PR executive and a master of the darker political arts, have played a blinder...
Read entire article at Guardian (UK)
The savagery unveiled today by George Osborne doesn't only amount to the deepest programme of public spending cuts since the 1920s. As the chancellor's fog of spin started to clear, the scale of the political ambition behind them also became apparent. The Tory-led coalition is using the economic crisis not only to rein in the state, but to reorder society.
This is to be Britain's shock therapy. It is the culmination of the Conservative project to dismantle the heart of the welfare state – or, as Osborne put it today, to "reshape" public services – that began more than 30 years ago.
Neither the Conservatives nor their Liberal Democrat cheerleaders have a mandate to do any such thing – or for the string of decisions they have handed down in blatant violation of pre-election pledges, from the abolition of universal child benefit to the privatising top-down transformation of the NHS. This is what most people at the May general election in fact voted against.
So coalition leaders have used the absurd claim that the country is on the brink of bankruptcy to force through an array of sweeping changes, any one of which would normally be the focus of a prolonged political battle. It is a kind of political coup, and the result has been policymaking chaos, with a 16% cut in the BBC's budget imposed in the middle of the night and a Ministry of Defence deal that promises aircraft carriers without any actual planes.
But when it comes to choreography, the Bullingdon boys, Osborne and David Cameron, a former PR executive and a master of the darker political arts, have played a blinder...