Politics

TINA is back

Chik Collins and Gerry McCartney

Bill Clinton's team, when he first ran for US president, was encouraged constantly to remember the importance of economic matters to his campaign: 'It's the economy stupid'. In today's Britain, as we witness the breathless rolling out of the Westminster coalition's agenda for cuts, marketisation and privatisation, there is the need for a reminder of a different kind; perhaps something like 'It's the politics actually'.
     Many seem to be mesmerised by the constant talk of budget deficits and economic necessities; but the coalition's approach bears all the hallmarks of the kind of strategy for imposing political (neo-liberal) change identified by Naomi Klein in her 2007 book 'The Shock Doctrine'.
     This strategy involves active exploitation of the disorientation and confusion created by a crisis – real or manufactured – to impose a new kind of reality on a society. The trick is first to portray a certain kind of 'solution' – typically one which involves cuts, marketisation, privatisation and rapidly sharpening social inequality – as absolutely necessary and unavoidable, and then to force that 'solution' through at such a pace that whatever opposition there might be is unable to prevent it becoming a fait accompli.
     We saw this in the UK in the 1980s. These were the days when Margaret Thatcher breathed life into TINA – There Is No Alternative – and railroaded 'unavoidable changes', to which there were in fact clear alternatives, through. She did so without ever attaining majority support in the country at large. The split in the anti-Conservative vote occasioned by the creation of the Social Democratic Party, and its subsequent alliance with the Liberal Party, allowed the Conservatives to achieve huge parliamentary majorities on the basis of little more than 40% of the vote.
     
Today TINA is back. The public is asked, not whether cuts are desirable, but where the cuts should be made. It's a bit like the salesman who asks, not whether you would like to buy that product that you don't really need, but what colour you would like it in.
     As in the 1980s, the split in the anti-Conservative vote has facilitated TINA's new-found prominence. On this occasion, however, it has done so not simply by splitting that vote to ensure it is less represented than it would otherwise be. Now a large (the Lib Dem) part of that vote is actively being used to make it possible for the Conservatives to pursue the agenda to which the relevant voters were clearly opposed.
     Ironically, the Conservatives' failure to win the election has, at least to this stage, proved to be vital in providing legitimacy to their agenda. The erstwhile opponents of the cuts agenda in the Liberal Democrats have taken the role of its leading apologists – 'now that we've seen the state of the finances'; 'now that we've seen what has been happening in Greece'. Liberal this may be; but it's not the kind of liberalism that those who voted Liberal Democrat were led to believe they were voting for. As for democratic – however one spins it, surely not?
     TINA is back then, to finish some unfinished business. It's the business of the Thatcher-Ridley-Joseph project, incubated in the aftermath of Edward Heath's U-turn in 1972 and let loose across the UK after 1979. That project set out – quite overtly – to destroy the social democratic settlement of the post-war years. It did a lot of damage in the 1980s and 1990s, but the British public retained too strong an attachment to too many aspects of the post-war settlement to allow for its outright destruction. The New Labour project not only failed to undo that damage after 1997, in many ways it continued with the kind of marketisation and privatisation which had caused the damage. Mrs Thatcher herself famously saw New Labour as her proudest achievement.
     
But still in 2010 there remain important aspects of the post-war settlement in place – particularly in health and in education. The Cameron-Osborne-Clegg project now sees the chance to wipe it more convincingly from the map of the UK. If they didn't have today's economic and financial situation as their pretext, they would have had to find or invent another one; and if they hadn't had Clegg's Liberal Democrats to help them breathe life back into TINA, the old girl wouldn't be striding the stage quite so upright or as confident as she is today.
     On this basis we might adapt the famous Clinton 1992 slogan as follows: 'It's not the economy stupid; it's the politics'. Putting it less bluntly, we are currently seeing the sharp imposition of an intensely political agenda, based on an economic/financial pretext, which will have very real economic consequences; most probably a 'double-dip' recession with sharply rising unemployment and intensifying hardship. All of this will be seen by the Cameron-Osborne project, as it was seen by their 1980s' predecessors, as 'a price worth paying' in the pursuit of a neo-liberal 'utopia' (read dystopia).
     And the international markets and ratings agencies which are said to be pushing us inexorably towards the policies which make all of this likely? They are not impersonal economic forces. They express the personal and political desires of people and institutions who support and stand financially (though not necessarily in other respects) to benefit from the Cameron-Osborne project.
     The current pace of change driven from Westminster and Whitehall is not a reflection of the absence of any practicable alternatives. It is an indication of a desire to prevent alternatives being discussed, understood and acted upon. There were alternatives to the Thatcher-Ridley-Joseph project in the 1980s. Other countries took a different path, allowing for much higher social spending based on a more progressive tax regime. These countries today come out significantly ahead of the UK in terms of just about all of the key indicators of well-being. They also tend to have been less implicated in, and less exposed to the consequences of, the financial and economic crisis of recent years.
     And just as there were alternatives to the Thatcher-Ridley-Joseph project of the 1980s, there are alternatives to the Cameron-Osborne project today. The stakes are huge. The harm liable to flow from the current agenda is immense – and not just for the poorest. The evidence of recent decades is that in a society heading towards marketisation, reducing welfare and sharpening social inequality the poor suffer most, but all the rest – including the rich – suffer too.
     It is time to halt the current rush to cut, marketise and privatise, so that the alternatives can be discussed and acted upon. This is perhaps the only thing which at the moment really is in the interests of everyone in the UK.

Chik Collins is a senior lecturer in the School of Social Sciences at the University of the West of Scotland

Gerry McCartney is a general practitioner and public health doctor