Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Coalition Must Tell the Public: Be Not Afraid

Tony Blair’s political legacy was making “progressive” the contested ground in British politics. Hence “progressive Conservatism” and “progressive Liberalism” and, I suppose, “progressive Labour”. George Osborne once even talked about “progressive austerity”. It shouldn’t be a surprise that some voters are turned-off by this marketing triumph. Yet this apparent consensus masks the real differences between the coalition and the opposition. Julian Glover’s piece in the Guardian today makes an important argument: the coalition needs to be more ideological.

Why be spooked by social democrat squawking? The coalition should shrug its shoulders and confess: the charge its enemies lay at its door is broadly correct. This is an ideological government with a plan for a smaller, less centralised and more liberal state. The left dreads the obvious fact that spending cuts are central to this plan – and they are. The left senses that the government is staging a cultural revolution against social democracy – and it is. The coalition does not want to make mild adjustments to the old order. It intends to smash it.

There is an element of mad Maoism to it all: the re-creation of a country fired by a spending review that will feel like a fetishistic exercise in the application of extreme pain. To say that cuts are being forced by necessity and nothing more, is to imply that when fatter times return ministers will reverse them. Nobody who knows the leaderships of this coalition believes that. Much of what the government must do to balance the books it would have wanted to do even if they were in balance.

Yet ministers, by and large, hesitate before admitting this. Liberal Democrats worry about scaring their voters. Conservatives aren’t sure the country will understand their big idea. It’s easier to take refuge in the alternative truth that cuts are happening because they are needed.

[…]The point of reducing spending is to change the state, not just spend less.

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