Welcome to Year Zero

As the late Frank Zappa once said, "there's a big difference between kneeling down and bending over." And right now, we are being bent right over. Welcome to 2011. Before Christmas, when Vince Cable talked about the colation being essentialy Maoist there was a fair amount of media scoffing and incredulity on offer. I'm not sure ther'es much to laugh at now: Cable's thesis is turning out to be pretty much on the money. We are in the midst of a time of continuous revolution. Here's a government who know, in their hearts, theat they've got one Parliament to do what they want, so they are haring around at pretty much breakneck speed, trying to force every single last bit of change through before anyone tries to stop them. The only thing Cable got wrong in the analysis was that the Coalition project hasn't modelled itself on Mao, but Pol Pot. This year is rapidly turning into Year Zero on the political calendar. Every institution or system is being ransacked:

• The NHS : today's Bill publication sees a huge change to the way helath care is provided. At first it looks little more than an accounting practice of ditiching PCTs, then giving the cash to doctors instead. This is all very well, but theres'a rather more sinister logic behind this: GP's are not going to run their own finances; they'll see the amount of work and subcontract to a specialist medical management organisation. The big European and US players must be rubbing their hands right now as a new market opens up to them. Goody, just what we need: more private organisations bleeding money out to hand to shareholders, and more managers to do it.
• Education : the Universities, Free Schools, the trashing of FE. How do you begin to even comprehend the coming car crash that this will be? There's not enough room here.
• Electoral Reform : changes to the voting system? Ok. Consulation?  No, why bother, let's just bulldoze it throuh the Commons and Lords and have the referendum anyway. Still, for some in the Conservative party this is great. After using the LibDems as a human shield for a year, anything with Clegg's name on it will be toast. Then came the proposals to force 50% participation in union strike ballots. But this is also hpocrisy. Why should different rules apply to unions when elections to parliament, in parliament, or to any other public office, for example, don't have these conditions. Boris Johnson was elected Mayor of London on a turnout well under 50%, for example. But he doesn't like to talk about that. 
• The Economy : what we have is essentially neo-Thatcherite. We have a government who are intenet on sucking money out of the economy as quickly as possible. But, of course, with rising unemployment and rising inflation, the prospect of all that private secotr growth Cameron and Osborne were optimistically predicting looks fairly dim. And that's beofre the tax rises really bite: VAT and fuel rises are going to cause a fair bit of discomfort for many. And then when interest rates start rising again. Meanwhile, the 50% tax rae is going to be removed because it is "ineffective". Lovely, so slap up indirect taxation and use the most regressive means possible to screw the public.
• Transport : so another thing that will be rising is train fares, and once again well above inflation. And then there's the (at least) 35bn to be spent on the London-Birmingham High Speed Rail Link, for which the benefits are, at best, questionable.  I'd have thought the money would be better spent elsewhere, and not on bulldozing on of the few green areas left in the south of England. But no, it's OK, we'll plant a few tress and everything will be just peachy. Never mind that neither the rail link to the North East of the country, nor the A1 could be described as more than barely adequate, we Northern Johnnies will just have to make do. And, in rural areas, cuts to local authority funding wil have disastrous consequences for public transport, like this and this.  It's amost as if someone doesn't want the popluation to be mobile.
• The Banks : the government claims that they cannot affect bank bonus culture, even though we, the public, own 82% of RBS, for exmaple. The mantra is that, "if we curb them, they will move elsewhere". Well, given the wonderful job they've been doing, elsewhere can have them.
• Local Authorities : one of the results of all this cutting is that local services will suffer. The quality of life for many people, some of whom are the most vunerable, is going to get markedly worse. And the wave of reduncancies mean that those people who were in work will now be on benefits, unproductive and angry.
• The Big Society : Cameron's BIG idea. And what a wet, resounding fart of an idea it is. Perhaps he envisioned all those people being made redundant being energised to go out and do what they were doing, but without earning a living doing it (and in some cases barely even that). Perhaps he really is that much of a blithering moon-faced imbecile. No, the Big Society is a cynical exercise in the neo-Thaterite embracing of 'charidee' and a public high-minded morality concealing the systematic rpe and pillage of much of our infrastructure, both physical and social. As an idea it is both iniquitous and hypocritical. And he can shove it.

 So far, after the New Year, the weather is just about holding but the political and social temparture is starting to rise. Already unions are expressing concern about inflation outsripping peoples ability to live, and pressure is strting to build. It's already a rocky start to Year Zero. how much worse will it get?

The Eighties Revivial aka Thatcherism Redux

No, this is not what you think. It won't be a nostalgic trail through puffball dresses, piano ties, wedge haircuts and misty-eyed reminiscence about Durran Duran. for those of us who were there, there was another, far more serious 1980's, and today's news seems to rather starkly highlight it.

Plastered all over the news this morning is the story that certain parts of the country will be less resilient to cuts when the spending review finally happens this autumn. Can you guess which bits of the country they might be? So much for sharing the pain. So, if you live in poor, Labour-voting Middlesbrough or Mansfield you are far more likely to feel the effects of the ConDem axe than if you live in Harrogate or St Albans. At this stage, I might say that this was always likely to be something of a 'No Shit Sherlock' moment, but the barefacedness of it all is just breathtaking. Anyone who says the North-South divide is closing is, frankly, living in a dream world. And Nick Clegg's mewlings about how, as a Sheffield MP, he understands the concern being shown, is little better. Prattling about 'difflicult choices' does nothing to acknowledge that those who are going to be asked to suffer the most are likely to be the ones who can least afford to suffer at all. All of his attempts to ameliorate the anxiety that is being felt are ham-fisted and ineffectual, all of which seem to be rapidly becoming his leit motif. To those of us who were around in the North during the Thatcher years, this is all starting to sound depressingly familiar.

And the results of all of this are fairly obvious to predict. Yet more damage will be done to those places least able to sustain it. So they will be left to rot further, and will then be berated by the government for doing so. Then, in years to come (and not a for fair while yet), the mistakes of now will be lamented over as regeneration money will be allocated to solve problems that have lain unresolved for the best part of thirty years already. Current actions are storing up huge structural problems for the next generation, but no one in the coalition seems to either want to listen or care.

Clegg must also see the writing on the wall. The support the LibDems have spent years building up has been pissed away. Already, party supporters and the wider electorate are starting to ask questions about the LibDems, and more particularly their leader. He may be convinced that the coalition will hold, but will he manage to hold his own position? It may seem fanciful to ass this question now, just four moths into the coalition; but come next May, especially if the AV referendum is lost, and the LibDems do badly in local elections, what then?

And what if we have a bad winter? If we have another severe winter, against the backdrop of swingeing government cuts and worsening public services, the distinct possiblity of civil unrest, strikes and protest rears its head again.

Of course, the background to this is painting a picture of blitzing those making a, "lifestyle choice to just sit on out-of-work benefits" (in an interview with Nick Robinson, reported by BBC News) and ramping up the rhetoric on 'benefit cheats'. This is, once again, the language of the 1980's, with its return to the notion of the deserving and undeserving poor. I notice, however, very little being said on the far more expensive problem of tax evasion and avoidance. I wonder why.

Meanwhile, the previously sensible Vince Cable appears to have totally lost the plot (see this BBC story from yesterday), in announcing that Science funding would face significant cuts. This was defended by Science Minister David Willetts, echoing Cable's promise to 'screen out mediocrity'. What was more worrying was the push for concentrating funding on 'impact' research, which generates immediate outputs. The president of the Royal Society, Lord Rees, was rightly deeply concerned about such moves and, in an opinion piece in the Financial Times lambasted the goevernment's approach.

We are in grave danger, by cutting in this way, of leaving vast swathes of our economy so fundamentally weakened that any potential recovery will take years, perhaps even decades to happen. And when recovery does happen (if it happens), then some regions will be left even further behind to wither and die. Coiicidentally, few of the areas suffering most are represented by LibDem MP's, fewer still by Conservatives. How very strange.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the beief that much of this is being done with an ideological zeal that borders on the insane. And that the Liberal Democrats are actually abetting this madness is nauseating. A generation in the wilderness awaits them.

God help the rest of us.