Halting the government's programme to shrink the state will not resolve the other underlying problems
To get a sizable protest out in central London in the middle of rainy autumn is no easy feat. It requires mobilisation and a Glastonbury-esque grip on logistics. So for organising this weekend's rally against austerity in Hyde Park, the TUC deserves congratulations: around 150,000 marchers, peacefully opposing this government's wrong-headed programme of cuts. But there's a paradox here: the economy continues to flatline, while popular support for this government is still sliding (an 11-point gap between Labour and the Conservatives, according to one opinion poll) – yet Saturday's turnout was about half that of the TUC's last big demonstration in March 2011, and attracted far less publicity. The argument has only been strengthened by the evidence and has won an increasingly sympathetic audience – yet, on the evidence of last weekend at least, the people making it are increasingly diffident. Why?
One reason could be a justified sense that such protests leave little impact. In his new book, Riot City, historian Clive Bloom notes that two of the largest demonstrations in political history took place within the past decade: the countryside rally of 2002 against the fox-hunting ban and the million-strong march in 2003 opposing the war on Iraq. Both were huge shows of popular opposition to policy, by middle-class voters from either end of the political spectrum – and both, as Professor Bloom points out, achieved nothing. The implication of his argument is logical if depressing: organised extra-parliamentary protest is increasingly symbolic. The demonstrators get to say their piece but that doesn't mean the denizens of Whitehall feel compelled to pay attention.
That surely applies to the argument against George Osborne's cuts. Despite disastrous figures, crisis in the eurozone, warnings from the IMF and the wavering of former allies, the chancellor has made clear that he will not deviate from Plan A. But the arguments being made by the anti-austerity brigade are also problematic, by dint of being too narrow.
There are not one but two discussions to be had over the future of the British economy: the first is the one we hear about all the time, to do with the cuts. But the more fundamental debate about what kind of economy Britain should have rarely gets an airing – so that economic argument in this country too often becomes only about cuts v no cuts; with the opponents of austerity implicitly advancing the view that the British economy was a wonderful place to be back in 2006 and that all that needs to be done is to kick out the coalition, wave the Keynesian wand and await the arrival of the economic Tardis to take us back into the noughties.
This is baloney, on several levels. Sure, Mr Osborne's cuts do go much further and much faster than any comparable economy and they have inflicted vast damage on the economy. What the right posited as remedial action to stop Britain turning into Greece is, it is clear, instead a programme to shrink the state. But even if that were halted at breakfast tomorrow, that still wouldn't resolve the other underlying issues: an oversized, socially useless and extractive financial sector; runaway inequality; a lopsided economy reliant on shopping and borrowing rather than producing and exporting; and a dearth of private sector jobs outside London providing decent pay, pensions and conditions, of the kind that manufacturing used to provide.
In fairness to the TUC, its research on some of these problems has been impressive. The bigger problem is elsewhere, starting in Westminster. Ed Miliband is now also taking an interest, albeit belatedly and without focus. But warm words about predistribution (in Labour jargon) or rebalancing (in coalition-speak) are not much use. What's needed is some reality about, for instance, how fragile Britain's banks remain and how moth-eaten its industrial base is. We might then have a proper debate about this country's future. It would surely be far more radical than the old stage fight about cuts v no cuts.
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