If the idea that we're all screwed takes hold, the Conservatives will end up exploiting the fear they've created
It's early for New Year's resolutions, but this one might take a while to get used to: for 2013 we have it as a civic duty to cheer up. Cheer up significantly; infuse debate with optimism and pride. This is unfamiliar territory for any lefty, "onwards, upwards" being more of a free-market mantra. But this year has been characterised by a deliberate air of catastrophe.
Economically, we are just one policy initiative away from being Greece (bankrupt, unable to afford basic medicines, on the brink of fascist uprising, burning our furniture for warmth … the overstatement is absurd). Energy futures are so insecure that the only way to steal a march on the rest of the world is to frack our own land to within an inch of habitability and then sell the gas to, erm, the rest of the world.
The benefits system has been rendered unaffordable by the twin evils of fraud and generations of worklessness. Housing benefit is yesterday's luxury; people have to get used to paying the same amount of money for the same squalid conditions – only with more overcrowding. Education is in such crisis that the best way to tackle it is to hand it over to people who have no experience in education. The NHS is inefficient and unaffordable, will become inexorably more so as our population ages, and the only way to handle that is to outsource it to people who want to profit from it.
The mistake I personally have been making is to conceive all these arguments individually, and attend to the answers as if we were all operating on a plane of reason. So, how can austerity be the way to avoid turning into a country whose problems were caused by austerity? What's the point of investing in a fuel that goes against our carbon targets – why can't we spend public money on developing fuel that we can use for the public good? How can the benefits bill be responsible for a debt whose bulk is made up by a bank bailout; how can fraud, at 0.7% of the bill, have made any significant dent on it; what have generations of worklessness got to do with anything, when they are almost entirely a figment of Iain Duncan Smith's imagination (1% of workless households have two generations who've never worked; figures for three generations are unavailable, possibly because those households don't exist – these feral poor being monsters under IDS's bed)?
Why throw education open to well-meaning parents and sponsors, when it means losing the expertise and the cross-borough overview of the local authority? Why introduce private companies into the NHS when the most cursory look at outsourcing anywhere else – old people's homes, waste management, trains, children's homes, asylum-seeker dispersal – shows that private companies do the exact opposite of what they claim? They do not drive down costs, they drive them up. They do not create competition; companies take one another over until there are only four of them, and then they operate as a cabal. They do not innovate, unless you count "innovation" as constantly looking for new ways to cut wages.
All of this is true, but it's not the point: this regime only makes any of these arguments in the service of a wider portrayal of gloom, and the strategy is a good one. For as long as this idea takes hold – that we're all screwed, from every possible direction – the Tories will win. They will fashion themselves as the status quo, taking advantage of the fear they have created to ward off a desire for change. They'll paint themselves as a haven, a safe pair of hands, an authority whose very creation of pain proves its fitness for these times in which pain is inevitable. It's time to stop focusing on battles – which you can win or lose, without making much difference – and change the weapons, change the landscape, come out of the darkness and fight in the light.
The reason we won't turn into Greece is not because of the policy tightrope that George Osborne is so gauchely, painfully clomping across. It's because – no offence, Greeks – our economy is much stronger than theirs, our public accounts more transparent, our tax system more consistent. The reason we don't need fracking is not because we're deep greens, waiting for an apocalypse, it's because we are the best placed nation in Europe, among the best placed in the world, for alternative energies – we are windy, we are surrounded by tides, we've played a key part in the development of renewables, and could continue to (so long as nobody destroys our universities). If Germany is planning for 50% of its energy use to come from renewables within six years, we could better that. We could plug into a European supergrid (once it exists) and sell our excess. We could literally rule the waves, people.
On the subject of benefits, can we pause to consider how incredibly low that figure of fraud is? In so many other areas of dishonesty – tax avoidance, expenses claims – the rot is never contained to a small core, it always spreads over time, it becomes peer-normalised and then grows exponentially, until the only people who aren't doing it are cranks. And yet, here we are, with this body of people among whom the number of fraudsters is tiny. On top of the honesty, consider in-work benefits, the number of people doing jobs that won't cover their rent, won't cover their childcare, won't put food on the table without government subsidy – working, in other words, for the sheer joy of work. This is a work ethic to die for.
The housing crisis is not a threat, it's an opportunity. We need more social housing, we need a more vigorous construction industry, and we need things for a government to invest in, rather than rounds of quantitative easing, delivering money into the hands of the top 5% and eroding pension annuities. We could climb out of recession on the back of this "crisis" at the same time as halting the hegemony of the private landlord, which is perverting wage spending-power and intensifying inequality. This is one of the few levers the government could actually pull to influence the economy.
UK education is ranked sixth best in the world, and not because Toby Young has set up a free school. The NHS is amazing: not because it's a socialist project, but because it is mind-blowingly good, and efficient, at what it does.
This government wants to govern a nation of crooks, fighting over the last crust of bread. In fact, we are an honest, industrious people with natural resources coming out of our well-educated, disease-free ears. Happy New Year.
Twitter: @zoesqwilliams
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