In the first of what we hope to be a series of radical articles and essays here on our blog, a local anarchist explores the link between the way the government made people accept a pointless war and the way they’re tying to make them accept heavy spending cuts in the UK today…
Do you ever experience déjà vu? That sense that something is being repeated. Remember back in 2002/3 when having agreed to support George Bush’s planned invasion of Iraq Tony Blair and his mates set out to convince the British public that invading Iraq was an urgent and essential task. Having said ‘Yes’ to George in April 2002 Tony had to tell a story to you and me that would convince us that the invasion of Iraq was really necessary. So the government went to great lengths to persuade us that despite no supporting evidence Iraq was a real and imminent threat, that Britain itself was under severe risk of attack from this impoverished country situated in the Middle East and that unless we acted fast we may see that threat realised. All a load of rubbish of course, yes Saddam Hussein was a horrible tyrant but a threat to the UK? Not at all.
What Tony Blair was engaged in was something called ‘securitisation’, this is when a leader makes statements that construct a narrative of a situation that legitimises actions that would normally be unacceptable, these statements are called ‘speech acts’ because they actually affect the lived experiences of people, changing people’s attitudes and views of the world and changing what is seen as acceptable action. In securitisation the speech acts declare that something is a risk to security and therefore it is, irrespective of whether it really is or not (1). With the help of the press Blair tried to create a sense of urgency, that something needed to be done and it needed to be done now.
Fast forward to 2010 and you realise that David Cameron must have been studying Blair closely but this time he needed to construct a story that would allow the Tories to impose a neo-liberal agenda on the UK. In the 80s and 90s the neo-liberal World Bank and IMF imposed structural adjustment programmes across Africa on countries that they had financial power over, those SAPs included minimising welfare provision, reducing the size of the state, privatisation of the public sector and opening up the economies to big global corporations. And the neo-liberal model hasn’t changed. Osborne and Cameron couldn’t believe their luck when they came to power with a gilt edged narrative handed to them, the aftermath of the financial crisis! All they had to do was convince people that despite it being the result of free market capitalism the answer to the crisis was… free market capitalism! (2) Dave emphasised the budget deficit, how it was a threat that urgently needed dealing with, how we had to pull together, that we were all in it together, him and his millionaire mates and you, we’re all going to feel the pain!
We’re in a crisis, this needs dealing with and now, said Blair in 2002/3 and it was repeated by Cameron in 2010 justifying what he had decided to do anyway, despite there being other ways to deal with the structural deficit and financial crisis caused by an increasingly unregulated financial sphere. And guess what Dave’s policies were? In short an SAP, privatization of the public sector, a small state, reduced social provision, an economy made even more amenable to corporate interests including less protection for new workers and a lowering of an already low corporation tax (3). And this isn’t just happening in the UK, across Europe SAPs are being implemented by and via governments with the Greek government having to sell off state assets, built up over years using peoples taxes, to private companies (4). And who is really going to suffer under the neoliberal model? The working class with less protection, less welfare provision, living in a society even more shaped to the profit interests of corporations. Remember Vince Cable’s comments in June that if workers conducted a wave of (legal) strikes then the government would change the law to make it more difficult to strike? There is a class war going on and it’s being waged in determined fashion by the elite against you and me. If we don’t recognise it and fight back then who knows what society will look like for the working class in a few years time. The time is right to fight!
Bibliography
(1) McDonald, M. (2008) ‘Global security after 11 September 2001’ in Carter, S., Jordan, T. and Watson, S. (eds.) Security: Sociology and Social Worlds, Manchester, Manchester University Press/Milton Keynes, The Open University, pp. 47-79 including citing of Waever, O. (1995) ‘Securitisation and desecuritisation’ in Lipschutz, R. D. (ed) On Security, pp. 46-86, New York, NY, Columbia.
(2) Mckay, I. (2011) ‘Signs of stress’ in Black Flag 233, Mid 2011.
(3) Monbiot, G. (2000) Captive State, Pan/Macmillan, London.
(4) BBC radio news 9/6/11