> < Though few people seemed to notice, on 3 November, a Treasury
> minister named Lord Sassoon served notice that the coalition's work
> on City bonuses was done: "The government has taken action to tackle
> unacceptable bonuses in the banking sector," he said, and that
> seemed to be that. Six days later, Barclays announced that its
> latest bonus pot would total £1.6bn – which is about a third of what
> the government currently spends each year on university teaching. >
>
>
> Spending cuts – the fightback begins
>
> Can this week's violent protests in Westminster simply be dismissed
> as the hijacking of an orderly demonstration by a 'small minory' of
> anarchists. Or are they a sign of things to come for an 'out-of-
> touch' government with 18 millionaires in its cabinet
>
> John Harris, The Guardian
>
> 12 November 2010
>
> On and on it went: aerial shots of the heaving crowd, rolling
> commentary, bursts of stuff shot on mobile phones, and the usual
> parade of talking heads. While what the BBC was calling a "mini-
> riot" happened both inside and outside the Millbank tower, the
> people in charge of its news channel were presumably ecstatic: this
> kind of stuff, after all, is what rolling news was invented for.
>
> Over there: a fire! Suddenly, on the roof: more protesters! On the
> phones: frantic office workers, taken aback by the disruption of
> their day! And in the midst of it all: that delicate and ever-
> shifting line of police, anxiously trying to do whatever they could,
> knowing full well that the people they were up against had already –
> if you'll excuse the pun – stolen a march on them.
>
> Meanwhile, the president of the National Union of Students did the
> media rounds. Aaron Porter is 25; he stood for the office as an
> independent, but is a member of the Labour party, whose dress code –
> the Nick Robinson-esque glasses are a good example – rather suggests
> that he's destined for a career in mainstream politics. Certainly,
> if you fancy being a high-ranking Labour MP, clambering to the top
> of the NUS isn't a bad move at all. His predecessors have included
> Jack Straw, Charles Clarke, the current shadow defence secretary Jim
> Murphy, and Phil Woolas, the MP last week suspended from office for
> making misleading claims in the course of the last election campaign
> – all of which highlights the fact that NUS presidents are not
> exactly renowned for being what the French call enragés.
>
> And so it proved. "Let me be clear," he told yet another camera. "I
> absolutely condemn the actions of a small minority who have used
> violent means to hijack the protest . . . if some people think it's
> appropriate to use violence, it's a total disgrace, and they have
> completely hijacked this opportunity to make a serious point." In
> his own way, he was endorsing the view that was subsequently
> splashed over the front page of yesterday's Daily Mail: "Anarchists
> spark violence as 50,000 take to streets over student fees –
> HIJACKING OF A VERY MIDDLE CLASS PROTEST".
>
> On the BBC, there was a particularly priceless moment. When Porter
> once again talked about "hijacking", the coverage cut to the mass of
> people outside Tory HQ, the presenter made the point that this was
> not what "a small minority" would look like – and Porter seemed
> momentarily lost for words. You had only to look at the crowd to
> know that the vast majority of them were not anarchists, but
> reasonably regular twentysomethings. As if to illustrate the point,
> when one of the people on the roof made the stupid decision to hurl
> down a fire extinguisher">stupid decision to hurl down a fire
> extinguisher, they were met with an outraged chant of "Don't throw
> shit! Don't throw shit!"
>
> Long after the fires had burned out, and the riot police had
> belatedly arrived, I spoke to a Guardian colleague who had spent
> most of Wednesday at the scene. Talk of cynical provocateurs, he
> said, was "nonsense": the crowd was made up of "ordinary students
> who were viscerally angry", but also mindful of what was ill-
> advised, or plain daft. When one of their number had prised up a
> cobblestone and moved to lob it at the police, he had been roundly
> told to "stop being an idiot"; moreover, the attempted occupation of
> Millbank had seemingly started on a whim, when a handful of people
> had walked into the foyer, not quite believing they had been allowed
> to do so, and decided to stay put. He was also unimpressed by talk
> of an assembly of self-indulgent, bourgeois moaners: time and again,
> he said, he had bumped into people from such northern towns as
> Bradford and Wakefield, who were students at FE colleges, angered to
> the point of fury by the government's axing of the educational
> maintenance allowance – the means-tested benefit that has enabled so
> many people to take up post-16 education without being a drain on
> the family budget.
>
> His basic point – and mine – is simple enough. What happened on
> Wednesday afternoon was not some meaningless rent-a-mob flare-up,
> nor an easily-ignored howl of indignation from some of society's
> more privileged citizens. It was an early sign of people growing
> anxious and restless, and what a government pledged to such drastic
> plans should increasingly expect.
>
> If you hadn't noticed already, these are strange, tumultuous times.
> We are still in the midst of the uneasy period of phoney war before
> the cuts actually bite, but we now know what's coming: the deepest
> and quickest reductions in public spending since the 1920s – which,
> according to an under-reported quote from David Cameron, will not be
> reversed, even when our economic circumstances improve (2 August, at
> an event in Birmingham: "Should we cut things now and go back later
> and try and restore them later? I think we should be trying to avoid
> that approach").
>
> The welfare state is in for an unprecedented reinvention, as
> ministers get dangerously close to reviving the nasty old trope of
> the undeserving poor; yesterday, as if to try to neutralise recent
> fretful noises from the Archbishop of Canterbury, Iain Duncan Smith
> talked about supposedly self-imposed worklessness as a "sin".
> Changes to housing benefit look likely to drastically change the
> social makeup of our cities, and London in particular; even Boris
> Johnson has talked about the danger of "social cleansing".
>
> Meanwhile, just about every area of our lives will soon feel the
> pinch: travel anywhere in the country, pick up the local paper, and
> it's all there – the imminent hacking back of youth centres, social
> care, school buildings, libraries, parks . . . you name it. Everyone
> will be affected: as ever, the most vulnerable will take the biggest
> hit, though it is no accident that the idea of the "squeezed middle"
> is being talked about as never before.
>
> Of late, my mind has returned time and again to a celebrated article
> from 1999 by the Oxford academic Ross McKibbin, and one passage in
> particular: "The middle classes make more use of the NHS, public
> transport, public libraries, local swimming pools, public parks and
> their right to state welfare than anyone else."
>
> Underneath the coalition's plans, there is an obvious enough agenda:
> not just the brutal cutting of public spending, but a decisive
> rolling-out of the market-obsessed, "choice"-fixated ideas that took
> root while Margaret Thatcher was prime minister, were revived and
> retooled once Tony Blair decided he had to define himself against
> the Labour party – and now look set to be taken to their logical
> conclusion by the Tories, and the like-minded Lib Dems who took
> their party into the coalition. Here lies another reason why
> Wednesday's events were so significant – for within the government's
> plans for higher education lie not just the hiking-up of fees, but
> an entire reinvention of the very ethos of our universities, whereby
> the idea of education as a public good takes yet another kicking,
> and everything comes down to "choice", and whatever is meant to be
> good for business.
>
> A recent issue of the London Review of Books featured an inspired
> demolition of the Browne review, the report into higher education by
> the former chief executive of BP that was hailed by the government
> as setting its "strategic direction", and thereby opened the way for
> the lifting of the cap on fees, and much more besides. The LRB piece
> was written by a Cambridge don named Stefan Collini, and it quickly
> got to the heart of the problem: "Overwhelmingly, the general
> statements announce, with startling confidence, the real point of
> higher education: 'Higher education matters because it drives
> innovation and economic transformation. Higher education helps to
> produce economic growth, which in turn contributes to national
> prosperity.' . . . This report displays no real interest in
> universities as places of education; they are conceived of simply as
> engines of economic prosperity and as agencies for equipping future
> employees to earn higher salaries."
>
> Meanwhile, where are the public? When it comes to tuition fees, do
> not believe the voices who tell us that the average Briton thinks
> students are a pampered lot who should get with the government's
> plans and count themselves lucky. A recent YouGov survey
> commissioned by the Sun found that the public opposed the Browne
> proposals by 45% to 37%; an ICM poll from around the same time
> offered the choice between raised fees and the far fairer option of
> a graduate tax, and found that people favoured the latter over the
> former by 61% to 29%.
>
> More generally, presumably to the delight of the government, a
> cliche has long since oozed into the reporting of what they are up
> to: that people accept the need for drastic austerity, and are
> meekly preparing for the necessary dose of fiscal medicine. Browse
> the requisite opinion polls, and you could be forgiven for assuming
> the worst: late last month, for example, Ipsos Mori found that 59%
> of people agreed that there was "a need to cut public spending on
> public services" – the kind of statistic cited almost daily by those
> newspapers who habitually encourage the government to go further,
> and faster.
>
> In fact, things aren't as simple as that. According to the same
> poll, the share of people who think the government has made either
> the right or wrong calls on public spending is evenly split: 41% and
> 38% respectively, while one in five simply don't know; 40% of people
> disagree with the idea that the coalition's approach will improve
> the state of the economy; while 49% reject the idea that, as the
> coalition insists, public services will somehow improve in the long
> run; 47% oppose cutting back the number of people who work in the
> public sector. Public opinion, it seems, is as contorted and
> contradictory as ever – and for the government, there is much less
> comfort than you might imagine.
>
> While the coalition comes over all Churchillian, endlessly talking
> about the "national interest" and the spurious idea that we are "all
> in this together", there is also a low hubbub of noise about their
> shortage of a mandate. On Wednesday, the ire of the marchers was
> focused on all those Lib Dems who blithely signed the NUS's anti-
> fees pledge ("I pledge to vote against any increase in fees in the
> next parliament and to pressure the government to introduce a fairer
> alternative" – yesterday, Nick Clegg limply said that he "should
> have been more careful" than to put his name to it). But there are
> also serious questions about the Tories – not just that they are
> pushing what Cameron recently called a "revolution" with the support
> of around one in five of the electorate, but also when it comes to
> the pronouncements they made during the election campaign.
>
> Consider, for example, a now-infamous quote from the PM, issued on
> the Andrew Marr show on 2 May: "What I can tell you is any cabinet
> minister, if I win the election, who comes to me and says: 'Here are
> my plans' and they involve frontline reductions – they'll be sent
> straight back to their department to go away and think again." And
> really: they wonder why some people are increasingly angry.
>
> And so to the wider context, and things that most of the media very
> rarely mentions. Political debate in Britain is endlessly distorted
> by the way that London so dominates the national conversation, and
> assumptions that run wide and deep in some of Britain's more
> desirable postcodes are assumed to blur into the national mood. In
> Islington, Notting Hill, and the more upmarket corners of the home
> counties, austerity will doubtless be taken in a lot of people's
> stride: if you have opted out of large swaths of the public sector
> and earn a six-figure salary, the prospect of the cuts will
> inevitably cause you relatively little worry. Self-evidently, this
> will not be the case in Bolton, Merthyr Tydfil, or Hastings; but
> neither will it hold true in Basildon, Crawley, or Harrogate.
>
> At the top of government, what might be called the "experience gap"
> grows even wider. There are at least 18 millionaires in the cabinet:
> Cameron is said to be worth around £3.4m; Nick Clegg's wealth is put
> at a mere £1.8m. Of late, even commentators on the right have been
> talking about the distance between some ministers and the people at
> the sharp end of their policies, not least when it comes to the
> middle class. Last month, for example, the Daily Telegraph's Peter
> Oborne bemoaned their "devastating" fate, in a piece worth quoting
> at reasonable length, if only to prove that the idea of an out-of-
> touch elite blithely wreaking havoc is not the preserve of hard-
> bitten lefties.
>
> Among Oborne's most telling passages was this one: "Doubtless both
> David Cameron and George Osborne think of themselves, quite
> genuinely, as middle class. Indeed, a few weeks ago, David Cameron
> referred to himself as a member of the "sharp-elbowed middle class",
> and the political intention of this remark was clear: he was
> claiming associate membership of the club of hard-working people who
> pay their taxes, do their best to rear their children and find it
> desperately hard to make ends meet. Few would challenge the
> Camerons' fundamental decency. But the middle-class people David and
> Samantha Cameron know socially tend to be on quarter of a million a
> year and upwards. Life for them may indeed be tough, but only in the
> sense of whether they can afford a skiing holiday or a spring break
> in the Caribbean."
>
> In last week's news that Cameron had put his personal photographer
> on the public payroll, there was a slight touch of the Marie
> Antoinettes, and a tension that may yet cause the government no end
> of trouble. It boils down to this: if you are secure in such an
> exclusive social bracket, it will inevitably distort your view of
> things. Around £27,000 for a university degree may well seem like
> the acme of both affordability and common sense; lost child benefit
> may seem like money dropped down the back of the couch; people on
> welfare will inevitably look like the residents of a completely
> different planet.
>
> Meanwhile, some longstanding assumptions seem to be changing at
> speed. Wednesday gave the lie to the idea that our young people are
> thoroughly post-ideological creatures, with no fight in them; if
> even the most fusty newspapers are worried about the chasm that
> separates the government from the so-called squeezed middle, you can
> bet that the politics of class may yet make an unexpected comeback.
>
> Oh, and one other thing. Though few people seemed to notice, on 3
> November, a Treasury minister named Lord Sassoon served notice that
> the coalition's work on City bonuses was done: "The government has
> taken action to tackle unacceptable bonuses in the banking sector,"
> he said, and that seemed to be that. Six days later, Barclays
> announced that its latest bonus pot would total £1.6bn – which is
> about a third of what the government currently spends each year on
> university teaching. The annual season of big executive payouts is
> about to commence once again; at this rate, do not be surprised if
> the seditious spirit of Millbank spreads – and fast
>
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