Written for The Guardian:
There were two oppositions in the last parliament: Labour and the Liberal Democrats. And, this week more than ever, it is worth saying that only the latter made any difference to the real lives of real people. Why? Because they were in government. But thanks to their brutal contraction and the subsequent departure of Don Corbyn de la Mancha for his knight-errant’s tour of windmills, we now have no effective opposition at all (unless you count the House of Lords). And this is about to matter in lots of painful ways to millions of people when the chancellor announces what cuts he plans to make in the spending review in his autumn statement on Wednesday.
You may recall that George Osborne used his conference speech – oratorically at least – to parlay his clammy mortician’s charm into something altogether more Nosferatu: a claim for the centre ground. But the spending review will disperse the swirling mists of his rhetoric and we will now see – in hard and detailed figures – exactly what this Conservative government looks like. Remember: Osborne has ordered the non-ringfenced government departments to find ways to slash their budgets by up to 40% by 2019-20 in order to meet the extra £20bn in savings in public spending that he was vowed to deliver.
I say “deliver”, as if the figure for these cuts were not an ideological choice but somehow undisputed and scientifically required. But it is important to remember that the pace of “austerity” is a strategic decision that Osborne has taken and then written into the narrative tectonics of the three-act play that he has devised for us all to sit through. (Spoiler alert: act three concerns widespread national rejoicing at The Surplus, miraculously coincident with the election of an Osborne-led Conservative government.)
