Spending cuts: slicing into the state

In this spending review, the government is rolling back the frontiers of the state where services cannot stand it
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George Osborne delivers the comprehensive spending review
Spending cuts: the Conservatives 'are using the current fiscal crisis to roll back the state's frontiers'. Photograph: PA Wire/PA

Some people will be looking at the spending review and thinking that it is not as bad as expected. That partly flows from the skill of a spin machine that matches anything produced by New Labour, and that primed the public to expect the apocalypse. It is also helped by a significant pledge to raise NHS spending in real terms. Other policies such as the pupil premium will have a positive impact. Having co-written with Nick Clegg the 2002 pamphlet in which he roots his commitment to this policy I could not be expected to say otherwise.

A patient who is told to expect a double amputation may well wake up happy to find that only one limb is missing. But the review must be viewed in the context of other government policies, such as the scrapping of the Future Jobs scheme and the Sustainable Development Commission. When this is done, the spending review represents a very significant rolling back of the frontiers of the state where services cannot stand it.

The idea that appropriate savings can be best made by not filling posts panders to the idea of a flabby public sector that finds favour on the right. Yet those who work in the public sector are already often far more efficient than the private sector, with staff working long hours for no extra pay on the basis of goodwill. Wednesday's cuts will, in time, take many public services back to pre-1997 pressures. When it came to power, the coalition talked about protecting frontline public services and has continued to do so. But evidence already suggests that the review will have an impact on school teachers and the police. Immediately after the review, Danny Alexander admitted on BBC TV that there are cuts that will affect the frontline.

Yet the great gaping hole in the strategy is the absence of any clear idea how cutting spending will encourage the private sector to grow. Indeed, one wonders how the loss of nearly half a million jobs will not harm the private sector, meaning as it will half a million people no longer with spending power, not to mention the loss of public contracts, as we are already seeing.

Moreover, the government sets much store in a belief that the "big society" can fill gaps left by cuts to public spending. This is particularly the aim where the big cuts to council spending are concerned. The argument runs something like this: the government may be cutting the "nanny state", but much of this work will be done by other people. Lots of people have time to run schools. GPs have excellent accounting skills. After all, that's what they were trained to do in all those years at medical school. People can police their communities without any danger of vigilantism, or a rising crime wave, because at some point they have watched The Bill. At least, that's how it looks in the big society.

Most of us in the real world are time-poor, juggling work and families. We do not think the government is on our backs and we find that one of the biggest problems with the so-called "nanny state" is that is doesn't offer families any actually nannying once in a while. We have no desire to take on extra roles in the community running public services, often because we do so already and know how hard it is even to persuade people to become school governors. We also generally expect that some degree of expertise and professionalism should take the lead in running public services. We know that this has to be done collectively and fairly across the UK and see democracy as the essential counterbalance to the voices of the pushy few.

That said, there is a section of the population which is about to become very time-rich: those who will lose their jobs as a result of the cuts. Perhaps these are the people who are supposed to step in and run all the things they used to run when they were paid by the state? It's hard to see where else the time will come from.

This is all driven by a party that believes on an ideological basis the state is too large and is able to use the current fiscal crisis to slash wherever it wants to roll back the state's frontiers. So slashing the state that is on people's backs (which often just translates as taxing people and photographing them if they drive at criminally dangerous speeds) is what matters to the Tories. It doesn't actually matter to them if it is not replaced.

Apart from a small number of dissidents, most Liberal Democrats are willing accomplices in this. Nick Clegg made an attempt to reassure dissenters in his last party conference speech. But that assertion is difficult to square with many of the cuts being made by this government (which the Liberal Democrats could have stopped from the opposition benches).

Not a state-cutting agenda? Even Margaret Thatcher delivered real terms increases in NHS spending. This government is delivering a smaller government, cutting parts of government that have helped in the past to liberate people. With the deficit being cut faster than necessary, actions speak louder than words.

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