If you think William Hague telling you to work harder is the most vexatious political message imaginable, consider how much worse it would be coming from Cameron or Osborne. Hague, like Tebbit before him, has a “striver’s” authenticity: “I slogged my way out of poverty, you can too.” Both in fact and in progression, that argument is bogus, but we don’t have time to get into that. There is an avalanche of preposterousness coming our way.Hague’s message follows the marvellously patrician thoughts of Philip Hammond, who wondered why households wouldn’t take responsibility for their indebtedness, and told the Telegraph: “People say to me, ‘it was the banks’. I say, ‘Hang on, the banks have to lend to someone’.”
We’re looking at the beginning of a new narrative: it’s mainly the fault of the last government. But if it’s not their fault, it’s your fault. Those hard-working families we love to talk about? You weren’t one of them. I clearly saw your kid watching Pokémon. Nobody was even trying to make anything they could sell in Brazil.
Now, a lot of it is plainly silly. You can’t work harder in a non-existent job. You can’t set up a business on your own when conditions are so stringent for borrowers and the domestic market is so flat. Pressed on whether his was an updated “on-your-bike” idea, Hague replied: “It’s more than that. It’s ‘get on the plane, go and sell things overseas, go and study overseas’. It’s much more than getting on the bike, the bike didn’t go that far.” That’s the government’s new way of dealing with unemployment: persuade people to leave the country. It’s original, you have to give it that.
The household debt argument is as absurd, in a more involved way. It’s true that household debt rose before the crash, it’s true that it was starkest in households with the lowest income, and it’s true that that creates perfect conditions for economic instability (a report by the Resolution Foundation, published on Tuesday, shows the extent of the debt surge). It is untrue to surmise, as the Telegraph did, that poor people just had a rush of blood to the head and wilfully engaged in an “unsustainable debt binge”.
Actually, there was a growing gap between pay and economic output, which is to say, wages at the bottom weren’t high enough. This will, over time, suck demand out of the economy and lead to recession. The Tories can tub thump all they like about how we can’t stimulate the economy “buying things we can’t afford”, but the truth is, if those low earners hadn’t taken on some debt, we would have simply had the recession sooner. What caused the wage depression? A surge – you might call it an unsustainable salary binge – in riches at the top. This is an easily discernible pattern, pointed out by the economist Stewart Lansley: in the US, there have been only two periods in a century when the richest 1% held more than a fifth of the country’s income pool. One was in the eight years running up to the Great Depression. The other was in the 18 years running up to this Even Better Depression (in 1990, they held 14.3%; by 2006 it was 22.8%).
Furthermore, if household indebtedness was that bad, why was no UK bank buried under its weight? All these debts are held by high street banks. As we’ve seen, in the face of instability from the international derivatives market, they had no resilience at all. And yet their lending to UK households has been strangely unproblematic, which suggests not that the banks have found some unexpected capital reserves under their mattresses, but rather that households soldier on with their debts.
It may put the brakes on their spending, but they’re not defaulting and making it someone else’s problem; they haven’t bitten off more they can chew, in other words. This gives ordinary households the double-edged merit of being the most responsible element of the entire system of credit – it’s double-edged because they end up paying for other people’s mistakes anyway, and then have to swallow some totally egregious blame from the sneering Philip Hammond.
Finally, there’s an ongoing attempt to make “household debt” sound like money that was thrown away on frivolities. Actually, it’s mainly mortgages: pre-crash, there were 12,000 mortgage products available to the UK homebuyer, 8,000 of which were available to people with compromised credit histories. That’s a case for the banks to answer; they didn’t make these loans because we asked them nicely.
Regardless of where you are on the income scale, nobody could ever call your decision to buy a house irresponsible – whatever happens, you need somewhere to live, and swingeing rents usually represent far worse value. For low-earning households to have avoided mortgage debts, they would have had to actively decide to stick with renting; that is, to pay the same, for a worse property that they’d never have any equity in, just on the off-chance that, as a result of a possible downturn, they might be dragged down by the debt. What a bizarre thing to expect of people, when you’re preaching a can-do, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps, aspirational Tory attitude.
I think Hague and Hammond are hoping that the spectre of individual responsibility will be enough to scare us all back to blaming the last government. But misattributed blame is a dangerous thing; I don’t know about you, but it doesn’t make me afraid, it makes me very angry.
Zoe Williams – The Guardian
Early in 2011, in the depths of social and economic crises characterized by radical inequality, common sense seemed to dictate that we trust the decisions and guidance of the ruling powers, lest even greater disasters befall us. The financial and governmental rulers may be tyrants, and they may have been primarily responsible for creating the crises, but we had no choice. During the course of 2011, however, a series of social struggles shattered that common sense and began to construct a new one. Occupy Wall Street was the most visible but was only one moment in a cycle of struggles that shifted the terrain of political debate and opened new possibilities for political action over the course of the year.
The glories of our blood and state
