Yesterday, as an officer of a local society, I received an email from the Chief Librarian of the local authority in which I live, inviting the Society's response to a paper of proposals for cuts to the Library Service in the Borough.
I drafted and sent a response. And what I found myself saying prompted me to further thought about the choices now being forced upon us all by the (let's be honest) Conservative government's 'austerity' policies.
The crux of what I will now try to elaborate is this: is it not time to start developing a programme of actual resistance to the budget cuts being imposed from Westminster ? Are there not in fact ways in which 'we' could simply refuse to accept them , and, at least to a degree, circumvent them ?
Begin with a simple narrative picture. Suppose all the Local Authorities in Wales, collectively, said: "We will not accept these cuts, we will not implement these cuts, and we are collaborating to find practical ways of NOT implementing these cuts." Suppose, even, that just the Labour- or Plaid- controlled authorities, took that stance.
With a bloc like that in alliance, what, effectively, could any other power do about it ? Calling out the army would not have any direct impact. Conventional legal or accounting processes to 'bring them to heel' could take years.
Raise the bar. Suppose the Welsh Assembly government supported the stance, either actively or simply by doing nothing to hinder it. Suppose, better, that the Welsh Assembly government reached out to the Scottish Assembly government, and that they joined hands on this issue. By that stage, the Westminster government's 'bluff' would have been called in no uncertain terms.
OK. Let's come back to money and the nuts and bolts.
Expenditure and funding at the level and scale we are considering, even at the level of a single local authority, is NOT like a private budget or household income writ large. The 'credit card maxed out' image is simply illiterate, in economic terms. (Which would be worse - to have a Chancellor who really believed it, or one who knew it was nonsense but peddled it all the same ?) We are not talking about, say, a barn full of corn, or a store full of potatoes, and when the barn or the store is empty, it is empty, and starvation stares us in the face. We are talking about numbers - very large numbers - on paper, or on a computer. We are talking about confidence, and about credit.
Ah yes, some will say, but that's the problem. The Welsh Assembly Government, or the County and Borough Councils, do not legally have the powers for structural borrowing, or for running a deficit. My answer to that objection is : "Stuff that. In practical terms, could they do it ?"
(Remember that the background to all this is that the Westminster government had and has no electoral mandate for their policies. The Conservatives failed to win a majority, and the Lib Dems fought the election (ie won their seats) on a set of policies essentially opposed to what they have supported in coalition. So the legitimacy of what I am proposing we should resist is, to be polite, highly debatable. Surely the lengths we need to go to to resist may legitimately reflect that.
And similarly, if we look at the actual implementation of the Westminster governments cuts, their programme makes no sense in conventional financial / economic terms.
A 'shrink-the-state' government could responsibly pursue its agenda over, say, a generation - rarely cutting anything, but simply not renewing programmes as time passed.
The sort of instant-effect cuts that have been pursued since 2010 are counter-productive, even in terms of their own intentions. It actually costs money, and wastes money already spent, to cut off programmes and projects in mid-flow.
And the ensuing disruption to the overall economy (made up of lots of individual lives and households) is profound, as we have seen these past years.
Money needs to go round and round, and keep going round. In a way, that is more important than how much there nominally is, or where it nominally comes from.
This is not just wild opinion - the bald fact is that the austerity programme has not even achieved its object - the 'deficit' is not being paid down in any significant way, and the date by which it might be paid down is in continuous retreat down the decades of the 21st century. It's the whole mind-set that is wrong, not the deficit itself.)
So, to return to the notion of actually refusing to accept the cuts. If we dared to think about it inventively, there are ways in which the refusenik authorities could do it. The first and simplest is simply to run a deficit. Who is going to call 'foul!' if that is done, what can they do if they don't like it, and (very important, this) how long would it take for them to do it ?
But to cushion that extreme, there are ways in which the local authorities could be supported. For example, I am in the happy position (probably not typical, I know) in which I could pay a year or even two years Council Tax in advance. That would presumably be legal ? The trades unions have an enormous interest in resisting the cuts - and they have not inconsiderable financial reserves. Again, a nimble mind could find not-illegal ways for the unions to help mitigate the local authorities' technical default at the points of most risk or most pressure. And even 'business' has no reason to love the cuts, and their tolerance of or connivance with the local authorities could be significant.
I repeat the questions with which I began:
is it not time to start developing a programme of actual resistance to the budget cuts being imposed from Westminster ?
Are there not in fact ways in which 'we' could simply refuse to accept them , and, at least to a degree, circumvent them ?
