Impossibility pervades politics today. The deficit denies all political action outside the tortured logic of cutting the deficit. Short-term political priorities and long-term political cynicism drive spending decisions: just ask the disabled, working families receiving tax credits, or any local council. Ambition and optimism are absent. Our domestic politics feel small, trapped in a deathly dance of technocratic reform and politically-inspired but economically flawed austerity. Within this political thrall, Britain is becoming the can’t do country.
There is a constant appeal to blind forces, as invisible as they are impersonal. Globalisation is blamed for the destruction of jobs from steel to retail. Impossibly high house prices and rents are attributed to “the market” as if it were an abstraction rather than a human construct. Commentators on the right tell us that the NHS is inherently “unsustainable” in the face of a population that is gradually getting older and sicker, as if the real choices about how much to fund it, what to expect from it, or how to best run it, were marginal.
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