It is disappointing that the response from the Left in Britain to the politics of austerity has been so limp. The brilliant coup from the interests of capital to paint the economic crisis as a crisis of government debt and public spending—and therefore the basis for an attack on the ideology of the left—has seen little in the way of aggressive intellectual response.
The simple explanation for this is that the left is divided. The line taken by the socialist and labour left has largely been one of denial. This is not a high level of debt, they argue. By historical standards, we have survived much higher levels of debt. Why, after the last war we faced debts on a far greater scale and yet that is when we established the health service.
I think this is a mistaken approach to the politics of austerity. For one thing, it will not wash. Citizens have a sense of there having been a vast amount of cash floating around during the Labour years. They also know that consumption, individual and national, was based on untrammelled credit. This is their sense of how life was, and they are not wrong.
Secondly, the parallel between our economy now and in the 1950s does not hold up to scrutiny. At that time we were an imperial nation and the workshop of the world, if a somewhat scruffy one making rather unfashionable products. We could use our empire as a vast ‘internal’ market, sucking in resources and finding compliant customers for our products. We could repay our debts through hard, productive labour—and we did. Now what do we have to offer the world as justification for the debts we have incurred? Our favourite offering of financial services is finding considerably less favour than five years ago.
But most importantly we should reject this line of argument because it is morally wrong. We should not have to live through the 1950s again, working hard to return interest to those who loaned us money. Back then it was US and Canadian capitalists who, through lend-lease, had ensured that the value created by British workers would flow back to them. We would not have won the war without US productive capacity, but we would not have lost the peace as spectacularly as we did had they not insisted that we continue to pay for it right up to 2006, just two years before the credit crisis.
Rather than arguing about how we should pay it back we should be repudiating the debt.
This is what has been happening in other European countries, where Citizens’ Audit have been established, inspired by the examples of the Latin American countries who refused to pay their debts during the last decade. Why should we pay back money loaned to us by financial institutions who have the power to create money by electronic fiat, they asked. And we should be asking the same question. By the time we had paid our wartime debts—the debts we incurred for defeating Hitler and protecting European democracy—we had paid our ‘allies’ the US and Canada, or rather US and Canadian capitalists and financiers, twice what we had borrowed. This iniquitous use of the power of money to extract value should be the real target of the left.
Earlier this week Portugal’s citizens’ audit campaign published a preliminary technical report: ‘Understand the debt to get out of the trap’; the Spanish campaign is called ‘Who owes whom?’ and is part of the work of the indignados. The Irish citizens audit, supported by UNITE as well as debt campaign groups, challenged circular nature of Irish debt-holding, with the government guaranteeing banks which, in turn, hold its debt. It found that Irish debt had been transformed from a safe and boring investment to a vehicle of speculative interest. Its authors used Kissinger’s term of “constructive ambiguity” to describe the deliberate use of recondite language to undermine the citizen’s power to understand the actions of their politicians.
The real purpose of a citizens’ audit is precisely to challenge this “constructive ambiguity”. Most people never question whether it is right that they should pay interest to a bank for the privilege of buying their home, although they will pay around twice the cost of the house by the term of the mortgage. Whether this is just depends on how the bank acquired the money and in these days when the corrupt dealings of banks are becoming revealed in more egregious detail every day, an audit into how our debt was acquired, who owns it, and who will receive the money that we are paying in return for our borrowings is urgently overdue.
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