Austerity, mon amour

The really real world of what David McNally calls the neoliberal mutation requires a renewed lexicon. The 'necessity' of gouging public expenditure to reassure investors - dismayed by the very government debts that have guaranteed their survival - has given rise to an 'age of austerity'. Steven Poole has recently blogged of the Unspeak of austerity as implying 'a severe self-discipline of the kind that is laudable, virtuous in its serious asceticism.' In Ireland, this moralization is lacquered with a feel of Operation Transformation, as an emetic to bloated 'lifestyles', with Olli Rehn replacing his compatriot Dr Eva as the symbol of the cool new Lutheranism. Nyder O'Leary unpicks the new virtuousness.

When Eamon Gilmore launched Labour's Election Campaign on Wednesday, he announced that Labour would announce plans for €7 billion of net adjustments (Labour are a progressive party, so they don't make cuts. They make adjustments, which are totally different). It was further confirmation that politics has reversed; politicians now announce cuts to public services with the same ease they used to promise cuts to tax. Ireland's establishment parties aren't identical, but the differences between them are purely tonal; witness the way that neither Labour nor Fine Gael did anything to block the EU/IMF deal, they just didn't pretend they were happy about it.

Yet, are they so different, even in behavioural terms? It's not just that all the parties are presenting a broadly similar economic consensus; their tone is similarly indistinguishable. Once you get beyond the election-approaching dusting of positivity, most discussion takes place against the backdrop of Difficult Times Ahead (a euphemism for redundancies and cuts) and the need for retrenchment.

"Across our public services, rapid growth in public spending during the 2003-08 period did not deliver equal improvement in services. Now that the property bubble has burst, we have been left with an over-sized and often ineffective State. The collapse in incomes and taxes is unlikely to be reversed in the medium-term, leaving public spending ratios unsustainably high." (Fine Gael - "Reinventing Government")

"Ireland does have an unsustainable budget deficit, and tackling it will require hard decisions, but we have to make the right hard decisions." (Labour, "In Ireland's Interest")

The first thing to note about the recent glorification of cuts is how essentially unsuccessful it's been. You don't need to go hunting into the depths of Keynesian economics to spot that this is the case - the view of deficit-slashing policy amongst economists can be charitably described as mixed - rather, it's a simple question of looking at the figures. I'm writing this not long after the Central Bank have revised their growth predictions down from 2.4% to 1.1% (in other news, they've expressed doubts about the stability of Weimar Germany and the long-term future of Pangea). Ireland's deficit has not come down at all, in spite of the repeated cutting of expenditure; the economic slowdown that accompanies the measures has taken tens of thousands of jobs as collateral. We even have the benefit of the UK's ConDem-lead experiment into slashing spending (almost entirely ideologically-driven, in their case) which has yet to put a dent in their deficit and has seen UK growth flatline and tax receipts fall.

The word that hovers over this spectacle is "austerity." It's carefully avoided by our politicians, but try sticking "austerity" and "Ireland" into google and you'll find a lifetime of reading material. Like many loaded words, it's telling. Austerity is often used to describe a period of belt-tightening; its association with the post-WWII period gives it a veneer of virtuousness. Thing is, "austere" and "frugal" aren't synonyms. Austere is the aesthetic of frugality; it isn't about saving money, it's about looking like you're saving money.

Austere, adj.
adj. austerer, austerest
adv. austerely
n. austerity
Severe or stern in disposition or appearance; somber and grave.
Strict or severe in discipline; ascetic.
Having no adornment or ornamentation; bare.

Time, you might think, for a voice or two to suggest that all this cutting hasn't been all it's cracked up to be; not a look-what-a-mad-maverick-I-am McWilliams type or one of those oh-so-krazy lefties like Joe Higgins, but a straightforward mainstream figure. It's too easy to ascribe the lack of any such thing to establishment agendas or media bias, but that's not the entire story. The media tends to follow established narratives; the establishment selects the policies it feels most able to sell. The macho fetishisation of cutting isn't simply an Irish phenomenon; its zenith was arguably the gleeful cheers of Tory backbenchers as George Osborne destroyed the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of people. This isn't an establishment creation. It's an ethic that has wormed its way into our culture; politicians and media react to it as much as they propagate it.

It's often assumed that large institutions act in a largely rational way, albeit one that's guided by self-preservation. This isn't really the case; the larger the number of people in a group, the more instinctively they react to events. Many of the more vicious of Ireland's cuts were justified by the statement that "we need to show [the markets / the rest of the world / our European allies / insert capricious econo-god here] we're serious." We're in a world of appearances and warped propriety, not numbers.

Political and economic elites are as susceptible to the power of narrative as the average cinema-goer. If the financial crisis were to be summed up into a simple morality tale, it would be about the evils of spending and accumulation. With the world drowning in debt, after a decade where "we" all partied (glorious word, "we"), it's time for society to solemnly learn the error of our ways. Having ordered more and more cocktails to delay the arrival of the bill, we now have to suffer financial penury and a hell of a hangover. Given two ways to approach a financial problem - grow out of it, or cut out of it - the government and media bias was for the one that made narrative sense, not the one that minimises suffering. Sackcloth and ashes it is, then.

We, pl. pron.
Nominative pl. of I.
Used to denote oneself and another or others.
Used to denote people in general.
Used to indicate a particular profession, nationality, political party, etc., that includes the speaker or writer.
(Also called the royal we) Used by a sovereign, or by other high officials and dignitaries, in place of I in formal speech.
(Also called the editorial we) Used by editors, writers, etc., to avoid the too personal or specific I or to represent a collective viewpoint.

It's fair to say that if We really had all partied, this might not be such a bad thing. Over the last ten years, some of society's collective behaviour was little short of obscene; this wasn't limited to the Seánies of this world, comforting as it may be to believe it. It wasn't rich elites that made ratings successes of Property Ladder and What Not To Wear. Maybe there's nothing wrong with reminding the aspirational classes that the summit of ambition shouldn't be an expanding property portfolio and a tasteful MDF cupboard filled with clothes you've never worn. The problem is that, if it's become a cliché to comment on how the gap between rich and poor widened hugely in that period, it's only because it's so obviously true.

When the Government's four year plan announced a cutting of the minimum wage, amidst the outrage there were questions about the logic behind it; decreasing tax take just makes the debt crisis worse, no matter how much mumbling you do about "competitiveness." It's the use of words like "pain," as a bland euphemism for economic hardship, that give the game away; this isn't an economic plan, it's a ceremonial cleansing in which punishment is inflicted on the powerless, while the powerful solemnly intone on how We have lived beyond our means. What makes this so repugnant is that these people are so detached from the lower echelons of Irish society - so convinced that they are suffering just by making decisions to inflict pain on others, so swayed by the notion that it's brave to take money from people with nothing - that they don't even see how warped their priorities are.

We should be clear about what's happening in Ireland and beyond. It's called economic debate, but there's no debate and it's got nothing to do with economics. It's is a unique form of ritual penance, with punishment inflicted on the blameless. The choice at the forthcoming election amounts to whether we want the whip-holder to look sympathetic as they tell us this is all necessary. After all, there's no more perfect definition of austerity.

Nyder O'Leary blogs at realreview.ie

(Image top via architekt2 on flickr)