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Against austerity
...If there is one thing we should be angry about in relation to the financial crisis – one thing far more infuriating than the apparently ‘evil’ bankers who are treated like voodoo dolls by the shallow anti-capitalists of the British press – it is this discussion of enforced austerity. Anyone who values choice, political imagination, individual liberty and independence should reject it. History tells us that austerity is not only an assault on our desire to live comfortable lives free from need or guilt; it is also a tool of political repression, which both springs from and reinforces the lack of a political alternative on how society should be organised. The Age of Austerity would not only prevent us from ‘buying new three-piece suites’ or ‘wasting hundreds on jokey Christmas presents from those idiotic mail-order catalogues’, as one commentator sneeringly puts it (3). It would also further increase state power over individuals and stifle political vision and debate.

It is striking that, for all the talked-up differences of opinion in recent months between the dwindling band of free-ish marketeers on one side and state socialists (or perhaps social-ishs?) on the other, there has been little live debate about the need for belt-tightening. That is because, long before the ‘credit crunch’ kicked in, there was a wide-ranging political consensus, spreading form left to right, from radical greens to dyed-in-the-wool Tories, that people’s material desires must be restrained. Whether it is justified on the green-leaning basis that our lust for stuff is destroying the planet, or the right-leaning notion that our materialism is undermining family life and community relations, it is broadly agreed that over-consumption must be tackled and austerity re-introduced, by force if necessary...