Quite a neat summary here (by Elliott Chappell in today’s Labour List email) of yesterday’s spending review based on Rishinomics:

“Our health emergency is not yet over and our economic emergency has only just begun,” Rishi Sunak told us as he launched into his spending review. 2.5 million public sector workers will see their pay frozen – including 90% of police, 80% of fire service and 75% of prison officers, at least 80% of secondary school teachers and 75% of those in primary schools. This, remember, just a week after the PM unveiled the biggest investment in defence since the Cold War. The Chancellor announced a new £4bn ‘levelling up’ fund that will see MPs bid for money in what looks to be the same mechanism that led to the controversy over the Towns Fund – in which the Tories prioritised spending to marginal seats ahead of the last election. He was silent on the £20 uplift to Universal Credit – the emergency top-up grudgingly given earlier in the pandemic. Failing to extend it will slash annual incomes for 16 million households by £1,040 in April. And, of course, the Chancellor rounded off all that (and much more) by going back on the Tory manifesto promise to keep UK aid spending at 0.7% of gross national income.”

    “Rishinomics“ is what I’ve called it for fun, of course. It’s neoliberalism really. And this is how it always works. It isn’t simply that capitalists hate the poor (though they often do). Capitalists need the poor. So they create poverty. An executive in a finance company housed in the World Financial Centre in New York, Craig Dinsell, explained some of it to me over lunch in the Metropolitan Museum restaurant in 2012. Low-paid workers can’t expect to be paid good wages, or even half-decent wages. That would cause inflation. Actually, low pay is good for them because it gives them an incentive to better themselves and get themselves out of poverty. It gives them ambition. Without that, they would just stay in their menial jobs for life. That’s “human nature” apparently (I’d been waiting for that). This little narrative, of course, ignores the fact that poverty more often destroys ambition and hope, it grinds people down. The truth is that low pay remains part of the system because it is essential to the pursuit of profit, although Craig didn’t quite put it like that—he was ruminating on “human nature”. So this, as far as I could tell, was the best of all possible worlds—There Is No Alternative. Tina lives.[1]

   I knew Craig Dinsell in the late 1960s, when he was 20. We attended an evangelical Baptist church in North London, where he played the role of gadfly to the church establishment and sang Bob Dylan songs. Now, as I said, he moves in high circles and is himself part of a rather bigger establishment (“We were invited to a dinner for Tony Blair”, he told me. “He seemed a nice guy”). Craig is a nice liberal. He reads the New York Times and advised me not to watch Fox News. I’m sure he voted for Biden.

    And in that there is a warning. We justifiably feel relief at Biden’s victory. But while Reagan was the first who decisively took the neoliberal path, it was so decisive that none of his successors or their followers ever abandoned it. Including Biden. As Brando Marcetic notes in “Yesterday’s Man: the case against Joe Biden”:

“While Clinton’s neoliberal politics alienated many voters, Biden was one of the earliest adopters of neoliberalism, successfully pushing the [Democratic] party to become more like him.”

If Marcetic is right (and I confess I have only read the introduction to the book so far, but it sounds likely to me) then while the tone, the style, and most of the politics of Biden may be very different from the horrors of the last 4 years, we should beware of wanting to “get back to normal”. For “normal” still includes neoliberalism. And Joe needs to be watched. And pushed.

    As for Rishi, don’t ask.

[1] Tina was the name given by cabinet minister Norman St John Stevas to Margret Thatcher because of her frequent use of the phrase “There is no alternative” to justify her neoliberal policies. In the end he had to go.