Fair? No, it’s foul

“Why is it only hearts?
Why are brains never broken?
Is logic indivisible truth
And passion just a token?”
From Qawaal-ke-Sawaal
by Bachchoo

When I was at Cambridge University, all those long years ago, there was a scholar there called Muku Hamid. I didn’t know him well. He was short, stocky and imposingly bearded. I didn’t know to which college he belonged, but he was reputed by my friends in the arts faculty to be a brilliant mathematical economist.
At the time I was an undergraduate there, the university had a professor of economics called Jane Robinson. She was an avowed “Marxist”, suffering from the intellectual contradiction of also being a Maoist. (It has been proved altogether elsewhere, and can be done by me again here — but life is short — that the one cannot be the other, they are different doctrines of political and revolutionary process and progress!) I don’t know what students of economics were taught in that faculty in those years, but whenever one encountered Hamid, he would answer any greeting such as “Hail fellow well met”, “Hi Muku baby” or even “Salaam aleikum Hamid sahib”, by stroking his beard and saying “Yaar, India ki economy minush mey chal rahi hein”. He would declare this with a melancholy expression. And this simple, not cryptically intoned judgment from a man reputed to be a phenomenon in the field of mathematical economics? On encountering Muku and hearing this, I would be depressed for hours — till the next few pints of beer.
I mustn’t pretend I understood the concept of an economy “moving in minus”.
All these years later, still living in Britain, I am being told something similar by George Osborne, the UK’s Chancellor of the Exchequer — finance minister by another name — that that’s precisely what’s happening to Britain: “Vilayat ki economy minush mey chal rehi hein!” Apart from telling the nation some such thing, he proposed this week, through Parliament and his ruling coalition, £23.1 billion of cuts in government expenditure over the next four years.
Let’s convert that, for ease of understanding, into rupees. At the current exchange rate that comes to approximately `1800,000,000,000 and if I know my denominations, that’s `18 thousand-crore. This is not what the government will spend or its bid to buy up North Korea — this is what the British government will not spend on defence, welfare, transport, health, education, police etc in the next four years. Remember this is not expenditure, this is cuts in the budgets already allocated for those things and others. The cuts amount to just 3.3 per cent of what the government will actually spend.
There are of course varying opinions about these cuts, with those on the extreme Left pronouncing them the worst anti-poor measures this country has ever taken and conjuring up scenarios of Dickensian squalor and the incentive of the needy to crime, while the extreme Right, the back benchers of the Tory Party, gives two cheers for the cuts and demands more.
The governing coalition of Tories and Liberal Democrats excuse and explain the cuts with two political arguments. Firstly, they say that the government had no option because the previous Labour government of Gordon Brown left this country with a massive deficit and uncontrolled public spending. They plead that their pace of cuts will reduce this deficit and save the country billions of pounds in the interest they pay on government debt. The figure? As a consequence of the reduced spending, “only” £63 billion in interest to service the debt.
Secondly, the government insists that they have spread the pain that these cuts will cause in depriving people of social benefits, of throwing public sector employees out of jobs and cutting people’s pensions, principally those of government workers. This “spreading the pain” is encapsulated in their slogan of “We’re all in it together”. The catchword of the coalition today is that the cuts are “fair”.
The one example they sprang upon the country at the Tory Party conference some weeks ago was a cut in Child Benefit. This is the sum that the state pays every mother for every child from birth till the child is 16. This was an automatic grant of a couple of thousand pounds a year given to the principle guardian of every child, irrespective of what the income of the principle guardian was. So a mother who earned, say £12,000 a year and the wife of a banker whose wages were £1 million a year, would get the same amount in Child Benefit. This seemed blatantly unfair. The government announced that it would cut the Child Benefit of every mother earning £45,000 a year and more. People earning anything less would continue to receive it.
This seems on the face of it eminently “fair” until one considers, as the rear guard of the Tory Party immediately did, that this would still mean that if a husband and wife both went out to work and earned £44,500 each, meaning that the family had an income of £89,000, they would get the same Child Benefit as our original mother who earns £12,000 a year.
Perhaps the anomaly can be ironed out. Or maybe the numbers that fall into this anomalous position don’t really negate the basic argument of increased “fairness”.
The counter argument to that of the government is that the Labour Party may have been lax with their control of the banking sector, but it was certainly the international banking industry, worldwide usury on the grand and accepted capitalist scale, that caused the global financial crisis and that Labour were the first to face that ugly music and had to dance their way into public debt to save the economy from the failure of banks.
So come back Muku Hamid and explain to me the government argument that additional tax imposed on the banks will be handed back to them with bonuses in the decrease in Corporation Tax. Why? And “fair”?
Explain why this government is so certain that imposing regressive taxes so that the poorer sections of society bear the brunt of the capitalist debt is the only solution. And yes, even if you persuade me that banks and bankers with £7 million in bonuses just this year, are the engines of prosperity (really? What about their mass bankruptcy), what again happens to the much-touted criteria of “fairness”?