Misappropriated
Ah, NAMA. Just when you think it’s out of the picture, the latest news report comes along and takes the thing apart yet again. Recently, it’s transpired that NAMA isn’t actually going to make the country loads and loads of money, as originally thought (well, I say “thought”, what I actually mean is “sort-of-vaguely-hoped-and-told-to-a-public-who-didn’t-believe-it-anyway”); in fact, we stand to lose hundreds of millions. Cue much anger from those who still have the energy to be outraged by more tales of fiscal incompetence, even if it’s increasingly like getting angry about the rain - yeah, it’s a bit rubbish, but we get a lot of it in Ireland and you just have to accept it.
Fact of the matter is, if NAMA does end up costing us – say – five hundred million, it’s really not that much in the overall scheme of things – particularly for a project as long-term as NAMA. €300 million, for example, is what the confiscation of pensioners’ medical cards was expected to cost, and one of the points made at the time was that you can recoup that much money anywhere. It was a question of 300 million versus something that looked unseemly, and the government decided that appearances mattered. The victimised people were voters, after all.
The retort’s obvious; it isn’t about the money, it’s about the principle. We were told one thing to justify the NAMA mechanism, the reality looks like being quite another. The NAMA thing hurts, partially because of the lack of transparency and the non-stop fudging of the figures, but mostly because of the narrative it presents; the law changed to bail out a financial system, it also happens to bail out the people primarily responsible for all the trouble in the first place, and meanwhile social welfare gets cut and the rest of us are plunged into austerity-
Ah, “austerity”. There’s a loaded word. It might – particularly for those from the UK – conjur up images of post-war poverty endured by a willing populace, but it’s interesting to note that austerity is an aesthetic word rather than a quantative one. “Frugal” means making most of meagre resources; “austerity” is making something look unapologetically frugal. It’s the glamourisation of scarcity, if you like. This is why it’s a gloriously appropriate word to describe the sudden fashion for severity that’s swept through Europe since Greece came within a ball-hair of going tits-up, and it’s become firmly embedded in the mentality of both sides of the argument; those in favour of cuts retreat to the belt-tightening meme, while those who loudly oppose NAMA make noise about spotting bankrupt property-developers going on holiday and travelling first class.
When those who oppose the relentless cutting of public provisions mention – say – Keynesian economics, they miss the point of what government does. Governments don’t deal in economics, they deal in aesthetics, and the aesthetic of austerity has taken firm root in our culture. It’s hardly surprising, given the story of the last few years. A bunch of ultra-competitive quasi-masonic posh male gits gambled colossal amounts of money they didn’t have, paid profliglate salaries that bounced around the domestic economy, and the government started spending based on tax-receipts that didn’t have any basis in reality. The moral is obvious; profligacy is bad, saving is good, and debt is evil. A few years ago, it was generally accepted that debt was a healthy, virtuous way of making your money work. Now it’s the height of irresponsibility, particularly collective debt, hence it’s all right to cut the salaries of a low-paid while talking about how ooh it’s tough for everyone.
In a sense, this isn’t entirely unwelcome. One of the most noxious trends of the last few years was that of the collector – the thinking that one of the average human’s raison d’etre was to acquire stuff, that a trip to HMV to buy the latest box-set of a TV series you’d never actually scene was natural and normal behaviour, that you could measure the depth of your cultural knowledge by the amount of shelf-space taken up by your DVD collection, that anyone with less than a hundred CDs was living more or less the same life as St Augustine of Hippo. Selfridges once had a campaign that went “See it, want it, buy it, forget it,” for fuck’s sake. That isn’t to say that this isn’t still the case – one of the most celebrated ad campaigns of late shows a woman going living a life that’s indistinguishable from her taste for consumer hardware – but any sort of acceptance that it’s not actually necessary to own the entire Planet of the Apes series on DVD is arguably a good thing. This is happening, which is why the latest Sex and the City film seemed so grotesquely out of step, even to fans of the series; I’d argue that it isn’t that the writing is appreciably worse, it’s that the cultural background against which we understand the story is massively changed.
(Having said that, I’d rather drink my own feet dissolved in peroxide than actually go and watch the SatC films, so there’s a very real possibility here that I don’t actually know what the hell I’m talking about.)
The problem, then, isn’t so much the sudden preaching of austerity; it’s the brand of austerity that’s being pushed. For all the lip-service paid to “we’re all in this together,” it’s implied to everyone that the real money is being haemorhagged by Someone Else. Before the UK Budget (which they thought was severe, bless them), David Cameron stated that “There is no way of dealing with an 11% budget deficit just by hitting either the rich or the welfare scrounger.” Well then, why go to the trouble of naming them? The implication, just by mentioning welfare scroungers, is that the financial crisis is their fault – convenient, as almost nobody in the country actually classes themselves as a welfare scrounger (or as rich, for that matter). Ergo, it’s down to someone else. In Ireland, almost everybody knows who should be ahead of them in the cuts queue. It’s public servants, or civil servant, or welfare cheats, or bankers, or developers, or single mothers, or dem bastards in Leinster House. That isn’t to say there isn’t a dollop of truth in some of the above; it’s just that, if you have a string of besuited dickheads in secure incomes singling out sectors who still have pots of money, then you end up with a bitter society that’s preoccupied with scapegoating.
Meanwhile, “austerity” continues to embraced as if it’s a question of manners, a rhetoric double-dipped in words like “appropriate”. In fact, if you want to see a perfect example of what austerity means in its current context, the best possible example appeared on the Late Late Show a couple of years ago (skip to 4m25s or so):
This is someone who’s suggesting that people should be paid (the minimum wage, presumably, unless of course you subscribe to the theory of “workfare”) to clear weeds from the roads, while at the same time saying that it’s no longer appropriate to travel by helicopter. Well, we all have to make sacrifices, don’t we? Now, if Jackie Lavin can give up helicopters, surely those on the dole can give up a tenner a week?
The interesting thing isn’t that what Lavin said was unforgivably warped, it’s that it was – economically – plain wrong; it would be far better for a stagnant economy if the Cullens flew by helicopter as much as they possibly could. However, Lavin is governed by a vaguely-formed sense of manners. That’s ultimately not such a terrible thing, really – “rich idiots have a bizarre sense of entitlement and warped priorities” isn’t exactly a shock headline.
That’s all very well, but governments shouldn’t operate on the same basis. Even leaving aside the question of public sector pay, we have a situation where welfare has been cut… even though all social welfare is spent by its recipients, and so ends up heading back to the exchequer in VAT and tax receipts anyway; we’ve seen capital expenditure on education and health slashed, even though the net cost to the exchequer of capital expenditure at this time is practically zero. We may have cut expenditure, but the deficit hasn’t even wobbled. We aren’t doing this for deficit reasons, really; we’re doing it because it’s “appropriate”. Welfare and wages are cut, not because of economics or even ideology, but because of decorum – the skewed, privileged cousin of politeness.
Well, a polite society isn’t one where people can froth at the money spent on its least fortunate, even if the complainant makes ten times as much. That, ultimately, is why the NAMA news rankles. NAMA is a purely economic measure – it isn’t about society, it’s about numbers so big that they’re barely comprehensible, and a few hundred million really isn’t that much. But while the wealthy and the privileged get the economic theory, and four billion’s worth of projected shortfall is shrugged off as part of the accounts, the poor and the vulnerable are crushed by an aesthetic decision that was taken by the wealthy on their behalf. That’s what’s needed. That’s what’s appropriate.