Cuts have not brought about economic growth

Date: 25 July 2011

Official figures due out tomorrow are expected to show that, despite savage cuts in our public services, growth in the UK economy has at best halted or, in the worst case scenario, shrunk.

Hmm; we were told the cuts imposed on the UK by the coalition would achieve the economic growth that is supposedly essential for recovery of the UK economy.

This brought about a bit of déjà vu for WDM activists who had worked on debt campaigns with our colleagues in the global south during the 1980s and 1990s.

The obsession with ‘economic growth’ was part of a western led neo-liberal agenda that paved the way for privatisation of essential public services in the global south. Western financial institutions told countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America that this would result in economic growth which would revive their economies.

Even though severe cuts were made to public services, the promised growth did not always occur and in some countries economic growth actually declined. What did increase was the gap between rich and poor and the vulnerability of some of the poorest sections of society.

So when anti-cuts campaigns began in the UK WDM highlighted, and continues to highlight, the similarities between the cuts agenda here and what had happened in the global south. This shows why we can, and should, stand in solidarity with people around the world who have gone through this before. We can take strength from their resistance to cuts in their own communities and inspiration from alternatives ways of doing things that have arisen out of their resistance.

WDM also believes it is important to provide those fighting against cuts in the UK with hard evidence that cuts don’t work as they build their cases against the cuts. Tomorrow’s figures on lack of growth in the economy is just further confirmation of this fact.

The flat-lining of the economy probably won’t persuade the government to change direction as their programme is built more on ideology than fact, but it should at least make us more determined to fight for what is right here and abroad – our healthcare, education and security in old age.