Who really wants to roll back the state? Not the right (Owen Jones in The Guardian)
Behold, the onward march of the state. Describing the current occupants of No 10 as statists might sound provocatively counterintuitive. Ever since the neoliberals began reshaping Britain in their own image, from the 1970s onwards, state-bashing has become a kind of national religion. Critics of austerity – such as myself – have slammed today's Tories for rolling back the state in ways Margaret Thatcher would have dismissed as too radical. The Lib Dems are fellow travellers: when Nick Clegg became their leader, he promised to "define a liberal alternative to the discredited politics of big government". Projections by the Office for Budget Responsibility suggest day-to-day spending on public services will drop to levels unseen in Britain for decades.
And yet, in so many ways, this government has promoted the growth of the state through its policies. Take what the government and its allies call "welfare dependency". Last week it was revealed that, since the Clegg-Cameron love-in began, wages have tanked and the number of people in work claiming housing benefit has jumped by 59%. There were 650,561 workers claiming housing benefit when the coalition was formed. That soared to more than 1 million last year, costing the taxpayer an extra £4.8bn. Overall, 4.3 million are now thought to claim in-work benefits. The state has grown because we are subsidising employers who are paying wages workers cannot live on and private landlords charging rents tenants cannot afford.
Statism intrudes into people's lives in more pernicious ways under the coalition. The long-term unemployed will be compelled to march to a jobcentre every day: more a means for the state to humiliate those without work and treat them as feckless leeches than a serious attempt to find them employment. The state has come up with other sticks to discipline those thrown out of work: benefit "sanctions" strip unemployed people – including poppy-selling war veterans such as Stephen Taylor – of support, for the most spurious reasons....
Thatcherism promised to set the individual free, but authoritarian statism was always part of its creed. It imposed laws boastfully described by Tony Blair as "the most restrictive on trade unions in the western world"; David Cameron now proposes to make them more restrictive still. The police were given sweeping powers to batter down the miners 30 years ago; then came legislation giving them the right to stop and search citizens without reasonable suspicion, and anti-terror laws that eroded individual rights in favour of the state. We've even had undercover police officers having sexual relationships with radical activists: statism has invaded the bedroom under false pretences.....
(Much more at link)
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/11/state-right-government-individualism-left
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