How concerned are Quakers about government cuts?
Friends urged to action
I am surprised not to see a massive reaction to cuts in government spending and benefits on the letters page and articles in the Friend. Does this really reflect a low level of concern among Quakers about the way many of these changes will affect the poorest, most vulnerable, people in society?
I believe most Friends will be alarmed at the prospect of many areas, such as higher education and personal care for the elderly and disabled, being cut back (some permanently, which the government says is its intention even after the ‘crisis’ is over). The changes to housing benefits will cause many people to lose their homes. The loss of support networks and the change of schools that may be involved could hurt the most vulnerable.
While there is a need to reduce the deficit in government finance, many economists (including Nobel Prize winners like Joseph Stiglitz) believe that the speed and severity of the cuts will damage the economy and its capacity to recover. Many Quakers have reservations about growth in the economy in its present form as being unsustainable in the long term. However, the short and medium term effect of the cuts will be the loss of about a million jobs in the public and private sectors. This will cause much hardship. Quakers have long been aware of the long term damage that unemployment can do to individuals and communities. Surely much of the public spending being cut is more valuable than lavish consumption by the very rich. Should we not be pressing for higher tax rates on the highly paid (even if some of the financial whiz-kids threaten to go abroad)?
Placing the blame for the ‘crisis’ on excessive spending by the previous government, which the present government seems to have persuaded much of the public is the case, ignores a major cause of the problems, the deregulation of the financial system. This led to excessive debt and massive flows of money to financial traders and institutions. Many of these shelter their profits from tax by moving them offshore. We need real action to clamp down on tax avoidance and evasion by individuals and companies, which, it has been estimated, deprives the government of revenues of the same order as the ‘deficit’.
While we may support the government’s ambition to reduce the number of people on long-term unemployment benefits, this aim will not be achieved in any fair way in the absence of enough fulfilling and adequately paid jobs. It seems likely that there will be extreme pressure on people to accept any job, no matter how unsuitable for their personal circumstances. The likely lack of jobs for young people coming out of education may lead to a ‘lost generation’.
How will Quakers respond to the government moves to have many public services taken over by volunteers? Would Friends take over, as volunteers, jobs from which employees have been made redundant?
Should we not be calling for much larger schemes for energy efficiency, renewables and sustainable transport, which can generate employment at many levels of skill and would shield us from the worst effects of the likely peak in oil production (which a recent highly professional report has suggested may come by 2015)? If we do not prepare for a huge increase in global energy costs, our balance of payments problems may make the present ‘crisis’ look rather insignificant.
There may be many activities taking place among Quakers – as individuals and in different Quaker organisations – concerned with the present economic and financial situation, but they don’t seem to have a very high profile from where I am.
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