There was no austerity
Politicians know how to spend money, all right. It's just that you're not getting any.
Something you often hear in political discourse is that the UK has long been suffering from “austerity”. The BBC even has its own series titled “The Austerity Audit” about the UK’s “decade of austerity” and generally the word is treated as fact, as though conveying a period such as the Victorian era.
There’s no doubt that many Brits live in austere conditions and have done so throughout the Conservatives’ time in power and prior to it. Perhaps unsurprisingly the country has become the second-most miserable nation in the world, according to one index, as we continue our torturous decline. But there’s a difference between “austere conditions” and “austerity”, a word that suggests politicians have been disciplined about spending, sensible even, and keeping the nation “living within its means”.
Yes, for some things the Government was frugal; the spending that really mattered, one might argue. But what makes the UK’s economic decline particularly distressing is that our leaders have haemorrhaged insane amounts of our money on odious dross, as well as placing it in the hands of bureaucrats who use their powers to stifle anyone with entrepreneurial spirit.
The Government’s prolific and idiotic levels of spending are why I started my Substack series, “Woke Waste”, having been astounded by the amount of taxpayer money ploughed into ideologically-deranged projects. Most of my discoveries were inadvertent. I would be digging around one area to find myself going down 10 new rabbit holes; I ended up with pages of material. It had to be flushed out and put somewhere the taxpayer could see (aka here).
Where to start with the waste? There’s too much of it for one article; it needs a book at least. But take the example of projects funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). Sponsored by the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (aka you and I, dear taxpayer), each year it awards around £110 million to researchers/ research organisations - channeled through UK Research and Innovation (UKRI).
What is this cutting-edge research, you ask? Well, right now there’s the £805,745 taxpayer-funded study centred on the premise that “The disproportionate representation of William Shakespeare in scholarship and performance has aligned early modern drama in the public mind with white, able-bodied, heterosexual, cisgender male narratives”. Huh? Its researcher seeks to mount a “large-scale production… around female, trans, queer, disabled and migrant life stories, and featuring almost no adult cisgender men” in answer to this problem of our times.
Another AHRC-funded project is The Queer Woman Reader, 1790-1940, whose “[t]hesis asks: how did the historical and fictional queer woman reader engage with emerging discourses of queerness in Britain in the long nineteenth century?” The researcher claims “The diaries, letters, book reviews, and fiction of the Ladies of Llangollen, Mary Diana Dods, Charlotte Brontë, Anne Lister, Geraldine Jewsbury, Jane Welsh Carlyle, Vernon Lee, Radclyffe Hall, Virginia Woolf, and Sylvia Townsend Warner represent diverse queer experience, across a period of shifting queer sociality.”
The rot goes much further, to the Arts Council England (ACE) which receives £445 million in public funds every year which are then disseminated towards the good, the bad and ugly of artistic endeavour. ACE-funding recipient Soho Theatre, for instance, is soon hosting a play described as a “kaleidoscopic tale of violence and vulnerability, set entirely in the confines of a men’s public toilet” (taster video below) and the Southbank Centre (receiving £17 million in annual funding from ACE) held a production of “a [children’s] tour around the human body” with a “trans non-binary emergency doctor and TV presenter” earlier this year.
Some of the worst cases of woke waste are in local government where bureaucrats not only find ways to tax locals but stifle the private sector with red tape - often with faux-moral justifications, such as environmentalism or “saving children’s lungs”. Will Norman, London’s Walking and Cycling Commissioner, who’s paid £110,000-£114,999 per year, has widened cycle lanes across the city, resulting in deep congestion across the Capital and losses for any business delivering products and/ or services, whose jobs now take longer due to complete.
The mainstream media often blames lack of funds for bankrupt and general incompetence in councils. Ahead of Jeremy Hunt’s Budget, the FT argued that “public services are under extreme pressure after years of spending restraint”. But you only have to look at £117k-a-year Amy Lamé, the useless “Night Czar”, or the Taxpayers’ Alliance findings that local authorities have spent a total of almost £52 million on Equality, Diversity and Inclusion roles in the last three financial years, to ask: are you joking?!
The headlines about “austerity” might have once had Brits imagining ministers agonising all night about whether they’ll have to cut funding from a children’s hospital or cancer research facility; terrible choices in which there are no winners. But they actually behave more like Isla Fisher’s character in Confessions of a Shopaholic if she’d undertaken a BA Queer Studies. There’s no end to the amount of government funds for anti-Western idiocy masquerading as the “arts”, or even worse, “research”.
The problem with a lot of the Government’s spending is most of us don’t even know it exists, never mind being able to fight it. The general sense of economic decline is the biggest symptom of all, and the more you unearth, the more alarming it gets. The irony is that government “splurging” is a major part of why we are feeling the pinch.
Excellent and well researched, thank you.