The Metropolis

After a year of beatings and austerity, what can we look forward to? More austerity and beatings

Josh Hall | Thursday 15 December, 2011 15:35

Santa vs Jesus from South Park

It’s easy to forget quite how extraordinary a year 2011 has been. At home and abroad, the past twelve months have seen remarkable levels of repression and resistance, violence and solidarity.

But perhaps the key lesson from 2011 is that governments are all broadly the same. The state is the entity that has the monopoly on violence. The degree to which they utilise that monopoly varies from country to country, but the events of the last twelve months have demonstrated that governments of every shade will use precisely as much violence as is necessary to maintain control.

Here, that violence is primarily structural. In the Conservative-Liberal UK, if you’re not white, upper middle class, able-bodied, cisgendered, and from the South East of England, you can expect your life outcomes (such as they can be measured) to be poorer. Austerity is the cover du jour for this structural violence – and, as the last few months have shown, the aggression is becoming progressively more acute.

The examples are everywhere. Just a few days ago the government cut payments to disabled children by 50 per cent, leaving each child more than £1,300 worse off every year. In the North East, unemployment increased by 8.8 per cent in the three months to October. If you’re a cancer patient undergoing chemotherapy, you will be hauled up in front of ATOS, a private company charged with getting people back into work. If you live in council accommodation, you will soon lose your secure tenancy. If you’re squatting in one of the country’s 720,000 empty homes, you’ll soon find yourself in jail. If you’re the director of a FTSE 100 company you’ve seen your pay increase by 50 per cent.

This is not a coincidence. Much of the rhetoric in opposition to austerity focuses on vulnerable groups being “hit disproportionately hard”, as if this is some statistical anomaly; an unforeseen consequence of an otherwise sound economic strategy. In reality, though, these are the intended outcomes of an ideologically driven tactic of divide and rule, of personalisation and privatisation ad absurdum. The Conservative-Liberal project is not compassionate, no matter what Call Me Dave’s folksy PR says. No, it is shot through with the malice of the hyper-privileged teenager, so coddled and so immature that they believe it to be their right to kick those who don’t look like them, or come from the same background as them, or move in the same social circles as them. These teenagers are running the country now, and it’s terrifying.

Of course, structural violence is not the only manifestation of this tendency. One need only look at the extraordinary brutality with which any form of public assembly has been met in the last twelve months for evidence of the thrill with which Theresa May and the rest have embraced their new powers. Witness the police dogs now present at virtually every demonstration, or the increasingly profligate use of tasers, or the police murder of a young black man in Tottenham – a murder about which the Met and the IPCC subsequently lied, and for which it is unlikely that anyone will be brought to justice.

The world is changing at an historic rate, and the thick clouds of crisis loom larger now. It’s not just about the economy any more. It’s about how we want to live on a day-to-day basis, about our contract with the people who govern us, about our ability to resist encroachments on our meagre rights. Next year will be about protecting those rights – but it should also be about a broader recharacterisation of our relationship with the state, a remodelling of our systems of governance, and the wholesale destruction of the political class. Not much to ask.

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