RACHEL REEVES’S announcement of 15 per cent cuts to the Civil Service repeat discredited mantras rolled out by past governments: that massive job losses can be imposed without affecting “front-line services,” and that new tech can replace people in the administration of complex systems.
“AI” now occupies the catch-all status “IT” did for a previous generation. We know already that over-reliance on poorly understood tech produces major miscarriages of justice — most famously in the Horizon scandal where a faulty computer programme resulted in innocent people being prosecuted and bankrupted, but also in the 200,000 people wrongly investigated for housing benefit fraud because of a dodgy algorithm used by the Department for Work and Pensions.
Naturally government departments need to adopt advancing technology: but tech as an excuse for cuts, a wheeze rolled out by the Gordon Brown and David Cameron governments, has a grim track record. As former vice-president of Civil Service union PCS John McInally observes, the result was “service delivery chaos” as “private companies looted the public sector for profit while introducing ill-considered, inefficient and wholly untested new technology.”
Government after government disguises cuts as “efficiency savings,” but the results are plain to see. Nobody regards the British state today as more efficient than when Cameron began swinging the axe in 2010.
The health service cannot cope with the number of patients, hospitals and schools are falling down, courts face huge case backlogs and Britain’s unemployed are the least likely to visit a job centre in Europe, since the system imposes so much stress and humiliation without helping people find work.
Reeves’s cuts figure, as PCS general secretary Fran Heathcote points out, is arbitrary: she has not explained which aspects of Civil Service work will cease. Rather, like her weekend briefings that there will be no “tax and spend” approach in her spending review on Wednesday, she is signalling the direction of the government.
That this is one which cossets the rich while attacking the poor is already evident. Last week’s attacks on disability and sickness payments were the latest example. Analysis by the Financial Times showing thousands of sick people will see their incomes reduced by a staggering 60 per cent indicate the cruelty of its approach.
But it is increasingly adopting the anti-state rhetoric of Donald Trump and Elon Musk across the Atlantic as well, where Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is shredding civil service jobs with abandon and Trump breezily abolishes whole departments, most recently education.
This did not begin with them, but is inspired by Argentina’s leader Javier Milei — Musk even apes his chainsaw-wielding stunts to illustrate his commitment to cuts — and is at heart an international ruling-class drive to eliminate the social state, just as it seeks to remove all social obligations from corporations, whose right to maximum profits should not, in their eyes, be infringed upon by details like public welfare, workers’ rights or sustainable ecosystems.
It is an attack on the social state only, not the state per se. It combines, for Milei, Trump and Starmer, with heightened authoritarianism and an increase in the state’s readiness to use force. So Reeves’s cuts are part of the same project as increases in military spending, even if the United States humiliated Starmer again at the weekend by mocking his “posturing” over Ukraine.
If Reeves’s priorities have more in common with Elon Musk’s than those of the trade union movement, though, it is surely time unions came together to fight back.
Quick-succession attacks on those who depend on social security and those who administer it make the case for a united front of unions and grassroots campaigns, aimed at defeating the Starmer-Reeves project and putting Britain on a trajectory that works for the working class.
For that we must drop the delusion that Labour branding makes this government our friend.
