Tag Archives: social contract

Scarcity on the surface

When I sat down for lunch with a local council leader one afternoon, in a café adjacent to a YMCA, one of the first things we discussed was capacity. The ability of the state to serve its people, to foster a society where they can access social mobility, and to give them support when they need it. As I sat down and talked with them, drinking my “woke” chai latte, I understood some of the problems we faced in Somerset and it was upsetting. Children unable to access SEND schooling, or falling out of education. People waiting many months for affordable housing, forced to rent privately. Elderly people living in precarity to afford social care.

Often we think about this country and the state that it is in, and all we can feel is despair; which is completely understandable. The canyon between earnings and living costs is ever-growing. Services keep being cut year-on-year, and there’s no money to restore them in real terms. Councils being forced to tackle potholes, graffiti, and overgrown vegetation like a game of whack-a-mole – I blame Eric Pickles in particular.

In 2010, when we came into government, the economic outlook was not good. We had just faced a global crisis of horrifying proportions, and as such policy programmes were devised. The Conservatives wanted to reduce a “structural deficit” through austerity, so that we could “live within our means”. They believed if they could cut debt as a proportion of GDP, through cutting expenditure, they could close a gap – but look at how much wider it has become.

One evening I was speaking to my Local Party chair, and she informed me it would cost four billion pounds to restore SEND provision funding in real terms. To put that into perspective, that is 18% of Rachel Reeves’ fiscal headroom (£22bn) from the Autumn Budget. Now extrapolate that to the rest of the state. Capacity wasn’t just “cut” in the immediacy of austerity, but it was left to wither. And the British people have paid the price; through fiscal drag, anaemic wage growth, a quicksand poverty line, and the persistent anxiety of precarity.

So what does that have to do with my latte in a YMCA-adjacent café? Well, this wasn’t any café; it supports our community, residents in the YMCA, and even helps people out of precarity. The Purple Spoon provides freezer meals, free to anyone who needs them; no questions asked. It is doing something that is emblematic of social liberal philosophy.

Many decades ago, in a different world, liberals envisioned a state that would support people to live. Not through paternalism, but through liberty through security. Despite what some say, welfare isn’t about paying people to “do nothing”, but two things: investing in people and supporting them. Yet Britain has stopped doing the former, and does the latter quite poorly.

Things can get better

But as I sat there, talking to this council leader and drinking that coffee, despair suddenly turned into hope. Not a naive, euphoric lightbulb moment, but a way forward. We can’t go back to where we were before 2008, but we can choose a better trajectory than managed decline. I understand our problems aren’t simple, but pragmatism and pessimism aren’t the same.