Whatever else happens today, one change is inevitable. We are moving into the era of no-money politics. No money to placate interest groups. No money for new initiatives, regulators, agencies. No money to prove how much ministers “care”. It was our money, not theirs. And now it’s gone.
It is hard to imagine how profound a change this will be for a country that has become addicted to treating so many problems as ones that can be fixed with cash. “More teachers, police, hospitals” has been our opium. People who were furious about soldiers being denied proper equipment in Afghanistan found it harder to work up steam about the internal inflation that ate up NHS cash. Labour’s three-term experiment has surely proved that there is no automatic link between more spending and better public services. Yet we in the media still tend to treat any kind of “cut” with outrage. That will be a hard habit to break.
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