George Osborne did far worse than what you’ll read in any email

Future historians might look upon the 13 years following 2010 as the ‘Age of Impunity’, an era in which Britain’s ruling classes existed in a world free of consequences. For them, at least. While this might also be true of previous times, the last decade or so has been an accelerated version of chaotic and destructive class rule. There seems to have been no negligence, no depravity, no cruelty that our elected and unelected masters could be held accountable for.

The current spotlight on former chancellor of the exchequer Gideon ‘George’ Osborne is a case in point. That light shines weakly and awry, off the mark.

The email

You might have heard that Osborne just married his former special advisor then chief of staff Thea Rogers. She was surely deeply involved in Osborne’s policy decisions for at least the six years from 2010 until his post-Brexit referendum sacking by Theresa May.

You may also have learned that a salacious email circulated right before their wedding, reportedly having been sent to the guest list. It alleges sexual activities by Osborne, apparently written by someone who knew him well and dislikes him immensely. It is not the purpose of this article to discuss whatever transgressions Osborne may or may not have committed. Its purpose is to point out the glaring omissions from ‘the email’.

If it was written to detail actions clearly viewed as being both true and wrong, the omitted details are, we could assume, seen as being fine. But his actual ‘achievements’, overlooked by the email’s author, are crimes against the people he ruled over. They are crimes lacking any meaningful framework for investigation, prosecution, or conviction, but monstrous nonetheless.

At the last count, in 2021, 335,000 of our fellow citizens that we know of – mums and dads, grandparents, children, aunts and uncles, friends, neighbours, and coworkers – have died as a result of Osborne’s austerity policies. Longer hospital waiting times, hunger, loneliness, despair, and suicides have followed from staggering cuts to health and welfare services, brutal and punitive benefits sanctions, and the gradual crumbling and collapse of civic life.

To add insult to injury, these deaths and this suffering were ‘achieved’ using our own money. The number is no doubt higher than this and will continue to grow long after the Conservative Party is ejected from power. Look at that number again. 335,000. It is far higher than deaths from Covid. It reads like the kind of figure one might see on a Wikipedia page about a war or military occupation. (Somewhere between 9,000 and 10,000 civilians have been killed in Ukraine since last year). For people on long-term sickness disability payments, that is how the past decade must have seemed.

A recent report revealed that children growing up during the austerity years were on average shorter than their European peers. The growth of the poorest and most vulnerable has been stunted by austerity, in more ways than one.

The ideology to which Osborne and his party subscribe has a neat get-out clause. It is not the business of the state to feed children, they would say. Parents should be responsible for raising their children, and if they can’t do it then they must be held responsible. They must learn to cook and budget better.

Shirkers and strivers

In a world in which all families had access to sufficient wealth, opportunities, time, and social capital, there might be something to be said for this. But we live in a world where the Tory party made all of those factors harder for a huge chunk of the population to access. A world where Osborne actively encouraged the bullying of low-income people, with his references to “strivers” and shirkers.

After 2010, people on lower incomes were targeted as lazy, feckless scroungers living off everyone else. Deep-seated prejudices against the poor were aided by a flood of spiteful judgement TV, from SuperScrimpers and How the Other Half Live to Little Britain. Poor people were the families of Benefits Street, people to be pitied, loathed, and laughed and gawped at.

And all the time they were dying in ever-increasing numbers.

Osborne’s crimes against society include the increase in single mums drifting into prostitution to feed their children. They include austerity-linked surges in violent crime, and 3.6 million calls to the NHS that were abandoned by the callers after hours of waiting.

They include the explosion of childhood diabetes, the rapid increase in blindness, and the 1,300 homeless people who died on the streets in 2022 alone. They include cuts to mental health services that saw children suffering from eating disorders or psychoses, and at acute risk of self-harm, sent halfway across the country or locked up and forgotten about.

At least as bad as all of that is the brutalisation of the whole of society. As we came to believe the endlessly propagandised Tory lie that there was ‘no more money’ – a lie repeated by the prime minister to add further contempt to his handling of the public sector pay review – and our paid-for, economically illiterate commentariat propagated and repeated it, we meekly accepted our national immiseration.

The putrid politics of elitist Osborne

Our society has become a crueller, angrier, and more bitter place. The irony of it all is that austerity actually made the country poorer through a manufactured recession. Some respected economists believe that austerity was never aimed at reducing debt as was claimed – and as never happened – but was a smokescreen for acceleration of Thatcher’s asset-stripping and dismantling of the state.

Not everyone was made poorer, of course. Those interests that are always dear to the Tory party, such as banks, landowners, and private landlords, did just fine through one of the most brutal eras in postwar British history. In some ways the entire policy was designed just for them. The economic backwardness of Osborne’s policies notwithstanding, austerity was a political success.

The story the Tories told about how the country needed to be punished for its profligacy under Labour (a cruel joke for anyone who actually claimed benefits from 1997 to 2010) was popular with a certain section of the population. Voters who saw politics not in terms of GDP growth but as an opportunity for righteous sadism, and thought certain of their fellow citizens – the long-term sick, single parents, “benefits scroungers” – needed to be motivated through hardship and hunger, rewarded the Tories at the ballot box. Conservatism has always worked in this way: a sly nod to a minority of voters that Judgement Day is coming for the undeserving poor.

None of the crimes against humanity listed above, or the many more caused by Osborne, were mentioned in the email at all. One in every 200 people, that we know of, have been killed in myriad ways by the austerity cooked up by Osborne, and maintained by others since, long after it became clear that austerity is deadly. One can only conclude that the writer thought those souls didn’t matter and knew readers wouldn’t care a jot either. Or the deaths of one in 200 aren’t even on their radar.

After all, it’s never talked about, even by opposition parties. There are no consequences, just rich rewards. And it only happened to ordinary people like you and me. We weren’t invited to the celebrations.