A year ago, no one was predicting the level of cuts—25 percent across all departments bar health—the country now faces. Even fewer were predicting such measures were politically survivable.
Yet, even as the coalition government, counting its 100th day in office on Thursday, announces cuts and measures that most other countries balk at, the sense of shock, numbness, and fear is mixed with a level of acceptance that few could have imagined.
This time last year, then Prime Minister Gordon Brown was still being lauded for his role internationally in resolving the banking crisis.
The freak waves rolling in after the global financial storm were the last chance for Gordon Brown, who had made his name as a talented chancellor—the U.K.’s finance minister—under Tony Blair in times of economic prosperity.
His popularity as PM floundering after a series of errors, as others waited tentatively to take his place, Brown began his last-ditch paddle. He hit the wave just right, and the political momentum of the global stimulus packages arguably carried him through the last couple of years of his premiership, giving him the political clout to see off challengers.
At home, he was rather mercilessly mocked for a slip of the tongue in which he declared he had “saved the world” (he meant to say “saved the banks”). Dubbing him Flash Gordon, the ever-mischievous British press offered Brown little of the praise that he gained abroad. But the banking crisis was nevertheless his hundred-year storm that many argued saved his premiership.
Meanwhile, would-be-prime minister David Cameron was warning against the financial stimulus, which so many around the global held in reverence; it was almost impossible to imagine Cameron would catch the political momentum offered to Brown.
But waiting deeper in the swell, Cameron may have quietly and perhaps unwittingly caught his own monster.
The most divisive issue in the closely fought May election was when to cut the gargantuan public deficit, swollen by recent bank-bailouts.
Cameron argued it should be as early as possible. Brown, later.
Prominent financial figures supported both sides, and in the tense election run-up Cameron appeared to have gained little traction, in the end falling just short of the majority needed to form a government.
But top big-wave riders don’t catch their Leviathans alone; these days they are towed in by a jet ski. Cameron too had a tow-in, in the form of Nick Clegg and the third-place Liberal Democrat Party. The coalition government, hastily created in the five days following the election, gave Cameron the freedom to embark on radical reforms too daring to undertake under the banner of one party.
Then, Cameron’s wave began to grow and swell with a new vigor; the national debt was upon us as Greece and Spain wobbled.
As the crisis loomed larger and more real, Cameron was just rising to his feet.
Now after just 100 days, the coalition government has had an epic ride, with radical reforms and massive cuts imbued with a momentum and justification few could have predicted.
Like Brown too, there are now suggestions that Cameron is leading the way internationally with his extreme austerity measures as the issue of national debt looms on the horizon for many nations.
But Cameron’s wave is not an easy one to ride. It is a gnarly, unpredictable beast that could slam him and the country into the reef at any moment, no matter how well he rides it. That’s why so many countries have not followed Britain into the water just yet; they are standing on the shore, watching to learn from our mistakes.
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