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Fruits of Fresh Start  - Austerity and Corruption

With the unveiling of a fast tracked budget - setting out the general thrust of Executive policy over the next period - the  essential elements of the Fresh Start agreement have already become clear.  These can be described as austerity and  patronage.  
 
Austerity is the easier one to identify as there is a understanding of the things it involves such as public spending cuts, wage  restraint, benefit reductions and privatisation.  More generally austerity can be understood as a shift of resources from the poorest to the wealthiest in society.  The Fresh Start agreement contains all these elements.  The first budget in the wake of the agreement starts to put them into effect.  
 
Over the next five years it is projected that public spending will be reduced in real terms by over five per cent. In the coming financial year the Department of Education is facing a cash  reduction of £72m (or 3.8 per cent) in its budget.  Running alongside this is a redundancy programme for teachers.  The minister has also recently announced an additional scheme, which under the guise of bringing the newly qualified into the profession, will replace older teachers with those on the lowest pay grade.  This double pronged attack not only reduces the number of teaching staff also puts downward pressure on the wages and working conditions of teachers.
 
Another department facing huge cuts is Culture, Arts and Leisure.  In the coming financial year its budget is facing cuts of up to 10 per cent which could result in the closure of a museum, reductions to library book stock and opening hours, the closure of community based arts organisations and the end of funding for some sports.
 
Even in Health, which is supposedly a protected area, there are growing pressures as service provision fails to keep pace with increasing demands.  One of the big financial pressures on health is privatisation.  It has advanced significantly in recent years - through private finance schemes and outsourcing - and looks set to accelerate in the future.  An example of this was the recent announcement that £40m was being made available to tackle lengthening waiting lists. Though headlined as a good news story the bulk of the funding was to go to private healthcare providers.       
 
Another example of austerity in the health sector is the ongoing pay freeze (real term pay cuts) for staff.  In the last few weeks this has seen the Executive impose a one off payment on nurses.  That the nurses pay claim amounted to just 1 per cent or £5 per week - the same as that offered to staff in Britain - demonstrates how draconian the Executive’s approach has been.  On this issue it is actually to the right of the Tories!  
 
What was also notable about the nurses modest pay claim was the hostility it provoked from politicians.  The statement by DUP MLA Emma Pengelly that the Executive “would be bankrupt ” if it were to meet such demands typified this.  Coming from an MLA who had so recently been co-opted into the Assembly then promoted to minister after working as a special advisor (collecting a £40,000 “severance” payment in the    process) serves to highlight the contrasting fortunes of workers and the feather-bedded political class at Stormont. 
 
This connects with the second essential element of Fresh Start which is patronage. It operates at an individual level, whether that be MLAs or other political hacks and hangers on such as those who have been nominated by the DUP to replace the UUP nominees who were dumped off various public bodies.  
 
But more fundamentally it operates at a institutional level where resources are allocated to satisfy various community claims.  So it was no coincidence that the Fresh Start was followed by high profile announcements on various pet projects for the parties. The most obvious one of these, which had already been flagged up by Sinn Fein in the negotiations, was announcement of funding for the A5 Derry to Enniskillen.  There is also funding for the police, prison and fire service training college at Desertcreat in Co Tyrone, the predicted cost of which has spiralled from £80 million to £157m.  The sports minister announced another push on the Casement Park project with a senior official taking charge of the GAA’s new planning application.  Also relating to west Belfast was the granting of planning permission for housing on the former industrial site that hosted the Visteon factory.
 
In economic terms most of these schemes are completely  unviable. They distort public spending and fail to address real needs. However, in the system of sectarian patronage that underpins the political settlement in the north they make perfect sense.  What Fresh Start makes clearer than any previous agreement is that austerity and sectarianism go hand in hand.  
 

 


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