By insisting that he will spend "whatever money is needed" on flood relief, Cameron has undermined his claim that austerity means we must tolerate rising homelessness and poverty.
David Cameron addresses the media during a press conference at 10 Downing Street yesterday.
It was just a few years ago that David Cameron was warning that Britain was "nearly bankrupt". The claim was, of course, nonsense. With its own currency, its own monetary policy and the ability to borrow at historically low rates, the UK was never at risk of insolvency. In extremis, the Bank of England could simply buy up government debt (as it has done through quantitative easing).
But the suggestion that Britain was bankrupt, or at least close to being so (Cameron often casually alternated between the two), was an immensely valuable means of justifying the coalition's austerity programme. Since 2010, Cameron has repeatedly invoked the deficit and the "tough choices" required to reduce it when confronted with the social and economic harm caused by the cuts to welfare and other government programmes.
Britain today is a country in which more than half a million people have turned to food banks since April 2013, in which homelessness has risen by 34 per cent since 2010, and in which, for the first time ever, there are more people from working families living in poverty (6.7 million) than from workless and retired ones (6.3 million). But Cameron has been able to justify all of this pain by presenting it as the tough medicine required to clear the country's debts. As yesterday's YouGov poll showed, 54 per cent of voters believe the cuts are "necessary", compared to just 30 per cent who believe they are unnecessary, a gap that has remained consistent throughout this parliament.
But yesterday, during his Downing Street press conference on the floods, Cameron suddenly abandoned this austere message. "Money," he declared, "is no object in this relief effort. Whatever money is needed, we will spend it." Many voters, not least those who have lost their homes to the floods, will appreciate the sentiment, but it prompts the question: if money is no object in the case of flooding, why is it an object in the case of homelessness, unemployment and poverty? Indeed, had he adopted such a generous stance from the start, and not cut real-terms spending on flood defences (what a false economy that has proved to be), Britain would have been far better prepared for the deluge than it was.
During the same press conference, after being challenged to divert money from the foreign aid budget to flood relief schemes, he replied: "I don’t think it’s needed to go for the aid budget because we will make available the money that’s needed here in Britain. We are a wealthy country, we have a growing economy. If money is needed for clean-up, money will be made available."
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