The Idea of ‘Fair Austerity’ is a Theological Oxymoron

By Chris Allen

Last week, the Bishop of Liverpool was reported to have launched a ‘scathing attack on government cuts programme’ (The Independent 18th January 2013).  The Bishop was speaking from a conference that he co-organised on the theme of ‘Austerity with Fairness’.  Given the current dearth of critical voices in this ‘age of austerity’, the Bishop’s intervention is welcome.  However, I would argue that his intervention constitutes a starting point for the wider debate that now needs to take place rather than ‘the point’ of that debate.  

The Starting Point:

First and foremost we need to be clear that Bishop James’ intervention does not constitute a ‘scathing criticism’ of the government’s cuts programme.  What he actually said was that some parts of the country are sustaining cuts “that do not feel fair”.  In other words, he was not attacking the government cuts programme, as such.  He was, rather, suggesting that the manner in which it is being geographically implemented is unfair.  Specifically, his point is that the cuts programme is impacting unfairly on the cities represented at his conference.  

It is noteworthy that Bishop James was not alone is expressing this sentiment at the ‘Austerity with Fairness’ conference.  He was supported by other delegates, such as the Leader of Newcastle City Council who was quoted as saying “I am not denying the need to deal with government spending which needs to be reduced”.  Indeed, Jerome Taylor, the author of the article about the ‘Austerity with Fairness’ conference in The Independent, reports that “Multiple council leaders speaking at the conference said they recognized the national debt needed to be dealt with, but they pleaded with central government to ensure that each area of the country reduces their budgets at a fair and equal rate”.

Getting to the Point

It goes without saying that Bishop Jones’ intervention represents a welcome rhetorical challenge to unfairness in a society that, at times, appears to have lost all sense of fairness.  However, it did not satisfy everybody.  Some people responded to the ‘Austerity with Fairness’ conference by occupying the council chamber at Liverpool Town Hall.  Their reasons for this action are very clear:  According to the Liverpool Echo the occupiers were driven by anger and, in the words of one of the occupiers, a commitment “to fight these cuts”.   

So where does this take us?   The occupiers were articulating a radical alternative argument to the one being made by Bishop Jones at the ‘Austerity with Fairness’ conference:  Contra Bishop Jones, they are not seeking a fairer regional distribution of austerity.  The point that they wanted to make, to Bishop Jones and other conference delegates, was that they oppose austerity per se.  This raises the question of whether they have a point and, if so, what implications their point might have for the position that the Bishop has taken on austerity. 

Is the Bishop saying anything new?

A key point that the occupiers might wish to make is that Bishop Jones’ intervention differs little in content from arguments that are already being aired in government.  For instance, a recent Liberal Democrat conference carried a resolution that binds Lib Dem Ministers and MPs to ‘ensuring fairness in a time of austerity’ on a region by region basis. 

This ‘fair’ approach to cuts that the Liberal Democrats’ advocate clearly constitutes the pragmatic response of a political party that accepts the status quo and seeks to work within it.  It may also reflect the pragmatic political position that the Bishop has taken (publicly if not privately) towards the government’s programme of austerity.   Yet when we look to religious leaders and the church we do not ask for pragmatism.   And this is where we encounter difficulty. 

The issue that we might take with the ‘Austerity with Fairness’ argument is that it (pragmatically or otherwise) accepts neo-liberal capitalism and the harm it commits.  Thus the questions Bishop Jones raises are only about the political management and geography of suffering.   The purpose of his very public and presumably pragmatic intervention last week was to ensure that pain and suffering are more evenly distributed.   He did not publicly raise issues about the political and economic origins of austerity and suffering – even though this may well also be one of his concerns.  

This raises some important theological issues for us to consider.  If God is present in our very being, and is the ground of that being, then we cannot be pragmatic about the effects that austerity has on human beings.  To allow austerity (in whatever measure: great or small and however evenly distributed) to eat into the lifeblood of fellow human beings is to allow it to attack the integrity of those human beings and, it follows, God. 

It seems to me that this necessitates a broader response from the Church. The core responsibility of the church must be to protect the integrity of God.  Therefore the church has a responsibility to confront those things that compromise the integrity of God.  This means that it is not enough, in itself, to call for a redistribution of the burden of suffering so that everybody gets the same, or thereabouts, since this does not protect the integrity of God. The church must surely go further than this. 

I would argue that the church needs to theologically confront neo-liberal capitalism.  This is because a key trait of neo-liberal capitalism is that it necessarily exploits the powerless in order to generate wealth for the global elite that benefit from it.  Neo-liberal capitalism has long visited suffering and misery on the worlds’ poor in the name of this programme of ‘wealth creation’.

There raises two issues.   First, we should note that the debate about ‘austerity with fairness’ that occurred last week spoke only about its effects ‘right here, right now’ in cities, such as Liverpool.  In other words it spoke about the austerity visited on select British cities that are, only now, receiving their dose of neo-liberal misery and suffering having enjoyed the longest orgy of needless consumption in living memory.  But surely we need to think beyond this ‘here and now’ place in which we, ourselves, are positioned as the core of the concern.  We need to think about the integrity of human life per se.   

This brings me to the second point.  When Bishop Jones suggests that it is important that “the wealth we do have is shared” I wonder whether there is a broader point to be made.  There is a need to ask theological questions about the neo-liberal system of global capitalism that creates this ‘wealth’:  What is ‘wealth’ anyway?  How is this wealth created?  By whom?  For whom?  And at what human cost?  If we, as a church, are not prepared to confront neo-liberal capitalism with our theological questions, on behalf of global humanity, then surely this constitutes a failure to protect the integrity of life and therefore God.  In other words, it would speak of a church that was apparently willing to sell out God to wealth and power.  And we know what the Gospels say about that. 

A New Vision

There are other good reasons for suggesting that we, as a Church, should respond to the government’s austerity agenda in a more radical way.  Jesus was not one for accepting the status quo nor was he a pragmatist.  He saw beyond things and asked other people to do the same.  Equally, we want religious leaders and a church that follows in the footsteps of Jesus such that we are enabled to see beyond where we currently are, with the help of a Christian vision of how things might be.  This brings me to a lovely quotation that came to my attention only yesterday from Andrew Cohen.  With Martin Luther King as the topic, the quotation reminds us that we can produce the conditions for radical change by theologically equipping ourselves to see the possibilities that exist beyond the pragmatic necessities of the immediate: 

“Visionaries are those rare and inspired individuals who see great promise and imminent potentials for human consciousness and culture that most of us haven't even begun to imagine yet. They see far beyond the present to a future that has yet to be created. For them, in a sense, that future already exists because their awareness is illuminated by inspiring and compelling images of the possible.  Unless we, like Dr. King and the other great spiritually awakened beings, invoke that same capacity to see and intuit beyond where we have already come, it is unlikely that our lives will be expressions of anything other than the status quo”. 

So, many of us have sound theological reasons for wanting a church response that goes further than the message emerging from the ‘Austerity with Fairness’ conference last week.   We do not seek a redistribution of austerity or wealth because we believe that both compromise the integrity of God.  We might instead look to the example of visionaries, such as David Sheppard, for inspiration on how to proceed.  During the ‘Winter of Discontent’ David Sheppard criticized both Business Leaders and Trade Unions for their parochialism.  He told Trade Unions that their responsibility was not to stand up for the sectional interests of their members.  They had a moral responsibility to stand for all working people and for a just world.  We might now ask ourselves, as a church, what we will now do to bring about the same just world.  This demands that we do not define our goal with reference to the sectional interests of select cities.  We need to stand up for the integrity of God’s creation.

Chris Allen