If the UK papers are to be believed, the biggest upside of Rachel Reeves’ latest budget is that Keir Starmer is safe from a leadership challenge… until May. Tough business, this. But the public is not wrong to be disappointed by this government’s crushing orthodoxy. Is this the brightest future we can imagine?
“So much of our economic model is limited in its horizons,” Eleanor Shearer writes in this week’s openDemocracy newsletter, adding that “an honest accounting of our economy must acknowledge that it has become extractive rather than productive”. Economics is the art of euphemism, where dry phrases such as “fiscal prudence” and “trimming outlays” mask the crushing impoverishment these policies enact on ordinary people.
And so our lead story this week lays out the reality of austerity, examining the devastation that Javier Milei’s “chainsaw economics” have inflicted on Argentina. The crisis, openDemocracy’s Latin America reporter, Angelina de los Santos, found on a recent trip to Buenos Aires, is most visible in the country’s spiking rates of anxiety, mental illness and suicide, which is now its leading cause of violent death.
The situation should be a stark warning for the UK’s government. But, just as Angelina found in Argentina, Disabled people here often bear the brunt of government cuts. Writing for us this week, Mikey Erhardt from Disability Rights UK said Labour’s “plan for the budget appears to have been to let the Disabled community take the fall for the state’s poor finances”.
Meanwhile, Erin Mansell from the Women’s Budget Group looks at whether Reeves’ budget delivers for women, who “disproportionately contend with soaring living costs – juggling unpaid care, low wages and rising household bills”, and in our podcast, Danny Sriskandarajah from the New Economics Foundation discusses how the key to nurturing a genuine democracy lies in supporting people’s movements.
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In Milei’s Argentina, austerity economics manifests as a mental health crisis • Angelina de los Santos
In her nine years at the Laura Bonaparte national mental health hospital in Buenos Aires City, Julieta Chevallier has seen suffering widen and deepen.
“When people finally come to see us, it’s usually because they’ve reached the end of their rope,” the social worker told openDemocracy. “What we used to see has now grown sharper, heavier: deeper hopelessness, more suicide attempts, more violence, more acute crises, and a constant anxiety about the economy – even about something as basic as securing food.
“People who had managed to stop using drugs after partially rebuilding their lives with support from social programs are falling back into old patterns.”
At the José A. Esteves neuropsychiatric hospital in Buenos Aires Province, director María Rosa Riva offers a similar warning.
“People are arriving utterly shattered,” said Riva, who has worked at the hospital since 1997 and led it since 2020...
This budget shows Labour government is still stuck in short-termism • Eleanor Shearer
Halloween may have been almost a month ago, but there was a ghost haunting Labour’s autumn budget: the spectre of the bond markets.
In her speech in the Commons, chancellor Rachel Reeves referred to Liz Truss’s disastrous mini-budget in 2022 as some kind of cautionary tale, and much of the post-budget analysis in the press focused on the market reactions, underscoring the fact that it has since become received wisdom that a government is only ever one fiscally irresponsible decision away from crisis.
This is an extension of the idea that governments are like households and must practice thrift or face ruin. Just as a mortgage provider would be loath to lend to you if your outgoings regularly outstripped your earnings, so it seems intuitive that the bond markets would baulk at governments that outspend their means.
The analogy is a fallacy, though. Reeves is not dealing with an overdue credit card bill; government debt, borrowing and spending doesn’t function like consumer debt, borrowing and spending...
Yet another government has failed to deliver for Disabled people • Mikey Erhardt
We are living in an era of sickness caused by political choices, and Disabled people in particular are paying the price. Many of us are getting incredibly ill under the weight of poor working conditions, precarious housing and overstretched health services.
The fault lies with successive governments that have chosen profit over people. Yet another chancellor just failed to acknowledge this, squandering another chance to make meaningful improvements to our lived realities.
This year's budget should have been a reset, a move away from the years of decline that have left millions of us facing exhaustive barriers to get a GP appointment, worrying about being late for work because of our unreliable and underfunded public transport, and freezing in old, mouldy homes.
Instead, Labour’s Rachel Reeves used her budget speech yesterday to make misjudged jokes and jabs at political rivals, and spent as much time talking about the alleged rising cost of social security as she did her headline policy, the removal of the punitive two-child benefit cap...
Did Rachel Reeves’ ‘cost of living budget’ deliver for women? • Erin Mansell
Rachel Reeves promised a cost-of-living budget, and on some measures, she delivered.
The chancellor used her budget speech this week to announce an end to the two-child limit on benefits, take levies off energy bills, freeze NHS prescription charges and rail fares in England, and raise the minimum wage. All of this will make some difference, especially for women, who disproportionately contend with soaring living costs – juggling unpaid care, low wages and rising household bills.
But in other areas, the Labour government did not go far enough to reduce other hardships that are felt particularly acutely by women. Reeves failed to introduce measures that could have alleviated homelessness, addressed some of the inequalities in the tax system, and led to a redistribution of the UK’s wealth.
Lifting the two-child limit on Universal Credit is unquestionably a landmark step towards tackling child poverty. Since its introduction in 2017, the policy has locked families into hardship. Campaigners have for years argued that punishing children for the number of siblings they have makes neither moral nor economic sense, given the billions that child poverty costs every year to those children’s life chances and the impact on public services...
🎧 Populism's silver lining • In Solidarity
Good news!
Our 2023 documentary series, Disciples: The Cult of TB Joshua, received a special citation at the GIJC25’s Global Shining Light Awards. "The investigation unearthed crimes of unimaginable scale and severity for a man once regarded as a prospective saint,” which included deeply disturbing instances of sexual, financial, spiritual abuse, predominantly against women.
openDemocracy's additional reporting led to the shutdown of Emmanuel TV, the YouTube channel of TB Joshua's church. This was after we had presented our analysis of over 50 "abusive" videos that violated the channel's hate speech policies.
The years-long investigation, in partnership with BBC Africa Eye, was made possible by the tireless efforts of our 50:50 team which publishes critical and in-depth coverage of gender, sexuality and social justice – worldwide: Lydia Namibiru, Margaret Coker, Soita Khatondi Wepukhulu, Rael Ombuor and Madeleine Jane
