grotesque but fair

Dear David Cameron

Nobel prize-winning economists have criticised both the necessity and the wisdom of the cuts your government has proposed. They are not panicked by our debt, they are panicked by your response to it. They know that UK debt has grown as a result of systemic problems mostly caused by a financial sector so overblown that it can hold the country to ransom and offload the cost of risk to the UK taxpayer, while pocketing the profits. You supported the policies which led to the bubble of greed, and you supported the bailout with tax-payer's money when the bubble inevitably burst, plunging the world into recession – and this country into debt.

You know as well as those Nobel-prize economists that the reason for the levels of debt are unconnected with public spending, which is smaller than in many other European nations, and was lower in the UK for most of the 2000s than at any point since the 1960s. Yet you lie to the public that this is the root of the problem.

You try to tell us that we are too impoverished a country to be able to afford to look after the long-term disabled, the homeless, the jobless. You brainwash the public into thinking that it is the fault of those people that they are disabled and homeless and jobless – and that if you remove everything from them, they will suddenly discover their inner resources and sense of responsibility and apply for a job cleaning toilets for £3.50 an hour.

And you know - or you should do - that for a millionaire to lose a few extra thousand pounds a year – or even several hundred thousand pounds a year - is not to be compared with a 2-child family on £10,000 a year losing a few hundred. The first will barely notice: who needs that many millions anyway? The second will have to make another sacrifice, for which her children will suffer. A real sacrifice - such as not being able to afford to buy new gym shoes for the child whose feet have grown too quickly. Or not being able to send the other child on a school trip. Or having to move to smaller rented accommodation further away from friends and school, and putting the teenage girl and her younger brother into the same room to sleep, study, and socialise.

Do you know what it is like not to be able to buy a child gym shoes? Or what it is like for the child to have to make an excuse week after week, about having forgotten his gym shoes, because he is embarrassed to admit he has none? Do you know what is like to be unable to study for your GCSEs because your younger brother is asleep, or listening to music, or having a tantrum in the bedroom you both share? Or what it is like to be bullied because you look 'poor' and others in your class have all the latest in technology and fashion? Or what it is like to teach a class of children who haven't slept and haven't breakfasted, and don't have a private library and swimming pool at home to feed their curiosity and keep them physically in shape.

Of course you don't - and never will. But how can you claim to represent the people of this country, when you and your cabinet and most of your government have never had to face the struggles which ordinary people face every day? How can you talk about 'fairness', when you have no mortgage at all on your million pound property, and another is being bought for you by the taxpayer? How can you pretend to know what people will suffer, when the majority of your cabinet – and friends - are rich beyond imagination, and whose lives have never been constrained by anything they couldn't buy? And how can you ever know how difficult it is to find work, pay the monthly bills, move upwards, feed your children properly, look after them when they are sick, provide them with books and after-school activities - while living on an estate where unemployment is 50% or more, with an income barely enough to cover the bills, while sick, or disabled, or chronically depressed, with have no savings, and when the cost of a university education for the children is more than you could hope to earn – let alone to put aside - in 5 years.

You would never apply these policies of punishment to your own children, never use this concept of 'fairness' with them. You will help them up, so that they can move forward on their own when ready. You will provide a safety net, just in case one of them cannot cope in the cruel world you have created, and you will be prepared to spend a little more to buy a house – you'll be able to do that for each of them - so they can be close to their work or their friends or family, because that too is important for their self-esteem, their independence, and their chances to do even better in life.

The President of the BMA has criticised your use of the word 'fair' as grotesque. It is. Your cuts are grotesque, your PR is grotesque, and your hypocrisy and ideology are grotesque. Try living like the rest of the country, and you might see what he is on about. Try living on the median wage – or less; try making mortgage payments or paying rent; try sending your children to the local (secondary) school; try watching them being unable to find employment, not having family friends who can open back doors to lucrative jobs for them; try watching them humiliated by no work, forced to live on £65 / week, and then told to take a job in the local Tesco superstore because they turned down a job doing telesales the week before. Try not working yourself: you will see how demeaning and difficult it is. Try setting up a business with no savings or collateral, no confidence, no business contacts who will help you out.

Try all of that, and then come back and lecture us on fairness.

Yours

EK