Dear Mr Cameron and Mr Milliband
The eyes of the world will fall on Brazil in June 2014. If you can fit it in amongst PMQs and cabinet meetings, I would recommend you come for a visit. It is a truly wonderful country with a lot going for it. As well as watching the inevitable failure of 11 blokes dressed in white shirts, I think you would also find there are some interesting lessons for both of you in taking forward the country which I will return to next year.
Starting with you Mr C. You like to talk about your utopian vision of the “Big Society” towards which you want Great Britain to move. My worry is that your idea of Big Society means “tiny government and let society step in to clean up the mess”. Well after 2 years of living here, I think Brazil may be the epitome of “Small Society” and it certainly is a mess. I’m not about to make direct comparisons between Britain and Brazil nor suggest that this is the way that Britain is heading if your policies continue as they are, but I do think there are some things worth reflecting upon.
Brazil has a “tiny government”. Or to be more precise, it has a huge monolithic government, dragging the country backwards like a chain around its neck, but the output and effectiveness of the public services which the government provides is tiny. You hope to trim back the fat that was built up by years of Labour’s excesses, to leave a lean efficient public sector which costs taxpayers the minimum amount possible and yet provides the bare minimum of essential public services. Undoubtedly, a lot of cuts are necessary and perfectly feasible. In Brazil there is a disastrous combination of inefficiency, poor spending priorities and corruption meaning that huge government spending results in unimaginably poor public services. The observations I want to make are regarding the effect of such “tiny government” on society (big or otherwise).
As you very well know, Brazil is extremely (and famously) unequal. There is a very small minority of the population who enjoy a very high standard of living (depending on how closely you define that term). Luxury imported cars, huge houses with swimming pools, teams of staff cleaning and cooking for them, top class restaurants, endless health checks, sports, recreation and high quality education for their children. But my god do they pay for it. None of the above is provided by the government’s public services. Using the astonishingly high salaries that they earn (often in the public sector), they must pay for private health provision (they wouldn’t dream of using government hospitals), private schools (they would never trust government schools with their children’s education) and their children’s recreational activities take place safely behind the high walls of their secure gated housing and sports clubs. Once they have paid for all of this, they become bitter about the extortionate taxes they pay on the imported foreign goods they buy. About the high level of income tax they pay with terrible public services in return. About the “wasteful government spending on layabouts” who receive the country’s famous ‘Bolsa Familia’ payments (a conditional cash transfer scheme providing small cash payments to poor parents in exchange for their children being vaccinated and attending school each day). The result is that this section of society is completely excluded from the majority, and often bitter and un-caring towards them. Why should they look after the interests of others when they already have to pay so much to look after their own? Indeed, their bitterness and self-interest turns to tax avoidance and corruption, further fuelling the problem.
The remainder of Brazil’s society has to deal with the day to day reality of “tiny government”. Their children attend state schools which languish in the world league tables of education standards, dooming them to low-skilled work and wages. They spend their lives struggling to earn enough to pay for the essentials. When they get ill, they are left with no option but the poorly funded and equipped state health service, sitting in dirty crumbling hospitals for hours or days. They live in neighbourhoods which either are favelas (ilegal constructed housing, often with no government services) or which would appear to your eyes to be favelas. Rubbish piles up in the streets, roads and pavements are falling to pieces, housing standards are low and crime (or fear of crime) is ever-present. Their children are either left to run the gauntlet of recreation activity on the streets or they are kept behind closed doors to play on their computer consoles. Somehow, perhaps by combination of the wonderful weather, a genetic predisposition or maybe just ignorance about any other alternative, they mostly remain admirably happy and spend their lives content to put food on the table, beer in the fridge and football on their televisions. Lacking the education and means for social mobility, some of them inevitably turn to the easy option of crime. There are plenty of targets who occasionally have to stray out from behind those high walls. Others turn to drugs, normally crack cocaine, to provide a quick and easy fix.
Of course it is not quite as black and white as this, but the net result of “tiny government” is a “tiny society”. Those who have the money, pay for the services which the government fails to provide, and bitterness, self-interest and corruption becomes endemic. Those who don’t have money, are stuck to cope with what is left over.
As you for you Mr M: I would urge you not to forget what has happened in Brazil. Where government largess and inefficiency (yes, and corruption) means that lots of money in equals very little public services out. Where poorly prioritised spending gives free places at state universities (the only ones which are anything approaching world-class) to the brightest children who almost inevitably come from the richest families which can afford private schools. There is always a need for rigorous accountability and improvement of public spending and to strive for efficiency savings. However, as I have described to Mr C. above, the acceptability of any government cuts must be the standard of services which is provided (rather than any supposed indicators). Yes, you can reduce the number of police, doctors and teachers as long as you can guarantee an appropriate level of security, health care provision and educational performance.
Brazil has numerous and many different problems to Britain and (as I said before) it can not be compared as a direct example of what happens when you trim back to a tiny government. But my observations while I have been living here have led me to worry about a tipping point of poor public services leading to societal changes which might be very difficult to reverse. A point where public services have been peeled back so far that the fabric of society (and high living standards) begins to break down. When police services are diminished to the point that the rich ‘put up walls’ and the poor are left to the wolves. When health services are so under-funded that private provision is the only option for those who can. When public authorities can no longer maintain pleasant public spaces, recreational facilities, museums and cultural institutions. Perhaps “Big Society” will step in and the rich, seeing the mess around them, will give more money to charities and NGOs to help the rest. Or perhaps they will become bitter, corrupt and self-interested and leave the rest to languish.
Yours sincerely
Tom Wood
PS. If you pop over before February, you can kip on my sofa.
brickingit 