The UK’s austerity policy is ideologically driven and is aimed at diverting finance from the poor to the rich under the pretext of the economic crisis, writer John Wight told RT.

Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne is announcing billions more in the government spending cuts while austerity measures are already biting for many people across the UK.
Osborne claimed that British economy is “out of intensive care.” RT asked Wight if he thinks that is really the case.

John Wight: Only in a fine world of the Tory party would that be the case. The country’s seen 1.1 percent growth in the last three years – the worst level of growth in this country’s economy over the last 100 years. That can by no means be considered a success. 

RT: Who's going to be the most affected by these latest cuts?

JW: Clearly the poor are going to be hit harder as a continuation of the mass experiment in human despair, which this coalition government has cheated to describe as an economic policy. It is ideologically driven and we see economics of the madhouse. And it is done with the objective of affecting the transference of wealth from the poor to the rich under the pretext of an economic crisis – not reason, it’s a pre-text. The economic crisis which hit this country in 2007 was their economic 9/11.

RT: Official figures show the deficit has been growing last year, despite previous cuts. So is there any point to them?

JW: Well, that’s what I’ve just said: this is ideologically driven. If you are considering these policies on the basis of economics, then clearly it is completely irrational. The US economist Paul Krugman lately described it as “a medieval doctor draining a patient’s blood,” and when that doesn’t work, draining more blood from the patient. This is entirely appropriate to describe this economic policy, this austerity. Austerity historically has been discredited. It doesn’t work in times of recession. At a time of recession the government needs to spend more to reintroduce the man which is contracted as profits stumble. And you must place this along the fact that the Office of Financial Statistics, the government’s own body set up to monitor these things, came up with a figure in April which stated that in the final quarter of last year UK businesses, excluding banks, were sitting on 318 billion pounds of surplus. And that money is money we need in the economy. They are not investing, they spend all the inducements from the government by the way of tax subsidies and tax cuts for the rich that the government has given to the rich over the last three years. 

RT: What do you think is the best way that the government can fight the deficit?

JW: It has to start investing in the real economy. It has to start directing banks to lend rather than pleading with banks, especially banks in which we own a majority share, such as RBS. The government should take over RBS’s operations and start lending in the interest of the real economy. The economy needs it. We have a housing crisis in the country, it’s the worst in the world, it’s a scandal. And we need to start investing in affordable homes. Rather than punishing the poor for being poor we should start actually diverting money from the rich to the poor, as befitting a civilized society. 

RT: Osborne announced cuts to the police budget. Do you think that will affect the crime rate?

JW: Well, not really, because based on what we know now a lot of criminals are actually in the police. They are also sitting in the boardrooms and in the House of Lords. It may have an effect. But I think they’ve consolidated the police and taken away the regional power from the police. It is yet to be seen. But as I say the cuts in the police budget are minimal compared to the cuts for the poor in terms of benefit cuts and so on.

The MI6 building, which is the SIS (The Secret Intelligence Service) headquarter, is pictured at Vauxhall Cross in central London (Reuters/Toby Melville)

 UK intelligence will receive the largest budget boost in the latest government review of public spending, reports the Telegraph. The funds increase follows civil rights uproar at UK involvement in the NSA spy scandal.

British Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne will present a review of public spending for 2015-16 on Wednesday with a view to cutting the deficit. While, funding for most government bodies will be slashed, MI6, MI5 and the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) will receive a bonus of up to $154 million.

The increase of 3 percent in overall funding for intelligence organizations, which already have a budget of $2.9 billion, will make them top of the UK government’s spending agenda, overtaking the health service, education and military.

The institutions that will suffer most at the hands of the $17 billion austerity cuts include the Business department, the Culture department, the Home Office and the Justice department. The Ministry of Defense, meanwhile, faces cuts of around $1.5 billion, with the reassurance that this will not stipulate a decrease in front-line troop numbers.

Recently, UK intelligence has come into the firing line after it was discovered the GCHQ has access to a massive global network of communications, storing calls, Facebook posts and internet histories. GCHQ also shares this data with the NSA.

The extent of the spy program is such that whistleblower Edward Snowden, who originally leaked the information to the Guardian, called it “worse than the US.” Rights groups were up in arms about the sheer scope of the network able to monitor 600 million ‘telephone events’ a day.

“This appears to be dangerously close to, if not exactly, the centralized database of all our internet communications, including some content, that successive Governments have ruled out and parliament has never legislated for,” said Nick Pickles of UK privacy campaign group Big Brother Watch.

GCHQ, for its part, has defended its sweeping eavesdropping network, saying it had always been “scrupulous” in complying with the law.

In answer to the public uproar to the sweeping surveillance programs, UK Foreign Minister, William Hague spoke out in support of the spy network and data sharing with the US. He said that both the US and the UK had acted in compliance with the law and used information only “to protect citizens’ freedoms.”

 "We should have nothing but pride in the unique and indispensable intelligence-sharing relationship between Britain and the United States," Hague said in his speech at the Ronald Reagan Library on Tuesday afternoon. He went on to call the US-UK alliance a “bastion of freedom.”

Moreover, he stressed that such surveillance was “indispensable” to combat the growing threat of terrorism.

Following the brutal murder of 25-year-old soldier Drummer Lee Rigby by Islamist extremist in Woolwich in May, UK intelligence has come under increased scrutiny. There were suggestions that MI5 and MI6 could have done more to prevent the death of Rigby after it was found that one of the alleged killers, Michael Adebolajo, had already been flagged by UK intelligence as a potential threat.

Twelve US-based brigades will be deactivated by 2017 to fit a slashed military budget. Despite cuts of over 80,000 troops, top brass assures that combat readiness will not suffer because the remaining brigades will have more battalions and firepower.

Army Chief of Staff General Ray Odierno announced Tuesday plans have been approved to inactivate 10 Brigade Combat Teams (BCTs) with headquarters on the US territory. This comes under the $487 billion military budget cuts mandated in 2011 by the Budget Control Act, a fourth round of military budget cuts since President Barack Obama entered office.

It has been announced that the final cut of the service in five years is expected to be 80,000 service personnel, most of which is to come through attrition, Orieno said giving the difference from a wartime high of 570,000 soldiers to 490,000 by the end of 2017.

Overall drop in the number of BCT will be from current 45 to 33, as the US Army plans to return to about the same number of enlisted servicemen it had before the Iraq war started, it was announced at General Odierno’s press conference. 

A standard American infantry BCT currently has roughly 3,500 servicemen. The announced cuts, which are mainly to affect the active-duty force, could also be regarded as reorganization of the military, which has been conducting wars for the last 12 years. The Army Reserve will remain at 205,000 soldiers and the state-based National Guard militia will lose 8,000 soldiers, dropping to 350,000 from 358,000. 

‘Increasing tooth-to-tail ratio’

General Odierno explained that whereas the number of BCT is decreasing, the number of battalions in them will grow from present two to three thus increasing the Army’s “tooth-to-tail ratio.” Besides an additional battalion, which is usually 600-800 soldiers, BCTs will have more engineers assigned. It is expected that remaining brigades would be somewhere close to 5,000 personnel instead of the today’s 3,500 servicemen and women.

 “We will add a third maneuver battalion and additional engineer and fires capability to each of our armor and infantry brigade combat teams in order to make them more lethal, more flexible and more agile,” Odierno said. 

Reportedly, the decision to beef up the number of servicemen in a BTC came as a recommendation from commanders with combat experience in Iraq and Afghanistan. In their view personnel proliferation will extend fighting capabilities of the brigades on a battlefield. In this way the impact on combat power will be minimized and the savings will be made at the expense of support units outside of BCT and logistics. 

 General Ray Odierno insists the cuts were thoroughly calculated after thousands of hours of planning, personnel interviews and simulated combat tests. Naturally, because the brigades are slashed for economic reasons, the final selection was based on cost and logistic effectiveness, required training resources, ranges, airspace and infrastructure, as well as local economic impacts once BCTs are gone, Odierno said.

“I know in the local communities it will have its impact,” Odierno told reporters on Tuesday. “But we've done our best to reach out to them so they understand what the impacts are. We've tried to make it as small an impact as possible for as many communities as we could,” he said.

The deactivation of 10 BCTs comes as the first round of military reduction, because if the Congress does not reconsider austerity in military spending, the number of service personnel will be reduced even lower than the planned 490,000 troops.

A member of the Armed Services Committee, Democrat US Congressman Adam Smith warned that, “The real hazard to military effectiveness will persist as long as Congress fails to act on sequestration. If sequestration is not removed, then more extensive force structure changes will need to be made.”

The chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Howard P. McKeon, promised his panel “will carefully examine the implications of this initial restructuring, but we all must understand that this is only the tip of the iceberg, much deeper cuts are still to come.”

Whether they will be accompanied by same ‘tooth-to-tail ratio increases’ remains to be seen. 

BCT Reduction by military installation

Fort Bliss, Texas – infantry BCT

Fort Bragg, North Carolina – airborne infantry BCT

Fort Campbell, Kentucky – infantry BCT

Fort Carson, Colorado – armor BCT

Fort Drum, New York – infantry BCT

Fort Hood, Texas – armor BCT

Fort Knox, Kentucky – infantry BCT

Fort Riley, Kansas – infantry BCT

Fort Stewart, Georgia – armor BCT

Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington – Stryker BCT