The government is embarking on an unprecedented assault on the working class. Not having won a majority for its programme, and therefore with no mandate, it hit the ground running after the May 2010 election with a "shock and awe" strategy - a flurry of initiatives designed to dismantle and disorient any resistance and use the hiatus to fundamentally restructure the economy in the interests of the capitalist class.
Margaret Thatcher largely left such heavy reforms until the second term - with victories over Argentina in the Falklands and the miners at home under the Tories belt. But Cameron is trying to compress this into the first few years, with the privatisation of health service delivery, the destruction of comprehensive education and a slash and burn approach to wages, jobs and pensions.
It was hoped that the Lib Dem element would help carry the waverers. Its perceived mantle as radicals who stood for civil liberties, backed the welfare state and opposed the Iraq war would provide some reassurance that, as the Coalition spin doctors put it, "we are all in this together."
The only opposition came from a recently trounced Labour Party with a strategy limited to holding on and waiting for the Tories to screw up and bear a heavy responsibility for the systemic economic
In this context the Coalition government got off to a reasonable start. Opinion polls showed a majority passively accepting the cuts programme as inevitable.
But it all began to slip in the autumn with the revolt against the scrapping of the Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA) and the tripling of university fees. The militancy of thousands of students across the country quickly exposed the betrayal of the Liberal Democrats, who had been elected on a youth vote after guaranteeing they would oppose any fee increases.
This in turn helped to galvanise the left and a wing of the union movement, hitherto lacking in self confidence. Since then we have seen the beginning of struggle at a local level against the cuts and the TUC's 26 March demo as a new focal point.
Not long into the New Year, a hastily drawn up plan to sell off swathes of state owned forestry was largely mothballed after a protest movement mushroomed in a myriad of often remote rural communities. The government's health reform plans were at first met by a muted response by doctor's leaders, but there is now widespread anger as thousands of front line jobs face the axe.
Cameron's racist assault on multiculturalism, on the day of a march by the far right English Defence League in Luton, exposed the false claim that we are "all in it together". Divisions within the Coalition were highlighted by Tory leader Baronness Warsi's attack on Islamophobia shortly before and deputy prime minister Nick Clegg quite explicitly taking his distance from Cameron soon after.
Cameron's big idea, "the big society", has increasingly run into the sand as the voluntary groups that would be relied upon to deliver free welfare in place of the state have joined the resistance to cuts that threaten their very existence.
Deep unease within the ruling class itself was reflected in an unprecedented attack by the Judge's Council, who warned that legal aid cuts would force hundreds of thousands of litigants to represent With the Labour leadership supine and committed to austerity, it will take the development of a united, coherent left alternative expressed in organised political terms to change this themselves, slowing down the system, costing money and leading to an "inevitable" decline in the quality of justice.
The response to the Libyan revolt was marked by vacillation and indecision. The government was ridiculed by the right wing tabloids for its failure to match the efficient evacuation of British nationals achieved by other European states. Cameron then over-compensated by engaging in gung-ho talk of military intervention and had to be pulled back by the USA. The expression "you and whose army?" came to mind, particularly when crack British Special Forces were detained by farm guards in Libya. All this from a Prime Minister who, pre election, promised to break with Blairite "humanitarian interventionism". But it is the economy that has been the most significant testing ground. The Coalition's main calling card has been the need for a sharp reduction in the deficit through a major austerity drive, on the basis that only this would secure the confidence of the markets that has been so sorely lacking in Greece, Ireland and Portugal. After nearly a
7 * Britain year in power things aren't looking good. An initial return to growth in the middle part of 2010 was reversed in the final quarter and pathetic attempts to blame this on the unusually cold weather have been rubbished by statistics. After a short upturn in the retail sector in January, even top chains like John Lewis and Primark have reported a slump in consumer demand.
The causes aren't difficult to find. High inflation, a tsunami of pending job cuts, long term wage freezes and cuts and a hike in VAT have combined to suck demand out of the economy. The consistent failure of optimistic official economic predictions over the past year have engendered a deeply insecure gloom that is impervious to the usual boosterism of spin doctors and media pundits. The return of recession will remain a threat, if not an actuality, for the foreseeable future.
Against this backcloth there has been outrage at the monster bonuses banks are still paying out - with top British bank HSBC paying 253 of its staff in excess of £1 million each, 89 of them based in this country; and Barclays pays its top five bankers £100 million between them -whilst contributing very little corporation tax.
Confidence is draining as leading economists anticipate that recovery will take years and may never fully occur. The turn of events in the Middle East is combining with this situation to create a "perfect storm", with rising oil prices adding to an inflation rate expected to climb to 4 or 5% this year. Government ministers expect rising oil prices to suck a further £45 billion out of the economy over the
Not to raise interest rates in response would represent a major pull-back from key monetarist principles that underpin neo-liberal capitalism. But to do so would send demand plummeting and crash the economy. Inevitably the creeping sense of disarray and lack of strategy has been expressed at the highest level of economic policy making.
The Bank of England governor admits that he understands why ordinary people are so angry at finance capitalism. Sections of the ruling class know that it will take more than slick presentation to get it through and business organisations are increasingly vocal in their unease at the cuts strategy. One lesson they have learnt from the banking crash is that "big government" can help a failing market.
Many of the key elements of this political situation came together in one revealing snapshot with the Barnsley Central
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8 How strong is the Coalition government? by-election. It was called when the former MP was convicted and gaoled for fraud. The replacement Labour candidate was an ex-Major in the Parachute Regiment who served in Iraq and Afghanistan - anything but a break from the Blair/Brown years. The Tories were beaten into third place by the UKIP. And the Lib Dems in the words of their own candidate Dominic Carman, were given a "good kicking" - slumping from 17% to 4% and 6th place behind the BNP.
It's tempting to write all this off as bungling and incompetence. But the global context tends to reinforce the picture. The tenth anniversary of 9/11 looms. What started out as a neo-con offensive has morphed into an era of wars and revolutions that appears to be spinning out of control. Far from successfully imposing western hegemony on the Middle East, the Iraq/ Afghanistan debacle, the structural crisis of the world economy and a seemingly endless