According to Will Hutton in yesterday’s Observer the amount of money spent by the government to rescue Northern Rock currently stands at £40bn and is expected to reach £50bn. This comes to 5% of UK GDP. The word Hutton uses to describe this economic fact is ’stunning’. He’s right but there are other words like ‘outrageous’ and ’scandalous’.
I checked out some Treasury figures today and found that total government spending on education for 2006-7 is 5.5% of GDP. The Treasury figures define this as ’spending on educational institutions’ and that means all the funding of Surestart nurseries, primary and secondary schools and further and higher education. So a government which is supposed to represent the labour movement in some way has spent only 0.5% less of this society’s wealth on rescuing a failed financial institution as it is prepared to spend on educating its citizens from the cradle to the grave.
It does bear out what many of us would have suspected when Blair piously announced that his three main priorities in government would be ‘education, education and education’. It wouldn’t have gone down so well, of course, if he had revealed his real priorities- ‘finance capitalism, finance capitalism and finance capitalism’ . Doesn’t have quite the same pious ring.
