So blinded by dogma are they that the reality of the cuts to come has not yet hit home with Cameron's critics. But it soon will
'The UK economy is healing", said George Osborne this week. Did Treasury officials show him all the graphs upside down? If he believes that, it's truly terrifying. If he doesn't, then applying more leeches to the economic arteries is the only remedy he knows. No turning back, there is no alternative ? TINA ? is that old Thatcher song he reprises at double volume. The cabinet is united round death Plan A, as even Vince Cable at the weekend signed his name in blood: even he said "Tina", too.
Osborne's faith healing has shrivelled growth, and next year looks worse. Though unemployment fell recently, both the CBI and Chambers of Commerce say it will rise in 2013 as the next giant wave of public sector cuts casts staff adrift. Tax receipts are falling, public spending and the deficit rising. Money is borrowed to waste on the running costs of unemployment, not on investment. The Engineering Employers Federation reports manufacturing at its worst for three years and order books negative, with domestic and export demand down, despite the pound's one-third devaluation. The Federation of Small Business said a third of businesses find their growth plans stunted by lack of bank lending. Osborne's Project Merlin failed; so did the national loan guarantee. Funding for lending is not off the ground before more plans are announced for government bank guarantees on loans to business and builders. Good if it works. But even to consider government-backed investment is to admit that his old "crowding out" theory is proven wrong: he pulled the state back but private investment didn't flood in. Instead large companies sit on billions, afraid to invest in an economy he has drained of demand.
The only booming sector is luxury London property: the FT reports a £38bn ballooning of investment in Mayfair-type hotspots, attracting Europeans and Asians seeking a safe haven. Many of these properties will lie empty ? ripe reminders of the need for a land value tax or at least Clegg's mansion tax.
As parliament returned, the only non-payroll Tories echoing Osborne's "healing economy" fantasy with a straight face were those desperately hoping for promotion in the reshuffle. By the end of Tuesday the swollen backbench ranks of the demoted and the disappointed will be even less willing to pretend their party's future looks bright. The editor of the Spectator stalks the corridors reminding all and sundry that the national debt will have risen far faster and higher under Cameron than under Labour in 13 years. Read Telegraph commentators these days, and you find ruder abuse of the Tory leaders than on these pages: "Cameron at half time is a political tragedy in the making"; "Cameron and Osborne have wimped out like flabby schoolboys dodging PE"; "When Cameron speaks I feel that he's talking to someone else"; or "No better than Mitt Romney".
David Davis's thundering broadside on Monday caught the mood of the malcontents. He was entirely right in concluding the economy is moribund, "bumping along the bottom". But when he proclaimed "There is an alternative", all he meant was even more of the same ? a triple dose of George's marvellous medicine. Deficit reduction is "too little, too late", he said. Cut spending, apply "electric shock treatment". But as with all slashers and burners, he hadn't the bottle to name what specific cuts he meant. "Take a knife to taxes"; nurture, don't punish "wealth creators", but "radically cut" regulations for employee protection. "The state is too large, complex, powerful, intrusive, and expensive," he said, and his party would all agree. Punchy, pithy, pugnacious, it was the speech to make him chief rabble-rouser for all the policies that are likely to march his party into the wilderness at the next election.
Any government's backbenchers would be restive in the face of such alarming economic failure. But what's odd about the Tory malcontents is how little they understand their own leaders: for all the U-turns and bungling, there has been absolutely no slippage in the great austerity. Shrinking the state, come what may, is happening. Yet they seem ignorant of what's steaming down the track towards them. Do they know that more than 80% of the announced cuts are still to be implemented? Are they ready in their constituencies to deal with huge rail fare rises in January at the same time as child benefit is abolished for better-off families? Are they ready for April, when disability living allowance cuts mean 90,000 people will have their motability scooters and cars repossessed and two-thirds of disabled children start to lose their allowances? The benefit cap in April will eject thousands of families from their homes in more affluent Tory areas.
Those who call for deeper cuts should look carefully at what trouble may be brewing in the NHS in their own patch ? or did they foolishly believe Cameron's no cuts pledge? Already in many areas people can only have one cataract on the NHS, while hip and knee replacements are rationed, along with 125 other procedures. Watch the outcry as units or whole hospitals close, or are reconfigured. Beware National Trust battalions ready to resume warfare against Osborne's latest green belt assault. Are these MPs ready for trouble when their councils struggle to collect council tax for the first time from the poorest homes, as councils themselves find it harder each year to identify yet another round of spending cuts? Capital spending gets yet another slashing next year ? an irony as the government tries to kick-start private infrastructure investment.
I suspect most of these angry Tory MPs are wilfully clueless. They have deliberately turned a blind eye to what's heading their way because they believe so passionately, so ideologically, in the theory of shrinking the state that they prefer not to probe its reality. They may share the public delusion that the worst of the cuts are over, as if announcements were deed. Those MPs now scornfully asking if David Cameron is a "man or a mouse" may find themselves doing a bit of squeaking before long.
www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/sep/03/angry-tories-no-alternative