By Peter Beresford, chair of national service user network Shaping Our Lives and professor of social policy at Brunel University
Perhaps the biggest mistake any of us can make about the government's massive cuts policy is to treat it as inevitable. This time, a different future may be possible, so long as we are ready to take hold of it. It's a measure of the government's own desperation that the prime minister recently felt obliged to intervene personally when one mother was accorded media attention by threatening to institutionalise her disabled daughter because of government cuts.
Surely this isn't what the government meant by its Think Local, Act Personal social care partnership launched last November. Such intervention carries little conviction as a sustainable basis for any government to be making public policy.
As unemployment hits two and a half million and inflation looms large, we are increasingly reminded of the Thatcher cuts of a generation ago. Karl Marx might have been right that "history repeats itself". But perhaps it's time to rework his adage - "the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce". Perhaps now it's more a matter of history repeating itself without the same force: this time is different. Many circumstances have changed since the Thatcher cuts of the 1980s, potentially preventing equal damage this time around.
Disabled people and other welfare service users may seem easy targets to 20-something backroom boys in party HQs. But we now have freedom of information, human rights, equality and anti-disability discrimination legislation. We are signed up to the United Nations convention on the rights of people with disabilities. There is a host of political and legal requirements to involve and consult. We have determined and well run service user, disabled people's and carers' civil rights movements, and organisations.
Already there's been effective opposition, notably from students (right), new alliances formed and early government misjudgements and U-turns.
It's also not only those with little power who feel under attack. A broader public can now envisage losing their jobs, security, benefits and tax credits, with none of the perks of rising house prices or council house sales that Thatcher engineered. There's the same rising sense of fear and injustice that led to the collapse of the 1980s poll tax (left).
While ordinary people feel the full effect of cuts, those who caused the economic problems in the first place, who have incomes to match offshore tax arrangements and other tax avoidance schemes, are benefiting from the current regressive redistribution taking place in the name of repaying the deficit. No, a non-cuts alternative lies within our reach. All we need is the confidence to grasp it.
Pictures: Rex Features
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