In his speech today, Ed Balls proved himself worthy of the “Son of Brown” tag,
slipping in more than a few “Brownies”. I thought CoffeeHousers would be interested in some of the figures behind his claims…
Balls claimed that “we went into the crisis with lower national debt than we inherited in 1997”. That is flatly untrue. Public sector net debt when Labour took over was £350
billion. In 2006-07 it was £500 billion. Even adjusting for inflation, Brown and Balls had added £62.8 billion in today’s money to the national debt they “inherited” by the
time the crisis started:
Balls’ defenders will say that he meant “debt ratio” – and, to be sure, debt did not rise as
fast as GDP over those years so the ratio fell (from 42.5 per cent to 35.9 per cent). But Balls didn’t mention a ratio: he claimed to have cut debt. And that is clearly not true.
CoffeeHousers may remember that he flies into a range when called out on this verbal trick of his he once called up demanding we took down a post exposing his sleight of hand. We refused. Given that the debt is held by the British public, run up on their behalf by governments, there is a duty for all MPs to be crystal clear about what they mean. Britain’s fiscal situation is too serious for MPs to get away with saying that debt has fallen, when in fact it has gone up.
Balls also slammed Cameron and Osborne, saying they “thought they knew better… that if they cut public sector jobs, the private sector would more than fill the gap”. Balls claims they’ve been proven wrong.
Labour took great glee in the most recent employment statistics, which showed that public sector employment fell by 111,000 from March to June, but the private sector figure only rose by 41,000.
But that was just one quarter – and these statistics must be taken together, if only because sampling
error makes any one set useless. From March 2010 to June 2011, public sector employment dropped by 268,000 while the private sector grew by 575,000: more than two private jobs gained for every
public job lost:
The shadow Chancellor also attacked Osborne for “piling austerity on austerity” and said he’s “ignoring the evidence here in Britain that austerity just isn’t working”. This is
his ultimate goal: to tie poor GDP growth to the Coalition’s cuts and say that everything would be better had we listened to Balls. “We said that going too far, too fast would choke off the
recovery and put jobs at risk… and look what’s happened”. In other words “I told you so”. The problem is, it’s hard to claim that government cuts are hurting the economy when
central government is spending more this year than last:
The cuts haven’t begun to have an effect yet, which means they can’t be responsible for our weak growth and Ed Balls is a long way from being able to say “I told you so” when it comes to
the UK economy.
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