Johnson’s deceptions and out-of-date figures

Oh, how Labour enjoy misleading the public about their record on the public finances. Ed Miliband did it a couple of weeks ago, with some very loose rhetoric about how the previous government had “paid down the debt”. And now Alan Johnson’s at it, with a fiery speech at the RSA which reheated many of the themes in his recent New Statesman article.

The passage that struck me was this:

“In 2007/08 as the crisis hit, we have the second lowest debt level in the G7 reduced by 14 percent in the 10 years we’d been in office… …The year before the crisis hit we were borrowing 2.4 percent of GDP compared to the 3.4 percent we inherited from Ken Clarke.”

1) Second lowest debt level in the G7. Johnson can have that – although here the deception is in what he doesn’t say.