Tony Blair’s absence has not made the heart grow any fonder.
Tony Blair’s absence has not made the heart grow any fonder. On the not-rare-enough occasions when he returns to our television screens, one feels an instinctive revulsion. Here is the Prime Minister who was as uninterested in economics as he was in the conduct of warfare. He ceded domestic power to an incompetent and reckless Chancellor and he is now accepting £200,000-a-year jobs with the banks with whom his government worked hand-in-glove. No, there is no pleasure in seeing him again. Especially as Britain starts to focus on the mess which he bequeathed.
Mere numbers do not do justice to the financial crisis produced by the Blair-Brown era, or the economic quagmire from which Britain is still trying to escape. To listen to Gordon Brown, one would think that there is a binary distinction: that we were in recession, and we are now out of it and, ergo, out of trouble. In fact, Britain has simply passed the end of the beginning and this recession will be distinguished by how long we take to crawl back to where we once were. In our case, it will be three more years — perhaps longer still.
David Cameron has rightly dismissed Mr Brown’s projections as a fake ‘trampoline recovery’ — but this raises awkward questions which the Conservatives are not keen to discuss. The longer the recovery, the deeper the cuts will have to be — and the Tories may find it impossible, in office, to reduce the deficit faster than Labour. If so, then Cameron need not worry about the political reaction. The punishment from the bond markets (which supply £1 in every £4 spent by this government) will be swift and devastating.
It is unfair and wrong for any Conservative to claim that Alistair Darling has no agenda for slashing public service budgets. The Chancellor is not allowed to talk about it, but his Pre-Budget Report implies spending across government departments by an impressive 11 per cent over four years. So ‘cuts’ is not an election issue: whoever wins the next election will decimate spending on education and the police. Labour is planning the sharpest cuts since the war, and the Tories say their cuts would be sharper still — but do not quantify them.
It suits all political parties for the public to remain ignorant of the scale of the coming cuts. Labour keeps quiet because its cuts agenda clashes with the Prime Minister’s mendacious ‘investment vs cuts’ dividing line. The Tories don’t mention Labour cuts because they prefer having this agenda to themselves. And as James Forsyth says on page 10, the issue of cuts is potentially explosive within the Conservative party because the promises made on the election trail are now stacking up, with huge implications for George Osborne’s first budget.
The pledge to increase international development spending to 0.7 per cent of GDP implies that the aid budget will increase by 50 per cent under the Tories — about £5 billion. How will this be justified if defence is being cut by about the same amount — and at a time of war? The Tory MPs who have done the maths are appalled at the implications. Protecting the NHS from spending cuts means that other public services would be cut by at least 18 per cent. As Mr Cameron says, we’re all in this together. So why should the police and military suffer, while the NHS bureaucracy keeps every penny of the money it has been force-fed?
It may well be rude to ruin politicians’ speeches by producing a calculator, but it is grimly necessary. As the Tories make these pledges in response to Labour attack lines, they would do well to stop and ask how this would sound on budget day: how the parliamentary Conservative party would react to a proposal to take £5 billion from the military and spend it on overseas aid projects of dubious efficacy. The murmurs of dissent have already started.
Mr Brown is, of course, the author of the budget insofar as it will repair the damage he inflicted. He has done more harm to the national finances than anyone with whom Britain has not been at war. The national debt — which was £350 billion when Mr Brown and Mr Blair moved into Downing Street — will break through £1 trillion soon and is likely never to fall below this level. The cost of this will be felt by generations.
The Conservatives should never let the public forget whose legacy this is. Labour, after all, brilliantly caricatured John Major’s government as some kind of Long Black Wednesday. As Peter Oborne points out on page 16, John Major’s seven years now look like an exemplar of financial competence and radical public sector reform. And had he set out to adopt a ‘scorched earth’ policy to ruin the finances for the incoming government, as Mr Brown is doing, then he would have been torn down by any one of his fellow Cabinet members.
Mr Brown should not be lying about the cuts implicit in the budget. Mr Cameron should not be making so many expensive promises about health and aid spending on the campaign trail, without admitting just how much misery this will inflict on unprotected departments after the election. The political debate around the recession has, from the offset, resembled that of the Road Runner cartoon: the unfortunate beast speeds over a cliff, then is suspended in mid-air as he realises what he has done, then crashes to earth. It is time for all our political leaders to look down.
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