Much of Ed Miliband’s Grand Confession on the economy is wearily familiar. I mean, we’ve known his
take on the deficit for some time: that the drop in tax receipts from a crumbling financial
sector was to blame, rather than Brown’s spending. And to have him argue that Labour should have made the economy less dependent on the City is just another way of saying exactly the same thing.
But there is something new in there, too. Miliband is set to admit that Labour didn’t “talk the language of cuts” soon enough. Not that he’s saying Labour should have – or still
should – cut deeper and faster, mind. It’s simply that Brown and his ministers didn’t breath the c-word early enough. This, the thinking goes, made it look as though Labour were impotent when
it came to actually reducing the deficit.
It may seem banal for Miliband to dwell upon the “language of cuts,” but he also happens to right, in a way. One of the most poisonous aspects of the Brown government was its managed
silence over how much it was cutting. Indeed, at the end of 2009, I put together a timeline of it all. In April
that year, cuts of 7 percent were hidden away in the Budget. In June, Brown denied that there were cuts in the Budget. In July, he was still clinging humourlessly on to the idea of a “0
percent rise” in public spending. In September, he finally used the word “cuts” for the first time. It was all too little, all too late.
In which case, the real argument still surrounds Miliband’s first proposition: that Labour’s spending wasn’t irresponsible. I, for one, accept that tax receipts fell precipitously during the crash. But it’s also true that Labour didn’t run a surplus in any year since 2002. Here’s the graph that I put together a few months ago to illustrate the point:
As I said at the time, I’ll leave it to CoffeeHousers to judge whether that’s responsible fiscal management or not.
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