A couple of weeks on holiday, and there’s plenty to catch up on. First, though,
George Osborne’s speech to Mansion House yesterday evening. In terms of substance, it was fairly radical stuff. And it’s
encouraging that so many of the Tories’ solid plans for reforming the financial
regulatory system have survived the coalition process. But, really, it was one simple, little sentence which jumped out at me. This:
“So what?” you may be thinking, “we knew that already.” Ah, yes, but we’ve rarely heard a politician be quite so upfront about our debt position before – at least not voluntarily. Contrast, if you will, with Gordon Brown’s claim to Mrs Duffy that Labour would “halve the debt” in four years. He meant the deficit, of course – or at least he should have meant the deficit, our government’s annual overspend – but, as we know, the two d-words got horrendously mixed up during the election campaign. Not so last night. Osborne put it unequivocally: the deficit will fall, the debt will rise.“Debt [is] set to still rise even at the end of this five year Parliament.”
While we shouldn’t expect anything less, Osborne’s honesty is, in some respects, rather brave. While it draws attention to Brown’s toxic legacy, it also outlines how powerless the current government for the clean-up operation. Still, we’re seeing progress, nonetheless.
P.S. If you need a reminder of how much the debt total will rise by, here are the numbers which the Office for Budget Responsibility came up with last week:
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