Today, on the Andrew Marr show, Ed Miliband repeated his porkie that David Cameron plans to reduce state spending to 1930s levels. When he first made this bizarre and obviously untrue claim, even your baristas here at Coffee House didn’t have 1930s spending data to hand. Now we do, so the extent of his deceit can be laid bare. The above graph (which you can explore by moving your cursor over the lines) shows total UK government spending, adjusted to today’s money. At £720 billion, the level of state spending in 2020 under George Osborne’s plans will be almost ten times higher the levels of the 1930s.
Now that the Tories have agreed to drop their claim about having halved the deficit – or, at least, to make clear that they have only halved the deficit-GDP ratio which is not the same thing – only one party is using deceit as a weapon in this election campaign.
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