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. If this remains the case, it will open up a significant gap between the two parties.
The difference lies in the quality of their ammunition. The Tories have a long line of true claims to deploy in this campaign, while Labour’s arsenal mainly consists of absurd plans, half-truths and porkies. Lynton Crosby could not have planned it better.
Miliband’s 1930s porkie is even more harmful for him because it’s patently, laughably untrue. It is vaguely plausible that the Tories might have halved the deficit –the original plan was to cut it by three-quarters. But any voter can tell that it’s not plausible that George Osborne wants to cut spending to 1930s levels when there was no welfare state. So when voters hear Miliband make this false claim, it will reinforce another message: that his words are not to be trusted.
PS A porkie is a political statement ‘weaponised’ (to borrow Miliband’s argot) to mislead voters, while carrying a Jesuitical explanation. In this case, he can claim that the state spending/GDP ratio is going back to levels last seen in the 1930s. But as the below graph shows, if Osborne does manage to keep to his path of spending restraint (a big ‘if’- his path is so ambitious as to be unbelievable) then it will be only a fraction below levels seen not in the 1930s but under Gordon Brown at the turn of the last decade.
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