There’s a punchy op-ed from David Cameron in today’s Guardian, centred around this three-pronged attack on Brown’s borrowing binge:
“But excessive borrowing, adding to permanent national debt, to cut taxes or boost spending is the wrong approach. There are three reasons for this.
The first is that we simply cannot afford it. We’re already mired in debt thanks to Brown’s age of irresponsibility – £2.4 trillion at the last estimate – so we have nothing to fall back on. Paying back Brown’s planned £15bn borrowing binge will mean the equivalent of an additional £880 tax bill for every family in Britain. Imagine the toll this would take on people. Think of the drag anchor for an economy in recovery.
The second reason is that it has been proved not to work. The Japanese followed the same strategy in the 1990s, pushing through an unfunded fiscal stimulus, racking up crippling debt, achieving little beyond white elephant public works programmes. There is no evidence it would work here and now.
My third objection is that Labour’s strategy could actually be counter-productive. At some point the question may stop being “how much more does the government want to borrow?” and become “how much more are markets prepared to lend?” The combination of our already huge budget deficit with a further borrowing binge could compromise investor confidence which might, in turn, force up interest rates. At a time when low interest rates are exactly what businesses need to survive and prosper, we cannot afford for this to happen.”
The article as a whole is another sign that the Tory attack operation is finally warming up. As Tim Montgomerie pointed out yesterday, it seems to be solidifying around a few key themes – and is all the more powerful because of it. More powerful, too, because it is now more visible. The number of Tory op-eds, media appearances, talking heads and soundbites seems to have risen appreciably over the past few days. Certain figures in the shadow cabinet also seem to be making themselves more prominent (cf. Alan Duncan and his effective line yesterday about Brown “trying to govern by propaganda”).
Sure, Cameron and Osborne have work to do yet. They are, on the whole, still being outspun by the reinvigorated No.10 operation, and there are still major question marks over what their actual response to the financial and economic crises would be. Cameron will hope to at least partially deal with the second of these issues today, by outlining how the Tories might pay for tax cuts by cutting back on spending. Will it be enough to end what Rachel Sylvester refers to, in another excellent column, as a “whispering campaign” against the Cameroons? We shall see.
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