Britain’s economic debate has been reduced to WWE-style wrestling, where two figures adopt semi-comic personas and have at each other for the entertainment of the crowd — while not doing any real fighting at
all. So it is with Osborne and Balls. Rhetorically, they are poles apart; one championing cuts, the other spending. But you’ll notice that neither quantifies the cuts. That’s because Osborne is
simply enacting an only-slightly-souped-up version of Darling’s plan and the real difference between the two parties is tiny. This was the point of last night’s Newsnight, where David Grossman filed a report (in which yours truly was interviewed) about the great pretend fight between two parties
whose plans only differ by less than 1 per cent a year. Labour’s plans would have involved 2.2 per cent average cuts to government departments per year. The coalition’s figure is 3 per
cent:
And, what’s more, the below graph shows how his government is increasing debt by 51 per cent – more than Labour managed in 13 years. And yes, it’s a smaller figure than the 60 per cent written into Darling’s last Budget. But not that much smaller.
What we’ve seen in the last 18 months has not really been economic argument. If it was, we’d hear the odd figure dropped in. Instead, all this wrestling. No wonder our prospects for economic growth are evaporating so rapidly.
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