What Labour's free owl pledge reveals about the state of political debate
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Version 0 of 1. Last Thursday, Team Miliband chanced upon the pledge that could win it the next election. That afternoon, Ed's press officers tweeted: "Everybody should have his own owl." To-wit-to-woo! Finally, special advisers had hit on a promise that was at least memorable – unlike the car crash of abstract nouns that normally pass for Labour policy: the parent-led, wraparound, compulsory, community, contributory jobs resolution principle and its ilk. Sadly, the promise of universal bird ownership turned out to be a hoax. Yet however solemnly I try, avian-based welfare doesn't strike me as so much more ridiculous than the rest of what passes for our tax-and-spend debate. Less than a year before the general election, all three main parties promise that once in office they will pile on further spending cuts and tax rises to accelerate austerity. Yet not one of George, Ed or Danny has given any serious indication of which public services they would hack, which bunch of voters they would tax further. Politicians, you surely sigh: always writing cheques they can't cash. But such large cheques! Osborne swears blind that if let back into the Treasury, he will rack up a budget surplus – the government will take in more money than it spends. This would be a truly amazing feat – one his predecessors in No 11 have managed only seven times in the past 50 years – yet George won't reveal the marvellous medicine that would enable him to pull it off. Labour and the Lib Dems are going almost the same distance, but allowing themselves a bit more time to get there. And again, we have no idea how they would balance the budget. For an idea of what such promises mean, speak to the economist Giles Wilkes, who until last month was special adviser to Vince Cable. Since leaving the Department of Business, he's been keeping a blog totting up the vows of fiscal rectitude made by all three parties. By his calculations, the Tories will cut public spending to less than £290bn within four years, from more than £340bn (in current prices) at the start of 2010. If the health service, schools and aid remain ringfenced from cuts, then Wilkes estimates that the home office and the departments of justice, environment, local government and business will have a combined budget of just £40bn by 2018 – down from about £100bn at the start of this decade. His verdict? "That is really not credible!" Nor is he alone: "For my last few months [in government] I asked every expert I could meet: do you think … less than £300bn of public spending is credible and achievable? I never met anyone who would say yes. Mostly, they looked on me as some sort of naïf." This is what fiscal credibility looks like nowadays: trying to beat your opponents by uttering ever more impossible promises. Whether blue, yellow or red, Westminster now resembles a version of Monty Python's Four Yorkshiremen sketch: "Ha'pence for local councils? Loox-shew-ray!" And if you balk at my charge of impossibilism, consider this: Osborne has already laid out £12bn of welfare cuts to be found after the next election. Typically, he hasn't explained where they will come from. Then think about the disruption and anxiety that the bedroom tax has caused to hundreds of thousands of households, many of them with a disabled member. How much did all that familial devastation chip off the welfare budget? Using the Department for Work and Pensions's own models, Rebecca Tunstall at the University of York thinks it raised a grand total of £320m. To make their proposed welfare savings, the Conservatives need more than 37 more bedroom taxes. I cannot imagine what they will be; nor I suspect can Osborne. But he is quite happy to lay on tax breaks for married couples and fuel duty freezes as far as the eye can see. The easy thing to do would be to lay the blame for such fiscal impossibilism at the entrance to the Commons. But it's also the fault of the media, for parroting the politicians' promises of sobriety and the latest Westminster sideshow (a report from the IPPR thinktank, anyone?) – at the same time as they reprint the lobbying of business associations and the wealthy. Consider: Labour promises to re-introduce the 50p tax rate on the top 1% of earners in Britain, and all of a sudden the press is full of cries about how the sky will fall down. CEOs write letters to the Telegraph, Dave accuses Ed of trying to wreck the recovery. Yet forthcoming research from the Equality Trust finds the case for the 50p rate watertight: the public want it, people wouldn't work fewer hours, and the economy wouldn't suffer. But even such a small measure that would raise the Treasury equivalent of a rounding error provokes howls of outrage. Similarly, Osborne boasts of his ultra-competitive corporation tax rate; Miliband talks of increasing it by one solitary penny – and is pilloried as some kind of Menshevik. Were the British to get serious about tax and spend, we could do one of two things: start talking about what all these avowals of balanced budgets will mean for our standards of living, or admit that this austerity Maoism is a joke and start thinking more constructively. Instead, this is the state of economic debate in Britain in the dying months before a general election: politicians of all stripes lie about the economics they are going to practise; the press ducks out of asking any questions, and the public await the bills and the starving of the public realm. Against that backdrop, what harm can a few more impossible promises do? Owls for all! Free ponies for every child! The moon on a lollystick! Or perhaps get in those water cannons. Sharp-ish. |