Accidents Will Happen
Philip Collins wrote a perceptive argument for The Times the other day in which he highlighted the fact that by accident rather than design a Conservative chancellor has ended up in exactly the position advanced by the Labour Party back in 2010, at least as far as public spending is concerned.
If you ask me there's some real truth in the argument that the electorate believes the Tories are more likely to take tough decisions and are therefore competent in terms of running the economy, but that they'd like a more cohesive overall approach.
Osborne: a Tory carrying out Labour policies
By Philip Collins - The Times
The chancellor has turned failure into success by stealing the opposition’s clothes and passing them off as his own
This is an election to produce nightmares and George Osborne’s task in the budget was to make his colleagues sleep more easily. Scare stories haunt the Tory party as the polls sit stubbornly still. The outcome that keeps them in suspense runs as follows.
The Tories run a campaign on economic authority, which, to their own satisfaction, they win comfortably. The prime minister, an unloved but respected figure, puts the central case: “We’ve started a job together. With your will, we shall go on and finish the job.” Labour campaigns on the promise of a “shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people and their families”. Occasionally, the issue of renegotiating Britain’s place in Europe and subjecting the result to a referendum intrudes.
Nationalist parties of all kinds perform well and the two main parties poll an unusually low percentage of the vote. In the tangled mess, Labour wins the most seats in parliament even though the Tories win the popular vote. An abortive attempt to construct a Tory and Liberal coalition falls victim to the arithmetic and Labour takes office as a minority administration looking to govern with the episodic aid of the Liberals and the Scottish National Party.
That is not just the modern Tory’s bad dream. It is an account of the general election of February 1974, the template for how it goes awry for the Conservatives. There is one detail on which the parallel does not hold. The party seeking a referendum on Europe was Labour. Apart from that, the Tories, screaming with heads in hands, can see David Cameron playing Ted Heath and Ed Miliband, the new Harold Wilson, installing a second kitchen in 10 Downing Street.
The distant echo of 1974 is no beautiful augury for Labour either. A thin victory in February led to a second election in October and, thereafter, five years of dismal industrial relations that tarred the Labour party as unelectable for a generation. In his budget on Wednesday, Mr Osborne made a few gratuitous references to François Hollande but Labour should be more wary of late-period Wilson. As well as late-period Neil Kinnock, of course. Labour hopes the election will not play out like 1992, when an expected victory dissolved in the final days. But Mr Osborne has shown that he is living in neither 1974 nor 1992. He is going to party like it’s 1999. If there are parallels in previous elections, the budget is a portent of 2001.
The crucial item in the budget was Mr Osborne’s sotto voce confession that the autumn statement was a mistake. His plans last year were to produce a surplus of £23 billion by 2019. This had allowed Labour to say that the Tories were taking provision of services down to a level last seen in the low, dishonest decade of the 1930s. Rather spooked by the connotations, Mr Osborne altered his plan, choosing to “spend” money that, by his own magic, he had created in the first place and thereby ensuring that, in 2019, spending will be 36 per cent of GDP, the same figure it was under Gordon Brown in 2000.
The 2001 election was a contest the British people could have done without. The campaign produced the habitual sound and fury, quite literally in the case of John Prescott, who took to punching the electorate. Labour’s campaign slogan, though, was a functional but inspiring “A lot done; a lot still to do” and the country recorded an almost identical verdict to 1997. This is the campaign the Tories will fight, with the hope of the same result.
This is why Mr Osborne had to go rapidly into reverse. In a steady-as-she-goes election you do not wish to be branded an ideologue. Fortunately, nobody turns failure into success more cutely than Mr Osborne. You may recall that he spent a couple of years saying there would be no economic Plan B which, when it appeared, had two elements — a big infrastructure plan and a blanket denial that this amounted to a Plan B.
Mr Osborne understandably forgot to mention his failures on Wednesday so it is only fair that I make good the omission. Besides, he is a politician who is best understood by the story he strings together from his defeats. Mr Osborne did not say that, on his original plans, the deficit should have disappeared by now. He forgot to admit that he was reinstating a target he had abandoned because, now he had some assets to sell, he could see a way to hit it.
Mr Osborne did not chant, as he incited his pantomime audience to sing along, two important facts about the meagre recovery: “Productivity Down! Immigration Up!” It must have slipped his mind that the deficit in the balance of payments is the worst in peace time since 1830. Cutting the data to suit himself, he failed to point out that the bottom 40 per cent of the income scale has taken the same share of the burden of austerity as the top 60 per cent.
Mr Osborne was the chancellor who believed in all manner of impossible things before breakfast. The sums Mr Osborne did in 2010 added up only if each of the following three years saw the largest rise in business investment on record and the best year for export growth since the nightmare year of 1974. Instead, we got a recovery based on household debt, consumer spending and government schemes to stimulate the housing market, a glass menagerie of a recovery, both precious and fragile at the same time. Mr Osborne must be tempted to head to the Foreign Office after the election and let Sajid Javid clear up the mess that is accumulating.
That’s the bitter fruit of victory. For the moment, through the smoke, a grinning Mr Osborne is visible in the mirrors. After declaring Alistair Darling’s plan for deficit reduction would turn London into Athens, Mr Osborne has actually carried it out by accident. Labour has been right on the deficit all along and Ed Balls is right now. The implied cuts to the police, defence and border control in Mr Osborne’s revised projections are too severe. Already, by the end of 2015, they will have been cut by 30 per cent. To try the same again will mark the outer limit of public acceptance of austerity and Mr Osborne, if he is still in situ, will revert once again to Labour spending plans.
The opinion polls are locked because neither party offers what a plurality wants, which is the Labour party, led by Tories. The sum total of his many failures, allied to a flinty political will which is a genuinely rare political virtue, is that George Osborne has turned into a Tory man carrying out Labour measures, the best chancellor Labour doesn’t have. The sort of chancellor Labour had in the year 2001.
This is an election to produce nightmares and George Osborne’s task in the budget was to make his colleagues sleep more easily. Scare stories haunt the Tory party as the polls sit stubbornly still. The outcome that keeps them in suspense runs as follows.
The Tories run a campaign on economic authority, which, to their own satisfaction, they win comfortably. The prime minister, an unloved but respected figure, puts the central case: “We’ve started a job together. With your will, we shall go on and finish the job.” Labour campaigns on the promise of a “shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people and their families”. Occasionally, the issue of renegotiating Britain’s place in Europe and subjecting the result to a referendum intrudes.
Nationalist parties of all kinds perform well and the two main parties poll an unusually low percentage of the vote. In the tangled mess, Labour wins the most seats in parliament even though the Tories win the popular vote. An abortive attempt to construct a Tory and Liberal coalition falls victim to the arithmetic and Labour takes office as a minority administration looking to govern with the episodic aid of the Liberals and the Scottish National Party.
That is not just the modern Tory’s bad dream. It is an account of the general election of February 1974, the template for how it goes awry for the Conservatives. There is one detail on which the parallel does not hold. The party seeking a referendum on Europe was Labour. Apart from that, the Tories, screaming with heads in hands, can see David Cameron playing Ted Heath and Ed Miliband, the new Harold Wilson, installing a second kitchen in 10 Downing Street.
The distant echo of 1974 is no beautiful augury for Labour either. A thin victory in February led to a second election in October and, thereafter, five years of dismal industrial relations that tarred the Labour party as unelectable for a generation. In his budget on Wednesday, Mr Osborne made a few gratuitous references to François Hollande but Labour should be more wary of late-period Wilson. As well as late-period Neil Kinnock, of course. Labour hopes the election will not play out like 1992, when an expected victory dissolved in the final days. But Mr Osborne has shown that he is living in neither 1974 nor 1992. He is going to party like it’s 1999. If there are parallels in previous elections, the budget is a portent of 2001.
The crucial item in the budget was Mr Osborne’s sotto voce confession that the autumn statement was a mistake. His plans last year were to produce a surplus of £23 billion by 2019. This had allowed Labour to say that the Tories were taking provision of services down to a level last seen in the low, dishonest decade of the 1930s. Rather spooked by the connotations, Mr Osborne altered his plan, choosing to “spend” money that, by his own magic, he had created in the first place and thereby ensuring that, in 2019, spending will be 36 per cent of GDP, the same figure it was under Gordon Brown in 2000.
The 2001 election was a contest the British people could have done without. The campaign produced the habitual sound and fury, quite literally in the case of John Prescott, who took to punching the electorate. Labour’s campaign slogan, though, was a functional but inspiring “A lot done; a lot still to do” and the country recorded an almost identical verdict to 1997. This is the campaign the Tories will fight, with the hope of the same result.
This is why Mr Osborne had to go rapidly into reverse. In a steady-as-she-goes election you do not wish to be branded an ideologue. Fortunately, nobody turns failure into success more cutely than Mr Osborne. You may recall that he spent a couple of years saying there would be no economic Plan B which, when it appeared, had two elements — a big infrastructure plan and a blanket denial that this amounted to a Plan B.
Mr Osborne understandably forgot to mention his failures on Wednesday so it is only fair that I make good the omission. Besides, he is a politician who is best understood by the story he strings together from his defeats. Mr Osborne did not say that, on his original plans, the deficit should have disappeared by now. He forgot to admit that he was reinstating a target he had abandoned because, now he had some assets to sell, he could see a way to hit it.
Mr Osborne did not chant, as he incited his pantomime audience to sing along, two important facts about the meagre recovery: “Productivity Down! Immigration Up!” It must have slipped his mind that the deficit in the balance of payments is the worst in peace time since 1830. Cutting the data to suit himself, he failed to point out that the bottom 40 per cent of the income scale has taken the same share of the burden of austerity as the top 60 per cent.
Mr Osborne was the chancellor who believed in all manner of impossible things before breakfast. The sums Mr Osborne did in 2010 added up only if each of the following three years saw the largest rise in business investment on record and the best year for export growth since the nightmare year of 1974. Instead, we got a recovery based on household debt, consumer spending and government schemes to stimulate the housing market, a glass menagerie of a recovery, both precious and fragile at the same time. Mr Osborne must be tempted to head to the Foreign Office after the election and let Sajid Javid clear up the mess that is accumulating.
That’s the bitter fruit of victory. For the moment, through the smoke, a grinning Mr Osborne is visible in the mirrors. After declaring Alistair Darling’s plan for deficit reduction would turn London into Athens, Mr Osborne has actually carried it out by accident. Labour has been right on the deficit all along and Ed Balls is right now. The implied cuts to the police, defence and border control in Mr Osborne’s revised projections are too severe. Already, by the end of 2015, they will have been cut by 30 per cent. To try the same again will mark the outer limit of public acceptance of austerity and Mr Osborne, if he is still in situ, will revert once again to Labour spending plans.
The opinion polls are locked because neither party offers what a plurality wants, which is the Labour party, led by Tories. The sum total of his many failures, allied to a flinty political will which is a genuinely rare political virtue, is that George Osborne has turned into a Tory man carrying out Labour measures, the best chancellor Labour doesn’t have. The sort of chancellor Labour had in the year 2001.
