(Accidental) Honesty vs. Less bad economic management

Conservative Health spokesperson, Andrew Lansley, let slip that the Conservatives plan to ring-fence health and aid spending at the expense of a 10% cut for other departments. Labour jumped at the opportunity to cast the Conservatives as spending cutters.

Brown accused the Conservatives of being out of line with received opinion, “The only party that's proposing a cut in public spending is the Conservative party” said Gordon Brown at PMQs. What’s more, Labour proposed increased spending. (In itself, referring to public spending rather than investment is peculiar for frontbenchers.)

As it turns out Gordon Brown was being very misleading, you might even say that he was lying.

Due to the constraints placed on the treasury by the financial crisis, whoever is in government will have little choice about what to do. Both the Conservatives and Labour will do the same thing - protect healthcare expenditure and cut other departments more or less to the same amount, 10%.

The truth has come out and Brown has egg on his face. Cue George Osborne for a dose of piousness,

“The real dividing line is not ‘cut versus investment’, but honesty versus dishonest […] We should have the confidence to tell the public the truth that Britain faces a debt crisis; that real spending will have to be cut, whoever is elected; and that the bills of rising unemployment and the huge interest costs of a soaring national debt means that many government departments will face cuts in their budgets. These are statements of fact and to deny them invites ridicule.”

To the Times’ credit, they acknowledge, albeit fleetingly, that Osborne “gives no specific Conservative spending plans”.

So, is it a case of honest vs. dishonest?

Firstly, ‘honest’ should be prefixed by accidentally, reluctantly or surreptitiously, depending on which is actually the case. I would opt for accidentally given the way in which the Conservatives initially handled Lansley’s admission.

Secondly, there is more to Labour than dishonesty. As bad as Labour have been on the economy, the Conservative would have been far worse. When Brown acted swiftly to support banking when it was most needed Cameron, Osborne and Co. had little response.

Labour’s press management is appalling. Rather than the media focusing on the bold decisions made by Brown in contrast to the Conservatives' reluctance to do anything, the media are focusing on Brown’s petty lies. Labour have themselves to blame.

UPDATE

The day after this post was published Polly Toynbee offered the following advice to Labour:

Talk about the national debt honestly and turn it against the Tories. If Britain really is coming out of recession, keep telling voters the truth: virtually every penny of debt comes from rescuing the country from depression and the knock-on effect of recession. Saving banks that were hours from shutting ATMs and starving the population, then flooding the economy with money to stop a depression, was action strongly supported by the Financial Times and the Economist. The Tories – alone – opposed it and would have plunged us back to the 1930s. Most of the debt is due to recession – when tax revenues dry up and unemployment costs soar. These costs would be phenomenally higher in a long Tory-induced depression. […]

Voters know the Tories will cut with relish anything they dare, but David Cameron will win on competence if he is the only one who seems to face up to the debt. Labour has the best record on the recession and the best record on public services – but no chance if no one believes a word it says.

"The politically correct society is the civilised society"

In an interesting article about the new equality bill – ‘This bold equality push is just what we needed. In 1997’ - Toynbee briefly discusses political correctness.  

The phrase "political correctness" was born as a coded cover for all who still want to say Paki, spastic or queer, all those who still want to pick on anyone not like them, playground bullies who never grew up. The politically correct society is the civilised society, however much some may squirm at the more inelegant official circumlocutions designed to avoid offence. Inelegance is better than bile.

For more from the Polemical Report on political correctness see:

“That is why it is not on the jam jars – because we have moved on.”

Toynbee at her most divisive on the financial crisis

Polly Toynbee writes what I had been waiting for someone to write. Toynbee re-contextualises the financial crisis – she does a great job or a terrible one (if you read some of the comments). Read the whole piece and make up your own mind - ‘After the lie of the free lunch comes a real political choice’.

The Guardian columnists' view of the budget.

The Guardian columnists' view of the budget.

Jonathan Freedland’s offered an assessment that was no doubt similar to much of the Left's.

To see Alistair Darling deliver his budget was like watching a man pushed from a skyscraper window, falling calmly, even gracefully, as he somehow managed to remove his jacket, raise it above his head and tie it into a makeshift parachute.  You couldn't help but admire his ingenuity and optimism - but you still felt sure it was bound to end in a sticky mess.

Polly Toynebee’s Labour-friendly, if no more optimistic, viewpoint - 'Polly Toynbee: At last, a budget where the super-rich's bluff is called. Shame it's all too late'

When the new 50% rate kicks in next April, this last social democratic flag may be drowning, not waving

Is this a people's budget? It did soak the rich - just listen to their indignation. The 1.5% who earn over £100,000 will yet again claim an assault on "middle England". They will protest that productivity, growth, aspiration and the very future of the nation will be imperilled by skimming just a little cream off top earners. […]

Taxation is the only easy way to restore a very small measure of sanity to the unjust rewards of the rich. […]

Wealth has lost touch with reality: however often the rich are reminded that 98.5% of people don't earn £100,000 and only 10% earn over £40,000, they insist they are only "ordinary" and "middling". How cleverly the newsrooms of the right, led by extravagant earners, have diverted popular wrath on to the handful of public servants who earn more than the prime minister - without adding that this is an inevitable, if reprehensible, leakage from private-sector greed. […]

On the cuts

It hardly bears thinking about what these numbers will do to the old and disabled, children in care, children's centres or prisons. Councils will be left with shrivelled budgets to meet soaring demands from more old people and more deprived children. After the years of plenty, public servants have no experience in how to manage the coming famine. George Osborne's promise to cut now and even deeper suggests he too has no understanding of the misery this means.

For more on the 2009 budget see

• 'Andrew Neil on the 50% income tax rate for higher earners'
  
• 'Labour & press relations'
• 'Budget talk and press management'

Loan recipients risk a Friedmanite tourniquet, cutting off their economic lifeblood

Polly Toynbee on the IMF and developing nations – ‘Wall Street wounded Ghana.  IMF tonic could hurt it more’ 

Small but steady growth has been undermined by a banking crisis far away.  Now is a test of whether G20 aid will really help [...]

This is a good place to survey what Wall Street and the City did to the world.  Ghana, which has met its millennium goals on children in primary education and cutting poverty, has been an economic and political success story, with high growth.  A centre-left government has just taken over after hard-fought but peaceful elections.  It is better protected than some, the prices of its gold and cocoa holding up in the recession.  Offshore oil will flow in a few years.

But last year world food and oil prices soared.  […]  Oxfam economists point out that this was not caused by profligacy, but by external events last year.  A further source of bitterness: if rich countries had kept their 2005 Gleneagles promises, as Britain did, Ghana would have received $1bn, with no need to borrow at all.

Where should Ghana turn?  To the IMF, of course, now the G20 has swelled its treasury.  But there is deep political and public resistance after previous bad experience.  Remember how humiliated Britain felt going cap in hand to the fund in 1976.  Ghanaians know how World Bank and IMF largesse came with neoliberal quack remedies.

Cutting public services, making the poor poorer, putting cash crops and trade before welfare was the old IMF way.  It was the IMF that insisted on meters for Ghana's water supply, demanding full cash recovery for the service, steeply raising costs for the poorest.  The World Bank insisted on a private insurance model for Ghana's health service that has been administratively expensive and wasteful.  The new government rejects it, promising free healthcare for children.  The IMF wants subsidies for electricity removed, again hitting the poorest hardest.  A market policy of making individuals pay full cost for vital services instead of general taxation has made the IMF hated; Ghana has now voted for more social democratic solutions.  Freedom from the IMF feels like a second freedom from colonialism to many countries.  […]

Arnold Mcintyre, the IMF's representative in Ghana, insists that it would be entirely up to the government to propose its own measures.  This is, to put it politely, disingenuous.