Prateek Buch, director of the Social Liberal Forum, has an article in today’s Independent – The Lib Dems should not sign up to Osborne’s austerity straitjacket – issuing a stark warning to his fellow Lib Dems to take note of the “enormous red flag” he says was waved by George Osborne in last week’s Autumn Statement.
That flag was the Chancellor’s pledge for the economy to move into surplus by 2018/19, within the course of the next parliament. To achieve that – what, in effect, was the original Alistair Darling plan to eliminate the deficit over two parliaments – will be no mean task, as the Institute of Fiscal Studies made clear in its assessment of the Autumn Statement:
[Osborne] has said that he wants to extend the effective consolidation for another year, into 2018-19 by freezing total spending that year. Since “annually managed expenditure” [ie, social security payments, including pensions] will still be rising then that implies another hefty cut to departmental budgets. He doesn’t need to do that to meet the Government’s fiscal targets. And, if he is still in number 11, he may not find it easy given the pressures on spending that will without doubt have built up by then. As the Office for Budget Responsibility has pointed out, achieving this would require “general government consumption to fall to its lowest level as a share of national income since consistent data began in 1948”. … This would actually imply an acceleration in the rate of public service spending cuts – from 2.3% a year between April 2011 and March 2016, to 3.7% a year between April 2016 and March 2019. Simply to avoid such an acceleration in cuts in this kind of spending would require cuts in welfare (or other “annually managed expenditure”) spending of a further £12 billion a year by 2018-19.
And here’s Prateek’s version for a Lib Dem audience:
The Liberal Democrats cannot, or rather should not, sign up to the Chancellor’s plan to lock in austerity – deeper than planned at any stage since 2010 – up to and beyond 2018. For one, it is economically illiterate. For another, the ink is barely dry on a hard-fought deal struck by the party to fight the next election on our “own distinctive economic policies,” including fiscal plans to aid investment in “people, business and infrastructure,” not on the same terms as Tory austerians. Any deal to balance the budget in the next Parliament no matter the state of the economy – and more importantly, peoples’ living standards – flies in the face of that independent economic position.
The Lib Dem leadership don’t accept Prateek’s analysis. They say all three parties signed up to eliminate the deficit (ie, ‘balance the books’) over the course of two parliaments – but how this would be done will differ. The Conservatives will clearly look to achieve it through deeper spending cuts. The Lib Dems will be far more likely to advocate more tax increases on the wealthy, including Vince Cable’s mansion tax, and fewer and different spending cuts, including to wealthy pensioners’ benefits. So they’re quite content to sign up to the overall plans while disagreeing on how they would be implemented and putting that to the voters.
The Independent also carries an editorial on the party leadership’s economic positioning, In supporting George Osborne’s ‘fiscal contract’, Nick Clegg mapped out his party’s future – and his own:
Despite the grumbles we report today, events of the past few months have strengthened Mr Clegg. After a good party conference, he has rarely had more authority as leader. If he were replaced, for instance by Vince Cable or Tim Farron, they would inherit policies that they may have opposed privately, or indeed publicly, not so long ago – assuming they stick with the Tories. If it is a Lib-Lab administration it would be even worse; a new Liberal Democrat leader would have to renounce the central planks of economic policy proposed only weeks earlier at a general election. This is Cleggonomics: by tying his party to the Coalition’s economic agenda, Mr Clegg has tied his party to him.
It’s conclusion is abruptly supportive of what it terms ‘Cleggonomics’:
Committing the Lib Dems to a continuation of Coalition strategy puts his party in an unfamiliar position: promising less than it could deliver if it gave itself a freer hand to negotiate with Mr Cameron and Mr Miliband. But it is the mark of a serious party; and, moreover, it is the mark of a party of government .
* Stephen was Editor (and Co-Editor) of Liberal Democrat Voice from 2007 to 2015, and writes at The Collected Stephen Tall.
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Sorry Stephen but this is just plain wrong:
“They say all three parties signed up to eliminate the deficit (ie, ‘balance the books’) over the course of two parliaments – but how this would be done will differ.”
What we signed up to is to eliminate the structural deficit. A nebulous concept at best, I am sure you realise this is that part of the deficit which does not bear any relation to the economic cycle. This is completely different to what Osborne is aiming for – an absolute surplus in 2019, eliminating both structural cyclical deficits. Even aiming for this, and failing – as IFS and every single other serious commentators says we would – will distort tax and spend decisions at a time when the recovery is still fragile, investment is still too low and living standards nowhere near rising.
I am afraid I disagree wholeheartedly with your analysis that we can agree to the aim of surplus by 2019 but seek to achieve it differently – in this case, agreeing to the aim ties us to an unacceptably austere and economically damaging direction of travel that risks distracting us from the real work of rebuilding the economy.
So which is it? Has Clegg “tied [us] to the coalition’s economic mast”, as in the indie editorial, or is the strategy distinctive (as the conference vote requires) as you claim yourself?
Rebutting the (very good) SLF position with two self-contradictory arguments doesn’t look very coherent, Stephen.
@ Prateek – “I am afraid I disagree wholeheartedly with your analysis…” I think I made it clear this was the Lib Dem leadership’s line. They’re not necessarily one and the same thing 🙂
My view… I agree with most of your analysis. I think setting arbitrary targets for generating an absolute surplus and writing this into law is typical Osborne: political not strategic. I agree the UK government has a woeful record of public investment – we should use Heseltine’s plan as a blueprint – but we also need to acknowledge there’s been a lot of wasted money along the way. I would like us to return to Gordon Brown’s golden rule – borrowing only to invest across the economic cycle – with one difference: I’d like us to stick to it.
“The Lib Dems will be far more likely to advocate more tax increases on the wealthy, including Vince Cable’s mansion tax, and fewer and different spending cuts, including to wealthy pensioners’ benefits.”
I really hope people aren’t going to get into the habit of lazily invoking the mansion tax as a cure for all fiscal ills.
It’s projected to raise no more than £2bn – a small fraction of the sums the IFS is talking about in the report quoted above.
And hasn’t the Mansion Tax already been earmarked to go towards funding the Lib Dem proposals for a further multi-billion cut in income tax after 2015?
hahah I mis-read that line, in which case I wholeheartedly disagree with the leadership’s analysis 🙂
Hold your horses everyone. This discussion is totally academic because it is based on the OBR’s forecasts of economic growth, which are crucial in determining projections of revenue, the other side of the budget question.
Since we don’t yet know where UK growth is heading at the moment, we don’t know how much revenues are going to be and hence how much of an imposition moving into surplus could be. Moreover, if the economy were to grow at its current rate (0.8% per quarter or 3.2% a year) as part of a catch-up phase for the lost years following the crash, we could find ourselves being able to bring down debt as a percentage of GDP without having to run a surplus.
So getting hung up over a future projection when all the projections so far have turned out to be wrong, seems pretty pointless to me.
The much more crucial point is, do we think that we should be targeting a certain level of government spending as a percentage of GDP? As far as I can gather, in 1948, public spending was about 39% of GDP ( http://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/total_spending_chart ). In 2000, it was 34%. So I’m not sure why 1948 is supposed to be such a landmark or some kind of nadir in public provision.
To my mind, the most important distinction to make, rather than some bogus debate about projections that are so far ahead no-one can possibly know what they really mean, is whether we agree with “shrinking the state” beyond its normal, long term UK level of around 40%. I passionately believe this is a redundant Orange Booker idea that has no place within the Lib Dems. There is no valid argument to show that a priori the UK will be a better place because of a smaller state. It is just pure, unjustified ideology that has no evidence to back it up. If we look at the most prosperous, stable and contented societies, principally those in Scandinavia, the opposite is true. It is the idea of “shrinking the state” as being a valid goal in itself that we need to fight, rather than some notional figure five or six years hence in some unknowable future.
as long as the reverse holds true, fine:
that we should not seek to grow public spending beyond 40% of GDP, because after all, we have never persuaded the taxpayer to part with more on any sustained basis.
how does that sit with you?
As sensible pro-market commentators like Martin Wolf have pointed out governments need a degree of flexibility in how they approach fiscal policy. Committing to running a surplus by 2019 come what may is just plain silly. What if there is another financial crisis? Perhaps then the plan would have to be refined. But that’s the point. If the target is at the mercy of events, it’s a pointless target and certainly mad to be enshrining it into law, hardly a very liberal thing to do I would have thought. Clegg needs to start saying no more often and call Cameron’s bluff. But then I’m starting to think he doesn’t really disagree with Cameron…….
@ Jedibeeftrix
I don’t think anyone would argue that there should be a target to raise state spending upwards to a certain percentage of GDP. Only Gordon Brown was foolish to see that as a goal with the NHS, and look what happened there. It mostly disappeared in rising wages and other costs.
The thing that matters is what you do with public money rather than precisely how much of it you spend. If you are spending it on productive investment in infrastructure, skills and universities, it could be higher than 40%, but it certainly would not be a target. What would be the point of that?
@ Frank Booth
If you have read the Orange Book, you will see repeated references to the “nanny state” and such like. I hope Nick Clegg is more level headed than the likes of David Laws in avoiding such a “hate the state” mentality, but I fear you might be right.
Nick Clegg needs to be clearer about where he stands on this issue. Is he an ideologue who sees cutting the size of the state as a desirable goal, or is he a pragmatist who sees the state as being capable of being a useful means of pursuing desirable social and economic aims where the market fails to deliver?
This state spending = 50% GDP needs to be put in context. Ultimately much of what the state does is simply recycle money between citizens. You pay a lot of tax on one hand to be given sizeable benefits with the other. However spending that goes straight back into peoples’ pockets is hardly the same as public investment or spending on public services.
There is a supposed to be a principle that we sign up to nothing after 2015-16 because we fight the election as an autonomous party with an independent policy. (some of us would prefer that to be 2014-15 but there we are).
This is surely a bottom line?
Tony
From Prateek’s article: “the Chancellor’s plan to lock in austerity … is economically illiterate.
Indeed it is – apparently Osborne isn’t very good at arithmetic. There is an accounting identity (it’s basic double entry bookkeeping, not a theory) that says: Domestic Private Sector Financial Balance + Governmental Fiscal Balance = the Current Account Balance (or Trade Deficit/Surplus)
That’s a bit of a mouthful; what it means in plain English is that changes in private debt + changes in government debt = the trade surplus.
So, as long as we are running a balance of payments deficit (a negative sign in the above equation), then the sum of private and public debt must be equal and also negative – meaning growing debt in the equation. Stop and think about that and it makes good sense. If we run a trade deficit (as we do) then someone – public or private must incur debt to finance it. The debt bucket has a leak.
Probably in such circumstances both public and private sectors will see debt increase. It’s theoretically possible for one to assume the entire burden but that would mean the other’s debt would grow faster to compensate.
What Osborne is proposing is that government debt will initially grow more slowly then move into actual surplus. What he doesn’t explain is who he expects to pick up the slack. Maybe he thinks that over the next few years Britain will displace China and Germany as the export powerhouse of the world. I don’t – we have immense structural problems in the real economy which remain unfixed. Maybe he thinks that the private sector will take the strain. His ‘Help to Buy’ scheme certainly takes us in that direction as does the run-down in private savings but I think that by and large the people are maxed out with debt. Also if at any point a substantial fraction of the public is unable to service their loans (perhaps as a result of some global disruption) then the banks that lent them money will be in trouble again.
Bottom line: whatever the path of the economy over the next few years Osborne’s plan isn’t going to work. It sort of looks like it’s working right now only because private debt is, for the moment, increasing but that can’t/won’t continue. There is a clever ditty that summarises this folly.
“And now the budget’s balanced
Retrenchment is the hero
On either side is entered
A solitary Zero”
GF – absolutely right – which is why a budget surplus leads to a recession – viz Clinton’s surplus and Bushes recession.
GF – Rising debt is a particular concern when you consider the rock bottom interest rates we have right now. I’m not opposed to those, enough sensible economists seem to be of the view that higher rates would lead to a depression to convince me we should stay at 0.5%. However that’s okay whilst people are reducing their debts – it’s paradoxical in a way, but even with such low rates, in times like these, people would rather save than spend. However once people start getting into debt again, as is now happening, it’s a potential timebomb. Interest rates will eventually have to rise and those on tracker mortgages will suffer.
@ GF
Sorry but this kind of accounting definition economics is quite meaningless and I think you’ve got it wrong in any case.
The basic equation is that net borrowing for the household, corporate, government and external sectors must sum to zero, borrowing from one being lending from another. At the moment, households are saving a bit, companies are saving a lot, government is borrowing a lot and the external, overseas sector is lending (saving) a lot.
What the chancellor is hoping for is for government to borrow less and the corporate and external sectors to have less of a positive balance as they respectively spend more on investment goods and import more. This is the kind of balanced recovery we have been hoping and praying for and is entirely consistent with the basic equation.
At the moment, the recovery is imbalanced towards domestic consumption, but that is because it is the only recovery on offer at the moment. There are no others available. There is no point in blaming the chancellor for that. There are no other sources of significant growth possible at present.
We will have to hope that either our exports to the world outside Europe, which are growing at present, will soon be accompanied by at least stabilisation, if not increase, in our exports to the EU. Business investment is a lagging indicator, but as long as we can have some growth in internal demand plus rising exports, that should follow eventually.
Thanks solely to the Lib Dems we are at least trying to rebuild our productive capacity in the UK, although not nearly to the extent we should be. It will be a long haul though because of the mistakes made over recent decades by the other two parties.
“Thanks solely to the Lib Dems we are at least trying to rebuild our productive capacity in the UK, although not nearly to the extent we should be. It will be a long haul though because of the mistakes made over recent decades by the other two parties.”
Oh come on, you’ve done no better in government than anyone else.
Exports are feeble, especially given the devaluation of the pound.
“I don’t think anyone would argue that there should be a target to raise state spending upwards to a certain percentage of GDP. Only Gordon Brown was foolish to see that as a goal with the NHS, and look what happened there. It mostly disappeared in rising wages and other costs”
So paying NHS staff decently is money “disappearing”, is it? How progressive.
And it wasn’t “only Gordon Brown”. He acted upon the Wanless Report, written by someone not exactly a public sector insider. And as you well know, there were plenty of other things going on, people didn’t just sit there and do the same with more money. And nice use of “Gordon Brown” there to mean anything that happened under Labour, because he’s a baddie! Boo!
This is what the Kings Fund said in 2010.
http://www.kingsfund.org.uk/publications/high-performing-nhs
Lots of much improved performance. Plenty to do.
The last thing the NHS needed was you and the Tories to trash your commitments on the NHS. The King’s Fund are now pretty sure you’re going to miss your productivity targets now.
Shouldn’t they have been easy, given that silly old Gordo was wasting all that money?
“As sensible pro-market commentators like Martin Wolf have pointed out governments need a degree of flexibility in how they approach fiscal policy.”
Yes, Martin Wolf is good on this sort of thing.
Among his other points was that it was ridiculous not to get much needed infrastructure done, with borrowing rates as low as they could possibly be.
Instead we’ve seen the Coalition slash capital spending in their first year, and pursue Labour-style off balance sheet financing.
Private Eye point out today that Osborne’s projection for investment is that it will fall.
“it could be higher than 40%, but it certainly would not be a target. What would be the point of that?”
Well quite, RC, i did suggest the target be tied to public tolerance for taxation….
@ Tubby Isaacs
“Oh come on, you’ve done no better in government than anyone else.”
Er, that’ll be apart actually having an industrial policy for the first time in decades, investing in millions of apprenticeships, setting up the Green Investment Bank, setting up the British Business Bank, and the Regional Growth Fund….
“Exports are feeble, especially given the devaluation of the pound.”
So that’ll be everything to do with Coalition policy and nothing to do with the Eurozone crisis, then will it? Outside Europe, our exports are doing very well actually. Exports to China are up 20%+ on last year.
“And nice use of “Gordon Brown” there to mean anything that happened under Labour, because he’s a baddie! Boo!”
Not as if Labour supporters would ever use Nick Clegg in the same way ever, is it? Gordon Brown was the man with his hands on the purse strings at the time, so associating him with this policy is perfectly valid.
“So paying NHS staff decently is money “disappearing”, is it? How progressive.”
If you think wage inflation didn’t happen, just look at how Labour handled the new GPs’ contracts. Costs rose, productivity didn’t. Come on, be a bit more honest and admit that mistakes were made and that scarce money was not well used.
“The last thing the NHS needed was you and the Tories to trash your commitments on the NHS. ”
And we didn’t, so what are you talking about? Labour left us with a massive budget deficit to sort out. The NHS has been largely protected from cuts, certainly compared with other services. How on earth is that supposed to be “trashing our commitments”?
“Instead we’ve seen the Coalition slash capital spending in their first year”
Just as Labour planned to do. Which other areas would you have rather seen cut? Benefits, hospitals, schools? Or would you rather just have pretended the deficit just wasn’t there or that there was some other kind of cut that could have been made without actually cutting anything that anyone would have noticed?
I get pretty irritated at the kind of comment that somehow implies that we could just ignore the deficit, avoid any cuts and that if we’d just carried on as if nothing had happened it would all have come right, exports would have boomed and all of this “nasty Tory cuts stuff” could have been avoided. Frankly it’s wishful thinking at best and at worst, quite dishonest.
Adding to what Tony Greaves has said, is it not the case that no parliament can commit a successor parliament to anything?
Denis,
Correct that we do not bind a future Parliament, but the point is about where we stand, how we see the future and what we put in our manifesto. If CLegg is putting us with, or too close to, Osborne, then we are not a distinctive party and (as the article in the Independent quoted by Stephen implied) weakening our bargaining position after the next election; even if it could be said that we are putting ourselves as a party of government rather than opposition we are continuing to abandon our principles.
@ RC
There are a lot of accountants around the world that would disagree with you. This is a perfectly proper way of keeping track of financial flows in national accounts as much as in any other context; any version of economic theory that cannot handle that is frankly bizarre and on a hiding to nothing.
The basic equation is as you say but one can merge or disaggregate each of the terms to suit the context. I chose to run with only three terms for simplicity and then to move the ‘Trade surplus/deficit’ term to the right side of the equation because it made for an easier supporting narrative. However, if I read you correctly, you have the wrong sign for the ‘external sector’ (aka ‘Trade surplus/deficit’ in this context); it all depends on where the observer is and whose accounts he is tracking. It looks to me as if you switched half-way through to reflecting the perspective of an export surplus country like China but, as I say, I may be reading you wrongly here.
It’s actually starkly simple. We are financing our trade deficit ultimately by issuing IOUs. These may or may not be direct to, say, China as third parties can be involved, but a growing pile of IOUs to someone is the underling reality. So more imports = more debt and the question forced by the original equation is who then in the UK is on the hook for those debts. Is it the government or the private sector or a bit of both? To the extent it’s the private sector we should ask which bit of it – which is of course an intensely political question we are not really discussing at all?
Of course at some level (a rather fuzzy one, I suspect) the government knows this which is why there has been so much effort put into promoting exports (the Chancellor is definitely NOT hoping to “import more” as you suggest). The trouble is just about every other country is trying to do the same at the same time. So what Osborne is doing is trying to find ways of kicking the debt can down the road and/or shuffling the growing pile of debt off the government’s books. One strategy is to load part of it onto students (hence student loans); another is Help to Buy (where I am guessing the huge contingent liability isn’t being properly accounted for); yet another are FPIs and similar like getting the French and Chinese to pay for new nuclear (where once again I doubt the accounting is transparent). This just means we will pay through higher energy bills (plus a very hefty premium for interest at a high rate accumulated during construction) instead of more government debt paying very low rates.
What the Chancellor is NOT doing is dealing with the debt in a people-friendly way although this exists. He has chosen to do it in a bank-friendly way which is a political choice. Follow the political donations and it’s clear why this is so but it does mean he’s just digging us into an ever-deeper hole. That no party, sadly not even the Lib Dems, is prepared to argue for a people-friendly solution is disgraceful. No wonder Russell Brand speaks for so many.
The Independent’s conclusion is odd. I don’t see what weakening a party’s negotiating position has to do with being a party of government, and durable governments have often been durable precisely because they were prepared to rethink as they went along.
RC,
“Er, that’ll be apart actually having an industrial policy for the first time in decades, investing in millions of apprenticeships, setting up the Green Investment Bank, setting up the British Business Bank, and the Regional Growth Fund….”
So what does this industrial policy actually entail?
Are you seriously saying no-one had done anything to get growth to regions before? Successive governments have moved government bodies out of London to places that were struggling. What’s happened recently is that the Coalition rubbished those parts of the country as too dependent on government spending. You couldn’t make it up, you really couldn’t.
Then there’s the carnage brought about by your cuts.
http://ig.ft.com/austerity-map/
Middlebrough probably doesn’t need £717 per working age adult coming out of it.
Here’s the commitment the Prime Minister has to the region.
http://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/news/10852693._Typical__Cameron_snub_for_the_North_East_as_only_two_of_region_s_business_leaders_chosen_for_landmark_trip_to_China/
“Just two of 131 seats on David Cameron’s plane were allocated to company bosses from the North-East, the official No.10 guest list shows.
In stark contrast, no fewer than 75 of the 131 places were handed to business leaders from London and a further 17 to firms from the Home Counties.”
No commitment at all. Working for the richest parts of the country.
The National Audit Office have just published a report about your regional growth policies too.
http://www.nao.org.uk/press-releases/funding-structures-local-economic-growth/
“While the Government closed the Regional Development Agencies effectively, it did not establish the new local programmes covered in today’s report in time to avoid a significant dip in local growth funds and jobs created. Direct central government spending on local economic growth through the initiatives fell from £1,461 million in 2010-11 to £273 million in 2012-13, but will rise to £1,714 million in 2014-15.”
Pitiful- regions sawn off for a quick hit on deficit figures.
“Not as if Labour supporters would ever use Nick Clegg in the same way ever, is it? Gordon Brown was the man with his hands on the purse strings at the time, so associating him with this policy is perfectly valid. ”
He was Chancellor for the majority of it, not Prime Minister. Clegg, we’re told, personally OKs much of what goes on- you certainly make enough of him “stopping” stuff.
“So that’ll be everything to do with Coalition policy and nothing to do with the Eurozone crisis, then will it? Outside Europe, our exports are doing very well actually. Exports to China are up 20%+ on last year. ”
The Eurozone Crisis in which the government did nothing at all. You’re the government in one of the biggest economies in the world., despite the obvious effect they have on Britain. You didn’t even rhetorically oppose the disasters going on over there. Aside from a small amount for Ireland, you went along with the Eurosceptic Right’s “not having any of our money” line. Even doing nothing, exports, with the weak pound, to Europe were poor. And they’re poor elsewhere too.
The OBR sees the trade gap not getting any better for as long as it makes predictions. Industrial strategy?
You’ve turned into Jeremy Hunt, I see. If that GP contract is so awful, do something about it. You’ve had 3.5 years. What you trashed was your commitment to the existing, basically public NHS. How can you seriously defend putting “making PCT’s elected” in the Coalition Agreement then soon afterwards signing up the abolition of the whole structure?
The contract may have been bad, I don’t know- it looks generous, I agree. So sort it out. I’m also at a loss to understand why if GPs are so lazy and overpaid, they need to be made the lynch pins of the new system.
NHS productivity:
http://www.york.ac.uk/news-and-events/news/2013/research/nhs-productivity/
“The research shows that NHS productivity has increased by 8 per cent since 2004/5. There have been year-on-year increases in the number of people receiving treatment and continued improvements in 30-day survival rates. Staff numbers have increased by almost 11 per cent since 2004/5 but increases have flattened out recently. There has been pronounced growth in the use of other inputs over time.
Productivity growth of 3.2 per cent between 2009/10 and 2010/11 was driven mainly by a slowdown in staffing, with levels of activity being maintained.
Health Minister Lord Howe said: “NHS staff have risen to the challenge and worked hard to deliver this impressive improvement in productivity”
Unfortunately, nobody now thinks you’ll achieve the productivity targets you set yourself by 2015, which doesn’t reflect very well on your reforms.
“I get pretty irritated at the kind of comment that somehow implies that we could just ignore the deficit, avoid any cuts and that if we’d just carried on as if nothing had happened it would all have come right, exports would have boomed and all of this “nasty Tory cuts stuff” could have been avoided. Frankly it’s wishful thinking at best and at worst, quite dishonest.”
Sorry, you’re the party are the dishonest ones. You were left an economic position far better than the headlines because of the existing low debt and its extremely prudent scheduling.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15717770
“both Spain and France have smaller deficits than the UK, they will have to borrow comparable amounts to the UK in total – more than Britain in the case of France (according to Bloomberg data) – because so much of Spain’s and France’s debt is short-term, and needs repaying next year.
It’s the number “13.99” which tells you the UK isn’t bust and probably won’t go bust. That’s the average maturity of British government debt, the number of years that we as taxpayers have to pay off what we owe our creditors.
Those 13.99 years should surely be long enough to reconstruct our economy to generate growth in a balanced and sustainable way, to prove that we can pay our way in the world”
You’ll see there the problems France, pre-Hollande was facing. Yet to hear you now, you’d think Hollande had blown some brilliant legacy.
Banging on about the deficit (intended to peak that year anyway) was at best being half truthful. You’ve been taken over by people like David Laws to the right of the Tories on economics, who wanted to do this cutting for ideological reasons.
Labour’s position on the deficit was better, but still rather craven. It takes its share of the blame for that, but your utter dishonesty didn’t help. Your leader, having campaigned for cuts to start later during the election, purported to have been scared by Greece and changed his mind. This despite the main change being the deficit coming in lower than predicted.
Oh, while I’m being moderated.
Do you, RC, still say it was only some clique around Gordon Brown who thought spending on health needed increasing a lot? Or that nobody did anything to make the money work?
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2002/sep/25/comment.libdems2002
“Nationally, the Lib Dems were pushing for higher expenditure on public services long before this year’s Wanless report, commissioned by Gordon Brown, that documented the staggering £267bn cumulative shortfall in NHS investment over 30 years compared to average European investment.”
There you go- Gordon Brown and Sir Paul Wanless hadn’t got there as quickly as you, that was the line.
That was then, this is now, right?