Good old Channel 4. They’ve done a Factcheck on Brown’s claim, repeated (twice) at every PMQs session that (for example yesterday):
“If we’d listened to Liberal party advice we’d be cutting public expenditure by £20bn this year.”
Now, I think it would be fair to say that Channel 4 Factcheck, marvellous though it and the Snowman are, is not the weathervane of the nation’s political mood. Tabloids will not rush to reproduce these findings. But never mind that for now, give yourself a break and weep with relief as you read the following:
The Lib Dem tax and spending policy is too convoluted to sit neatly in sound-bite territory, but Brown only tells half the story.
A policy document adopted at Lib Dem conference this autumn paved the way for spending cuts. The party reckons the government wastes £20bn on what it considers white elephants -the likes of as ID cards and child trust funds.
However, the party also plans to redirect at least some of the cash to areas it reckons need more money, such as education and social care.
The party has promised tax cuts elsewhere – such as 4p off income tax, made up for by increased taxes on higher earners and polluters – and if not all of the £20bn were needed for the party’s priority spending areas, some of it would be given back in the form of deeper tax cuts.
So Clegg leaves the door open for public spending cuts, though not £20bn worth. This open door can be an open goal both for those who believe in cutting public spending and those who – like the PM – support increased spending to combat the economic downturn.
So although it’s not – arguably – the most politically sensible move for the Lib Dems to leave this grey area for attack in their policy, it’s doesn’t mean the PM can keep misrepresenting it. Not without FactCheck raising an eyebrow, at least.
Many would agree – have agreed on these pages – with their analysis of the unwisdom of said “grey area”. And as long as Brown thinks he can get away with this, he will, even if Factcheck proceeds beyond the raised eyebrow to the sardonic stare.
But we are where we are, and all that. We’ve all had our ha’penny’s worth about this lately, so perhaps it’s time for a summary and some – hehehe – yellow sky thinking. How do LDVers think we can best hit back at this accusation of Brown’s (both at PMQs and in general campaigning)?
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18 Comments
Agressive agitation in two words both in terms of rolling it out on the web and including it in local Focus litrature.
By coming up with specifics on where we think the £20bn of wasteful spending actually is, and where we will redirect it to, rather than just having that figure hanging over us. Although there is an argument that we need to keep our powder dry for a General Election campaign, we should start giving more details soon. We can’t just start campaigning on the £20bn during the four weeks of a General Election campaign – we need to be campaigning on it in advance as well – both in the House of Commons and in the country.
Agreed Bernard…we should cost it, stick it on a leaflet and go door knocking and delivering in every Labour target seat.
The best way to hit back is to plead guilty as charged. That we want to cut £20 billion from dreary wasteful government spending, and that we don’t particularly want to spend it on other dreary wasteful things. That we should return it to the people whose money it was in the first place. That pouring money in at the top never ever worked. That people have a right to their hard earned cash, including when in gets passed from one generation to another. That £20 billion is just the beginning. That we are now a party of the centre-right. That the beard and sandals are gone for ever.
Ahem . . .
Just putting it on leaflets though is not enough. What sort of leaflets? What sort of advertising?
Well maybe a special edition of Focus; I agree it’s not enough and there is plenty more to do but the general thrust of what I am saying is that we can’t expect the media to give us an awful lot of help.
Yes – the savings need to be identified, to enable the party to say where they wouldn’t come from as much as anything.
Conversely the party should talk more about the priorities that the savings would be redirected to, and what that extra spending would achieve.
And forget about saying “maybe there will be a few billion left over for tax cuts, if we can spare the money”. If Clegg wants to talk about tax cuts, he should talk about the far bigger £18 billion of income tax cuts that have already been properly costed.
“If Clegg wants to talk about tax cuts, he should talk about the far bigger £18 billion of income tax cuts that have already been properly costed.”
That’s what he has concentrated on in recent days/weeks (and much more effectively IMO)
Does sort of pose the question what purpose the £20bn serves other than giving people a stick to beat us with.
The idea of “keeping our powder dry till the elecetion” runs counter to every single campaigning training session on the importance of repetition of campaign messages.
In fact as I understand it and as I was briefed by our Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury to the Conference this fact check misunderstands the policy as well. In fact there are two lots of £20 billion. The first lot is the tax package passed at Conference previously in which we reduce the lower rate of income tax, paid for by more green taxes and taxes on wealth. The second lot is the package passed this year which redirects spending to our priorities including the ID card money to more bobbies on the beat and which we will use for FURTHER tax cuts if we have any money left over.
There I have just proved how convuluted our tax policy really is!!
Peter
I don’t think the “Factcheck” is inconsistent with what you’ve just said.
First, let’s make a clear distinction. This one (the famous £20bn) is our Spending Switch programme. The income tax cuts (CCF’s £18bn) come from a competely separate Tax Switch programme. It is, of course, very sensible of us to have two comprehensive reform programmes, to tackle both the way Government raises money, and the way they spend it.
Secondly – on the Spending Switch – here are the wise comments of Daniel Finkelstein as mentioned on this site a few days ago (and yes, I’ve been selective and left out his less wise rants!):
” As … talk of ‘by the time of the next election’ basically acknowledges – the Libs have identified nothing like £20bn of savings. I think it is perfectly possible to save £20bn but I bet my house that the Lib effort will end up being unconvincing.
These exercises – I’ve run one – end up confusing one-off capital savings which might reduce spending in one year, with ongoing reform. They also often get the amounts wrong. This sort of work is much better done in office than in opposition. ”
OK. So how do we dig ourselves out of that? My suggestions are:
(1). Make the £20bn our ball-park “aim” figure – not a promise.
(2). Announce that we are going to do a one-off exercise to identify some waste, and/or we are going to keep our eyes peeled and periodically tear off NuLab a strip whenever we see waste happening.
(3). Keep finding wasteful items and publicising them, one at a time. Now for example, if we start with the £10bn wasted on ID cards, we should admit that this is only a ball-park estimate as of now today, but with those qualifications, it will do. Grin and accept it if someone authoritative says it would only be £5bn.
(4). Make sure we get to the election having amassed a grand total of say, £43bn potential savings in various dribs and drabs, i.e., let’s try to beat our £20bn target comfortably. Cheerfully admit that some of the figures may be approximate and/or out of date, but, bang the drum and say, just look at how much we could save if we didn’t adopt the Brown tractor-production model of big government.
(5). Then tell everybody how we would spend the savings on more useful priorities, and how that would create lots of new jobs.
Bernard, on where the money will come from, these are some of the wasteful and low priority projects we will make savings from –
· Scale back means tested tax credits for above average earners
· Abolish the Child Trust Fund
· Scrap BERR
· Cut the road building program
· Cancel ID cards
We will invest the money in our priority programmes like guaranteed care for the elderly and extra investment in the poorest children’s education (pupil premium). And if there’s money to spare, we’ll channel it into extending our tax cuts for people on low and middle incomes (remembering that we also have the 4p income tax cut, which is funded separately, by tax increases on the wealthy and on pollution).
Remember, £20 billion is 3% of government spending. Does anyone seriously believe that 3% of government spending could not be being spent in a more effective way?
I think this is a pretty strong message to campaign on now.
David Allen, I would urge trust in our Treasury team. I have no doubt the savings they come up with will be robust, as indeed they were in 2005.
Labour – and Gordon Brown in particular – always claim our sums don’t add up. But the claim is based on no evidence whatsoever. The IFS have looked at our figures and agreed that they broadly add up. At the last general election Brown employed the same tactic, but a freedom of information request for the costings of our policies after the election found that our estimates were either the same as the Treasury’s or we had been slightly more conservative.
One potential problem with announcing our complete list of savings now which nobody has mentioned is, even if we had the list completed and robustly costed to our satisfaction, by a year’s time it would have changed and would need to be rewritten. We had one or two problems in this area in 2005. Our costings for savings were robust when they were put together, but some of the figures changed before the manifesto came out simply because the cost of particular programmes to the Government changed. It wasn’t our fault but it highlighted the dangers of preannouncing the finer details (rather than the broad brush) of your manifesto too early.
George, it’s not a question of distrusting our team. It’s just that as Finkelstein says, you can’t possibly know enough to get it right if you’re not in government and you haven’t seen the books.
I don’t think it is good enough to say we are soon going to identify loads of waste but we can’t tell you what yet. We have to spot what’s going wrong at the time it is going wrong, and shout up. Even if we can’t put a precise figure on it. Shouting up is what will get us noticed!
George, that list of things you provide is fine, but they need to be backed up by specific figures, both for the amount we’d save and the amounts we’d spend on other priorities/tax cuts. And I also doubt they’re anywhere near £20bn in on-going spending (eg most of the cost of ID cards is one-off expenditure rather than on-going spending). I take your point that things can change, but at the moment I don’t think we’re getting across that we have ideas about particular areas of spending that we wish to cut. Instead, we’re allowing opponents like Brown to portray us as being in favour of across the board cuts in public spending.
I think we need a slogan.
As I’m not very original I’d point out that our principles on taxation come from the same place as our environmental principles – so the ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’ mantra could easily be applied to economic wastage, just as it is to environmental wastage.
I’m not so worried. The mood is for tax cuts ahead of spending on services so we flog it for all it’s worth. We can tack once the message is out far and wide.
BTW I heard that when the Brown/Darling plan was punched into the treasury super-computer the answer came back… “Computer says no…”
Nick said on the Daily POlitics today that we would announce our savings “within the next few weeks”