Last week George Osborne converted omni-shambles into omni-rout. The Chancellor, whose ill-devised Budget a year ago left him looking cack-handed, vanquished his political enemies and snookered his Coalition partners with a sure-footed statement on public spending. In the process he cemented the Tories’ victory in the battle of ideas, and opened a new political era.
Even the prospect of the statement set Labour’s Ed Miliband and Ed Balls vigorously waving the white flag of surrender.
For three years their argument has been that with interest rates so low, Britain should borrow and spend more. Yes, the Britain which has the highest annual budget deficit in the EU, and which (as Labour likes to remind us) is adding to the national debt hundreds of billions of pounds on top of what Osborne originally planned.
Labour’s dreamy answer to the country’s debt problem goes down well with trade union leaders but to the public it now seems ridiculous. Families struggling with the mortgage, choking on yesteryear’s easy credit and drowning in plastic card interest payments cannot see how additional borrowing can make any more sense for government than it would for chip card.
Oppositions usually say ridiculous things and must embarrassingly then ditch untenable positions. Labour is right to do so now, to give it a chance of looking sane at the General Election.
Still, these have been hellish weeks for the shadow team. The Labour view of the world is falling apart. They’ve pretty much accepted the Government’s policy on schools (even though Michael Gove’s cunning plot spells the end of local government control and presages the destruction of trade union power).
Worse still for Labour, in a few months the reputation of the National Health Service has crashed. At last, it can be seen for what it is: a final surviving nationalised industry. Like telephones, gas and electricity before privatisation, many of its employees are indifferent to their customers (in this case sick people). The organisation has suffered producer capture, the point where it is run for employees not patients.
Most devastatingly, Labour set up a supervisory body charged by Ministers with covering up every outrage to protect the NHS’s reputation (or rather the Government’s). Anyone who squawked about dying patients was bought off with money that might otherwise have helped dying patients. This ultimate example of Labour spin must have left the NHS’s founder Aneurin Bevan gyrating in his tomb. Labour has nursed the NHS from cradle to grave: once its midwife, it’s now killed it off.
Little wonder that Labour’s not complaining about how little money the Chancellor is giving to health. With increasing numbers of elderly patients, and with new and expensive treatments emerging every day, the squeeze on the NHS would now be horrendous, if we didn’t all know that it had been given money to burn, certainly to waste and misuse, during Gordon Brown’s baleful reign.
Labour’s not squealing much about slashed police budgets either. How can it, when we know of the service’s scandals from sick pay to early retirement, from Hillsborough to Stephen Lawrence? What’s more, another ten per cent has gone from local authority budgets with hardly a whimper from Balls, because only waste has poured out of the town halls as they’ve passed through Osborne’s wringer.
The Government is shrinking the client state: that over-sized group who work for the state, are housed by the state, or live off the state, and who on polling day vote to expand the state.
Without the Cabinet’s hatchet work, the private sector could never recover, crowded out by vested interests and excessive taxation. Nor, indeed, could the Conservatives hope to win another Election.
This all sounds revolutionary, and it is. Britain is being turned around. In the least promising of circumstances – with a listless economy and soaring public debt – the Government is radically reforming schools, universities, health, policing and welfare. It has piled in where Thatcher feared to tread.
Tory backwoodsmen whinge that they have been held back by their Lib Dem partners. The opposite is true. The Coalition has been ‘given permission’ for much more radical policies than would have been tolerated from a Tory government, whether minority or majority. The BBC has felt neither compelled nor authorised to wage savage war against it, as it did against Thatcher. What right would it have to hound a Coalition that represents 60 per cent of electors at the last Election?
If the Tories and Lib Dems fought together they’d keep their ministerial offices and limousines, and continue to do the right things for the UK. But too many backbenchers in both parties yearn for Opposition, preferring hallucinogenic ideological purity and political irrelevance to the mucky reality of governing.
The Lib Dems are going to look mighty silly at the Election. ‘Which bit of what the Government has done do you disagree with?’, they’ll be asked. There’s no good answer. If they give examples, they’ll be asked why they went along with them. If there are no examples, how do they account for ditching their partner and their achievement?
But the Conservatives know that outside the Coalition they stand a poor chance of winning. There’s scarcely any precedent for a governing party increasing its share of the vote.
Thus Labour, the guilty party whose world has collapsed and whose henchmen are being unmasked with each new public sector scandal, may be rewarded by being returned to office.
So why does Osborne’s statement mark an historic moment? He’s abandoning the key flaw in democracy: that it sets politicians in competition with each other to promise too much. They’re then forced to borrow, passing the bill on to the future. That’s how we have a massive debt, and how a generation that had free university tuition, were home-owners and who could expect a comfortable pension, has given way to one that owes money for its fees, pays rent and has no savings.
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