Labour deserve to lose. But do the Tories deserve to win?

When your house is on fire you don’t call the arsonist to come and put it out. So there’s no reason to vote for Gordon Brown, who has done so much to shape Labour party policy since 1997.




New Labour’s time is almost up; it’s time for something new. The world has changed so much in the last 5 years with Obama, banks and recession. I’m looking forward to a political change.



New Labour is the project that failed. We can see that now. In 1997 the Tories were old, tired, drifting and had not delivered on public services. So now the sense of disappointment around the country at New Labour – even amongst Labour supporters – is palpable.



First things first: the recession. Every major economy went into one, but the UK had one of the most severe economic contractions, was one of the first in, the last out, and with the one of the largest national debts. The causes of the worldwide credit crunch were varied, and many. I explore them in other articles. But the weak financial position that the country his equipped with in facing the recession can certainly be laid at the door of the Labour government, and more specifically at the door of one James Brown. (That’s Gordon Brown’s real first name by the way, did you know that? Except he’s not very funky.)



Yes, that’s right, the Scottish comedian himself. As Chancellor he was the most senior Labour figure in charge of the nation’s finances, and the financial mismanagement with which he saddled Britain is his legacy. Labour decided the policy; he implemented it.



In 1997 Labour entered into a Faustian pact with the City to spend money like it was going out of fashion. Year after year I remember seeing Gordon Brown, resplendent in his dinner jacket and white bow tie, deliver his speech to the City of London. Every year, without fail, he would lavish praise on their get-rich-at-all-costs deals, their short-termism and their thrusting dynamism, while he marvelled uncritically and without the slightest trace of irony at how they had surpassed New York in the pantheon of greed and debt. Not a word about bonuses, or (much more importantly) the poisonous culture of short-termism that bonuses were encouraging.



Labour built the British economy on an edifice of lies. It was a lie built on debt, and it was unsustainable. A pyramid scheme of deception. In its essence, simplified to its bare bones, it meant borrowing money from China in order to buy Chinese goods. Madness.



Labour promised that there would be no return to boom and bust, but that’s exactly what we’ve got, and we’ve got it in spades. A fake boom on borrowed money and short-term deals arranged by the City, with a consumer boom underpinned by unsustainable house price increases and a massive increase in personal debt, cheered on by Brown. Their incompetence has been utterly staggering, and unforgivable. For sure, they weren’t alone. The Great British public eagerly lapped up easy credit and the huge debts, to get what they wanted, and get it right now. The Government fed their obsession, like a drug dealer who gives his clients more and more to get them hooked.



So now, whenever Brown or the other Labour cronies try and persuade us that they saved Britain, that their actions led us out of recession or that other parties would put us back into recession etc etc they have a problem. Every mention of words like ‘recession’, ‘recovery’, ‘downturn’, etc all remind people who exactly it was that played such a prominent role on the international stage in creating the conditions for a credit crunch, who doubled the national debt and who got us into this mess. For this reason alone, Labour deserves to lose this election.



What of Labour’s social record?



They made huge noises about it when Blair took over in 97. But their record has been mixed – and that’s being generous. The gap between the rich and the poor, by which they set so much stall, has widened. They have doubled the size of the NHS budget without really reforming the way it spends money. GPs have been paid more to do less work. There have been some bright spots in health – waiting lists have come down on many measures. But the failures of government IT projects and defence procurement projects have been more black holes into which billions have been poured.



To me, it is Labour’s failure on education (‘education, education, education’) which has been the biggest national scandal of all. Upon the quality of education the future of society rests. Labour’s failure on this will have consequences for generations to come. By the government’s own research, literacy and numeracy levels for 11 year olds are so poor as to be disastrous. OFSTED reported in 2009 that 1 in 3 British state schools is ‘inadequate’. It’s an utterly devastating indictment. Selection by ability has been replaced by selection by postcode. Discipline has collapsed and teachers are drowning in bureaucracy. After 13 years, no party should be re-elected on this record.



The list goes on. DNA profiles of those proved innocent, suspension of habeas corpus, powers brought in because of an over-reaction to terrorism, the right to trial by jury, even the rendition of human beings to places of torture have all been brought in by Labour. Labour’s mismanagement of foreign policy needs no introduction, let alone explanation.





History repeats itself. In slightly different ways perhaps, but it does. This Labour government is ending as its Labour predecessors have: with national bankruptcy, financial chaos, high unemployment, and a healthy dose of trade union militancy thrown in just for fun. Someone once said: “A devalued currency is a sign of a devalued government”. Who said that? A certain Gordon Brown, when in opposition.



There really are only two reasons to vote Labour: first, blind loyalty; second, fear of the Conservatives.



So what of the Conservatives? One thing is undeniable: any party that can’t demolish a Government that has a track record like Labour’s clearly has a hole in it somewhere. The public knows some things full well: that if the Tories had won the 2005 election the credit crunch, the banking collapse, the falling pound, the expenses scandal – all these things would have happened just the same.



Here is a home truth about the election: The Institute of Fiscal Studies estimates that most (if not all) government departments require a 25% cut in their budgets. So the choice is really a choice between three administrators rather than leaders; the winners can only become the custodians of national finance rather than radical tax-cutters or tax-and-spenders. Ideologically you can barely fit a cigarette paper between the parties now.



So this is the state of affairs: because of the parlous state of the country’s finances, there is almost no room for the next Government to make any radical ideological changes to the way Britain is governed. The money just isn’t there. All three parties agree that spending must be cut; they just differ on the extent and the timing



The deficit Labour has left the country saddled with is so enormous that there have to be huge cutbacks in spending and probably tax rises too.



The Tories want to cut deeper and quicker; Labour prefer to keep big Government spending going a little longer. It sounds like the age-old choice between Keynes and Hayek – between economic dirigisme and laissez-faire. But it isn’t so. Not any more. They are all cost-cutters now, they just won’t admit it in the election campaign.





Nothing has been more deceitful and patronising to the public than the conspiracy of silence that all three parties have maintained over the elephant in the drawing room: the budget deficit. The cuts that are required to balance the budget are so severe they make the constant pledges to ‘protect’ services look grotesque in their dishonesty. The parties have competed on who would cut the least, and who would spend the most, while the international bond markets know full well that whoever wins the election will have to cut deeper than Thatcher ever did. So they are pretty relaxed about the result.



John Lanchester, writing in The Guardian today, estimates that the gap between the parties’ spending and tax-raising plans is about £30 billion a year. Yet none of the parties has come anywhere near explaining how the nation will fill this hole. The lack of detail, honesty and transparency around this issue is cynical and breathtaking. It is the truth that dare not speak its name, and no party – not even Nick Clegg’s – can bring itself to level with the public. Maybe they think we are all mugs. Maybe we are – I don’t see the audiences in political debates rubbishing parties’ spending plans very often. More often it’s just the opposite: the more spending they promise, the more popular they seem to be. It’s put the Tories on the back foot as they can’t bring themselves to admit that their spending plans have the harshest cuts of all.



All the parties’ pledges on spending are a smokescreen to try and make the public forget about the enormous cuts that will happen sooner or later and that will spare no front-line service in the country. The Civil Service know this full well, and are preparing spending plans accordingly. They know there is no choice.



Cameron has not played his hand very well. He has a problem that is very much the inverse of Margaret Thatcher’s in 1979 - then it was big-spending social democracy and Keynesianism that was discredited; now it is laissez-faire that has been undermined. The clamour now is for nationalisation and taxing the bankers, not free-market enterprise.





Cameron’s mantle of ‘change’ has been swiped by Nick Clegg, who has deceitfully positioned himself as somehow being above politics. Everyone wants change, there’s no doubt about that. The world has changed immensely in the last 5 years. Obama, for a start. Clegg is no Obama, but then neither is Cameron.



The Tories have lost credibility by, ludicrously, promising to ‘ring-fence’ the gargantuan health budget (over £100 billion). Especially when the NHS has so much wastage in it. At least Labour and the Lib Dems have been honest enough not to rule it out. The public can sniff out populist policies like this. The Tories research has identified the NHS as a weak link for them, so they made a rash and unsustainable promise. As well as making an open-ended guarantee for expensive cancer drugs, no matter what the cost. It’s not credible.



In fact the Lib Dems are perhaps the least deceitful of the three main parties in that they have at least tried to cost some of their proposals. The public just don’t buy the argument that ‘efficiency savings’ and ‘cutting bureaucracy’ can fill the black hole of debt.



The Conservatives lack a single, consistent message. They could have stuck to a simple statement or question and hammered it relentlessly. It can only be about one thing: the debt. How about this: “Are you better off now than you were 5 years ago?” Or “Why trust the arsonist to put out the fire?” Or “Who bankrupted Britain?” Or “Labour have blown it”.



Instead they have jumped around from gimmick to gimmick, like a few extra quid to persuade people to get married. As I have said in previous posts, Gordon Brown has actually won the leaders’ debates, simply because, like all good generals, he succeeded in choosing the ground that the battle was fought on. In a word, ‘cuts’. He relentlessly put Cameron on the defensive by challenging him to match Labour’s preposterous spending plans – when the battle ground should be : why trust the arsonist to put out the fire?



The only inventive thing the Tories have come out with is the idea of the ‘Big Society’ (presumably to replace the ‘Big State’). It’s a good idea on its own merit – the State has, after all, failed to alleviate social problems, or run the economy – but it doesn’t chime with the economic climate, the economic debates or people’s most pressing concerns. The ideological tide is shifting towards more state intervention, not less. So although a good idea, the Tories have shot themselves in the foot with it.



Labour’s theme is ‘Tory cuts’; the Lib Dems is ‘we are different’. The Tories don’t have a theme. In a way they are doomed in the same way that Labour are; except for the Tories their downfall came from the arrogance of assuming that because the economic situation is so bad they only had to turn up to win. Looks like they will regret that now.