Labour have got lucky

Some guys have all the luck. And some parties have it too. And, despite being the progenitors of the worst financial mess in living memory, Labour have actually had more luck with the timing of economic cycles than the Conservatives.


The Governor of the Bank of England said last year "whoever wins [the 2010] election will be out of power for a whole generation because of how tough the fiscal austerity will have to be". That’s Labour’s first slice of luck - they don’t have to clean up the mess they’ve created. That’s been left instead to the other two parties. Having laid waste to much of the nation’s finances Labour can now sit back and watch as the Coalition (more specifically the Conservatives) get the blame for fiscal retrenchment – that’s ‘cuts’ in plain English.


But history repeats itself. In 1979 the outgoing Labour Government left Mrs Thatcher to take over a country in economic chaos. Debt, inflation, strikes. Britain was known as the ‘Sick Man of Europe’. All this and an IMF bailout 3 years before. Not a million miles from where we are today. The Conservatives embarked on a period of squeezing the money supply and restoring financial responsibility. It was painful but it worked.


Fast forward to 2011. The Coalition have implemented cuts, which are severe, but in fact take public spending back only to 2005 levels. The UK is only reducing the rate at which we are borrowing - and no-one wants to admit this. But Labour can still contrast the ‘cuts’ of today with the spending policies of their tenure. This is their second slice of luck: everyone's forgotten the cuts that Labour would have had to make. The narrative has been set: Tory cuts versus Labour spending. Ed Balls was the driving force behind much of Gordon Brown’s folly, but everyone’s kind of forgotten that now. Why? Because he's not the one making any cuts!

So Labour have got away with the preposterous strategy of criticizing each and every spending cut while refusing to spell out a single cut that they would themselves have made. Alistair Darling claimed that Labour would indeed make billions of pounds of cuts, just they would not make them as quickly as the Conservatives proposed to. Ok then: what are they? Perhaps someone can know when they've told us.