Quality | 2009.06.24
Candour is the weapon to target the Tory achilles heel | Polly Toynbee
The latest Guardian poll confirms Labour\'s one edge: public services. But to win the debate, it needs to be honest about the costs
Let\'s be honest. So say all the parties, striving to win back lost trust. But simulated honesty is all we get so far – a charade of an Iraq inquiry , both main parties ducking real electoral reform and lies all round about national debt. But if the name of the game is seeming the most honest then the Conservatives are winning hands down. However, carrying off the silver cup for honesty on future spending cuts may turn out to do them more damage than if they had lied.
They have made a great mistake in abandoning their original promise to track Labour\'s spending plans, which until now they stuck to like chewing gum to a shoe, to Labour\'s chagrin. Voters will readily believe them when they promise severe cuts to public services. Why wouldn\'t they? Shrinking the state is what Conservatives always intend. But is it what most voters want? In tomorrow\'s Guardian ICM poll, Labour only out-scores the Tories on one issue – better protecting public services (even then, only just).
Ipsos Mori is bemused to find voters still say they would prefer tax rises to public service cuts. Not believing it, the pollster tightened the question to ask if they would rather see their own taxes rise – and they got the same answer. But voters can lie like politicians: in the privacy of the polling booth the wallet may speak louder than public-spirited sentiment. However, it shows no deep rightward shift. Margaret Thatcher was always cautious: in 1979 she never promised cuts, certainly nothing resembling her slash-and-burn budget of 1981.
Undaunted, George Osborne yesterday pledged (unspecified) large cuts: no more tiptoeing around the truth, he said. He went further than Andrew Lansley : he might cut more than 10% in most departments. "The real dividing line" he wrote in the Times, "is not \'cuts versus investment\' but honesty versus dishonesty." That certainly earns him the full attention of the public. So what will he cut? Our old friends, "ID cards, quango pay and the cost of politics" – popular but hardly yielding billions. So what else? Another old friend, waste. "Radical reform" in education and welfare and "get better value for money". Considering the government\'s own stunningly unrealistic demands for efficiency savings year after year, finding treasure troves of bureaucratic slack is, at best, unlikely. Osborne\'s plans will be set out "in due course", he says, but watch out: "Some savings will only become apparent when we have the chance to look at the books in government." So we won\'t know until after an election – and that\'s not honest. There is nothing hidden in government books. It\'s all in the Treasury\'s red book.
Which is why Labour can\'t get away with pretending either. If Gordon Brown continues his pretence, as in the Commons and his Sunday Mirror article , no one will listen. After he reeled off a dazzle of dishonest figures for "spending increases" unadjusted for inflation, many voices in Friday\'s long cabinet warned that outright denial of future spending cuts was unsustainable. But those wise voices seem not to have prevailed, as Brown\'s article contrasted "our investment in public services" with Tory "cuts of 10%" that "would mean 44,000 fewer teachers, 15,000 fewer police, 10,000 fewer soldiers". Since the red book says capital investment will be halved, with real spending down for years after 2011, Labour has to tell a better story than this.
It has a good case, so why not make it? Talk about the national debt honestly and turn it against the Tories. If Britain really is coming out of recession, keep telling voters the truth: virtually every penny of debt comes from rescuing the country from depression and the knock-on effect of recession. Saving banks that were hours from shutting ATMs and starving the population, then flooding the economy with money to stop a depression, was action strongly supported by the Financial Times and the Economist. The Tories – alone – opposed it and would have plunged us back to the 1930s. Most of the debt is due to recession – when tax revenues dry up and unemployment costs soar. These costs would be phenomenally higher in a long Tory-induced depression. But there is no denying the debt.
Other useful truths follow: no one knows how large the debt will be; it doesn\'t need paying back fast; low inflation will make it easy to service while high inflation would erode its value. Osborne, the IMF, Institute for Fiscal Studies, CBI and the other pedlars of doom were all wrong in the past, failing to spot the bubble. The red book\'s own predications are usually wrong. The handful of economists who were right think Britain may be first out of trouble, so there\'s no problem selling our debt.
But of course Labour will have to make serious cuts and must admit it, or nothing it says will be believed. There are easy cuts – Trident and ID cards – but it will take more honesty than that. Public sector pensions would be brave, delaying the age of entitlement. Freezing public sector pay saves £20bn a year – but would only be acceptable if private pay and bonuses were frozen too. Vince Cable would raise capital gains tax to the same level as income tax. Imposing CGT on homes from now on would prevent another property bubble. Labour needs to open up the options.
Some spending truths will never see light of day from any party. Ring-fencing NHS growth may buy votes, but it\'s bad value for money. More lives are saved and quality of life better improved with a bigger bang for the taxpayer\'s buck in social care. But the NHS already has its bid in, with shroud-waving warnings of future black holes catching BBC headlines last week. Competing with mighty hospitals and powerful consultants, social services scattered among 152 councils are a weak force in the combat for funds. Social workers, probation officers , care homes, home helps, Sure Start children\'s centres, the fledgling youth service, apprenticeships and Ed Balls\'s youth guarantee – all these stand in the greatest peril of Conservative cuts; unseen services, badly under-celebrated except by their users.
Labour needs to promise to defend them. But to be heard, it needs to be honest about what it would cut and what it would tax in order to save them. Voters know the Tories will cut with relish anything they dare, but David Cameron will win on competence if he is the only one who seems to face up to the debt. Labour has the best record on the recession and the best record on public services – but no chance if no one believes a word it says.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]n/16/labour-fiscal-cuts-tories
