Comprehensive Spending Review: Labour’s secret counterplans revealed
Posted on Thursday 21 October, 2010
Filed Under Economics, New Labour
I HAPPEN to have a copy of the briefing that the Parliamentary Labour Party issued to Labour MPs yesterday to tell them what to think about Osborne’s Comprehensive Spending Review.
It bills itself as ever so exciting, hush-hush, need to know basis, on the QT stuff. At the foot of each page, the following menacing words are written in italics: ‘PLP briefings are the property of the Labour Party. They are confidential and are for the use of registered members only. Any publishing or dissemination of PLP political briefing is prohibited and maybe unlawful.’
Seasoned journo that I am, I have been eagerly skimming through the document this morning so I can reveal the sensational critique and killer counter-arguments the comrades have marshalled to nail the ConDems’ evil plans to foster the return of Thatcherite misery. Sadly, I have to report that aren’t any.
There is a section headed ‘script’ which is laden with pre-digested soundbites for regurgitation by the lobby fodder. For instance, one of the lines to take reads: ‘And while we recognise that cuts need to be made, there are too many examples of where the Government has made the wrong calls’. The optimal number of wrong calls is not specified.
The second part reassures readers that ‘There is an alternative’. That alternative – as is well-known by now – is to halve the deficit over four years rather than eliminate it entirely over five years, by means of a watered down and slower version of what the Tories and Lib Dems are going to do anyway.
The clichés start in bullet point number one, which stresses that ‘tough choices need to be made’, including on welfare. I am not entirely sure what ‘a reformed DLA gateway’ is when it is at home, but I suspect that the equivalent colloquialism would be something like ‘let’s turn the screws on those benefit-scrounging raspberry ripples, except nicely’.
Public spending on ‘vital public services’ should be cut by less than the coalition proposes. Nevertheless, vital public services should still be cut.
There follows a milquetoast Keynesian bit about ‘rebalancing deficit reduction towards tax’, with the targeted tax rises funding £7.5bn in capital spending. If that means taxing the bankers and spending on public works, I’m all in favour. And, er, that’s about it.
Obviously it would be stupid to suggest that Labour’s programme is no different from the coalition’s programme. Not-quite-so-nasty is obviously preferable to out-and-out-Tory-bastard nasty, especially for those at the sharp end.
The problem is that this timid document unnecessarily buys into free market logic. Because the thinking of the mainstream left in Britain has been in the deep freeze since 1994, we do not have an updated version of the Alternative Economic Strategy of the 1970s and early 1980s.
The AES was deeply flawed, not least by the pervasive influence of Stalinist notions of central planning, and cannot simply be resuscitated and expected to fight its corner in the twenty-first century world.
But it cannot be beyond the wit of today’s leftist economists to come up with some practical counters to Osborne’s spiteful homiletics.
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17 Responses to “Comprehensive Spending Review: Labour’s secret counterplans revealed”
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The AES was deeply flawed, not least by the pervasive influence of Stalinist notions of central planning, and cannot simply be resuscitated and expected to fight its corner in the twenty-first century world.
You underestimate the CPB and their allies in the trade union leaderships, Dave.
Why don’t you put it up on the site in full?
Bollocks to the copyright stuff.
Bingo Dave, that is exactly how that Eagle woman responded on Newsnight, even mentioning the ‘DLA gateway’( euphenism for more cuts/harrassment.) They really haven’t changed from NL, have they?
That’s quite sad.
I would if it was even remotely interesting. Trust me, it isn’t.
It’s a bit early for killer critiques, isn’t it, Dave? Surely it’s better to have waited to see what has been proposed; to see who it’s going to hit and on what scale; to sift through the various arguments, criticisms, defences and interpretations; to do your own sums; and then do some thinking and consultation with like-minded people to come up with arguments and a strategy that have a chance of resonating with the way people think and believe, and how they live, today. Because if its left to the SWP and their sort, you can be sure that the answers will be “imperialism” and/or “the boss class”, no matter what the question—the same shrewd all-purpose answers that have buttressed their broad-based appeal and kept them at the cutting edge of political life in this country more than the past 50 years.
New Labour are a bigger problem than the Tories, they have brought us to this place. Not because the world wide crisis was their fault but because they set into motion all the changes the Tories are now bringing about. New Labour brought us half way, the Tories are finishing the job. Think New Labours changes to the NHS and academy schools, tuition fees etc etc etc. THE political task is to fight against New Labour (not the Tories) and win it to a socialist position. The immediate task is to fight the cuts.
I feel your pain – no, really, I do – because I have somewhat similar feelings towards a Conservative party that has conserved virtually nothing in my lifetime, let alone actually becoming what its critics, like you, call ‘re-actionary’. But then again, un-like you, I learned years ago to treat politics as a spectator sport, or perhaps a three-ring circus. As the late Auberon Waugh told us over and over, your average MP is a social inadequate with deep psychological problems, amongst which I would add almost terminal dimness.
Well the IFS have just stated that the Treasury actually kept nearly all of the benefits cuts out of their sums, in regards to “fairness” in order to come up with a lot of their tables, and figures. And Osborne’s claim that he was only cutting 19% across the board.
Sorry, that’s just plain hilarious. Osborne doesn’t include nearly all of the benefit cuts in his sums, so he can come up with some stats to say it’s a fair way of paying!?
The IFS also state that Osborne also doesn’t include any cut after 2014 in his sums. As in the last year in parliament. Which is also the time where the benefit cuts hit the hardest.
Sorry, there’s a serious argument to say that Osborne has misled parliament here
Any remotely sane supposedly left of centre grouping would be advocating the bracingly progressive solution of printing a shitload of money (whilst safeguarding pensions.) Given the amount of personal debt out there it might even be popular with the “aspirational.”
I defy anyone, those with inherited assets/no chins excepted, to find a single economic or social drawback to a phat burst of inflation.
As Osborne criticized the previous government for poor regulation of the banks on Wednesday, I tried to remember him and Cameron criticizing them for this before the financial crash. Somehow connecting the Tories to anti-City policies just doesn’t ring true does it? Under regulation of the financial sector started in earnest with Maggie’s Big Bang didn’t it?
We have a problem. It’s the consensus among our political class, which includes the PLP, in following neo-liberal economic policies. Quite how Gordon Brown thought he could avoid boom and bust while following this ideology beats me. The system needs the the boom and bust cycles. I find it hard to give Brown much credit for anything, but he seemed to realize that changes were needed after the bank failures. That Darling, Dave Miliband and Johnson didn’t shows what we are up against.
We need an alternative to this and none is presently being offered. Is there no intellectual debate on economics anymore? A lot of people are looking for an answer and an alternative.
I tell you what, if the only ‘official’ opposition to the Coalition’s cuts program is Miliband and Johnson, then we are TRULY fucked. I mean did you see Ed at PMQ’s before the CSR on Wed.? Seriously, he’s a dictionary definition of a uselees fucking bog brush. And as for Johnson- well what can I fucking say? The man’s a complete fucking bellend.
As Les Abbey has already said, there is absolutely no clear cut, popular, ideological alternative around which a sufficient number of people can rally. Forget Her Majesty’s loyal opposition- they are a total waste of time, space, energy and matter.
Surely there must be a better way than letting people resign themselves to a dismal fate?
You don’t have to go that far to find economics alternatives. Never mind an AES for 2010, what Stiglitz has been saying to anyone who will listen, what Blanchflower writes every week in the New Statesman is some way beyond what Labour’s line appears to be. The ideological grip of seeing the crisis solely in terms of the deficit has been almost total amongst media commentators. Almost no-one has made the point that no matter how savage the cuts are, even in their own terms they will fail to deliver the projected deficit reductions unless the magic private sector recovery actually happens. For factional reasons Labour wouldn’t elect Ed Balls as leader, for those reasons and because the media tagged him a “deficit denier”, Miliband wouldn’t have him as shadow chancellor. He at least made some attempt at an alternative narrative. Re. the previous post – during the great cut-backs in the 1980s and 1920s Labour was unable to garner effective support and I rather fear that the Tories will still manage to win the next election.
The mystery is why after all these woooonerful years of progressive progress, anyone (present comatose company excepted) would expect anything “other” from what’s satirically called… The Labour Pary.
Watching Miliband Jnr crash and burn on Wednesday (PMQs) – and Alan Johnson’s (I’m just a hack – please look away now) CSR response, proves conclusively there is NO life after death. Why else would Mili have given Pat-twat the shadow chancellorship? To placate the placators? Homer nods, Tony nods even louder from a distance.
Now Playing in the hall… “Things can only get VERY much worse.”
Perhaps we should adopt sky’s advertising strapline, ‘Believe in better’?
Here are the known facts so far for local government direct from the front line:
Total of 7.1% cut in revenue budgets per year and significantly front loaded, i.e. higher cuts in 2011/2012. The actual cut will be higher than 28.4% in real terms as this is not adjusted for inflation.
45% cut in Capital funding by 2014/2015. Councils will be able to capitalise redundancy costs via a £200m fund!
Dedicated Schools Grant will increase by 0.1% in real terms in each Spending Review year but Education Capital will fall by 60% and the DfE’s non-schools budget will decrease by 12% in real terms.
£1 billion cut in flood defence despite Environment Agency predictions that current investment needs to double by 2035, or of warnings by the insurance industry that it will only offer cover for flooding if the Government continues to invest
adequately in flood risk management.
The 20% real term cuts in the Home office budget is expected to place extra stress on council budgets.
How this actually translates into front line services is as yet unknown but we already have worked up the impact on 25% cuts and the outcomes are startling.
Unless there is a fight back the motto should read “There is no such thing as society, big or small”
Day after day I am at my wits end to explain to myself why this country is not lighting fires in the street as I write. As are the French.
Then I come across a comment that reminds me.
‘I learned years ago to treat politics as a spectator sport, or perhaps a three-ring circus’ David Duff
The self serving, dripping, surreal cynicism of that is mind boggling.
Coming as it does from someone whose politics have shored up a monolithic three party right wing system for decades.
The only ‘spectator’s’ to this coming social holocaust are those who caused it. So called Liberal Democracy – in hook to the latest wheeze with fascist financiers – as in Murdoch.
Stop kidding yourself David. As you supposedly sit in ‘The Royal Box’ watching peoples education, jobs, families, pensions and lives, bite the dust.
Your politics are what caused this.
Enjoy the show
Some of us here really are ‘in this together.