Some
of the proposals announced in the Tory manifesto yesterday seemed, at first
sight, to be an attack on one of their most loyal groups of voters,
pensioners. Anecdotal evidence is
necessarily unreliable as to the attitudes of the many, but after seeing a few
pensioners interviewed following the launch, I suspect that attacking their
benefits is not much of a gamble after all.
There are plenty of them prepared to blame immigrants, overseas aid, unemployed
people – anyone except those actually taking the decisions. Getting different groups to blame each other
looks like a successful political strategy, sadly.
But
it’s the response to the economic aspects of the manifesto that struck me. I posted
a few days ago that the expectation that any political party could
realistically produce a sound costed manifesto for the next five years was
plain silly, because there are too many unknowns and variables. What parties can do, however, is look at one
or other side of the balance sheet. They
can, for instance, set out their approach to taxation and borrowing, and state
that they will manage expenditure in order to meet their targets. Alternatively, they can set out a programme of
policies and state that they will manage taxation and borrowing in order to
deliver that programme. It’s a bit like
an economic version of the uncertainty principle – you can do one or the other
but doing both is impossible.
In
2010 and 2015 the Tories effectively took the first approach. They set out their over-riding aim of
eliminating the deficit within 5 years, promised not to increase any of the
main taxes, and simply stated that they would cut spending in order to achieve
that. Detail on what would be cut was
sparse, to say the least, but they got away with it because they framed the
whole debate in terms of the absolute necessity of that objective. As it subsequently turned out, on the basis
of the bar which they set for themselves they failed miserably. Not only did they not eliminate the deficit,
they borrowed ever more.
In
this election, they have thrown that approach out of the window. Yes, they still have some vague commitment to
eliminate the deficit by 2025, but in essence, their approach this time round is
to set out their programme and state that they will adjust taxation and
borrowing as necessary to deliver that programme, without spelling out any
detail. The chances of them achieving
that deficit target look slim to me, but it doesn’t matter because it’s more
than one election away, and it was always the wrong target anyway. The ‘deficit elimination’ mantra served its
political purpose of framing the agenda and putting the other parties on the
spot; it was never that important in economic terms.
The
point is, however, that the Tories have been allowed, for three elections in a
row, to set out the detail of only one side of the equation, whilst the other
parties have been forced onto the defensive in trying to explain exactly what they
would do about both sides. How has this
happened? Why are we in a situation
where the bar has been set so much higher for everyone else? Double standards have been applied with the
active support and complicity of the press and media, including the
publicly-funded BBC. The real victory of
the Tories, not just in one or two elections, is that they have been able to
turn ‘impartial’ news media into their own propaganda arm; barely challenging
what they say and do even in comparison with their own self-imposed target
whilst tearing pieces out of anyone failing to meet a higher – and essentially
unattainable – standard.
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