Here’s an unpopular but correct statement: there never was any austerity. The problem the Labour Party now has to deal with is that their supporters don’t believe it.
The result is producing a mood of fury among left-leaning activists – as can be gleaned from reading the expostulations on Twitter/X. It seems that many really believe that the b*stard Tories throttled government spending and can’t understand why Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer are now refusing to turn the spending taps back on.
In this view, necessary parts of government have simply been starved of funding for years. Therefore, now we’re seven weeks into a Labour government, the solution is simple: reverse the Tory cuts. Return spending to where it was and sweetness and light will return, with milk and honey flowing through the land again. Even some Guardian columnists buy into this false account.
Perhaps that should be no surprise. The Guardian and such places are where this problem started. We’ve had at least a decade of being told that all problems stem from ‘austerity’. This is taken to mean that government has been refusing to splash the cash.
But government has been spending more money. As the term is popularly understood, there has been no austerity. Here are two charts:
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Spending has been rising all along. Yes, this is nominal, without accounting for inflation, but spending in pounds hasn’t fallen. Here’s another chart.
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This one shows real numbers, after inflation. Okay, education slipped a bit but there’s an element (only an element) of a change in how student loans outstanding were to be treated in that. We’ve not, in fact, got a big decline in spending there, have we? We’ve certainly not got a starved NHS nor social protection – which means welfare payments and state pension and so on.
Fine, there are more technical senses in which we can say that there was at least some austerity (and there is also a decent economic rationale that can be made for that).
Yet the current meaning that has real value among the electorate is that the Tories, the b*stards, just stopped spending government money. Those are the ‘cuts’ they are expecting a new government to simply reverse and let the milk and honey flow again.
Yet the Conservative Party didn’t, in fact, spend the last 14 years reducing government spending: quite the opposite. Large parts of the Labour electorate have however convinced themselves – egged on by a large part of the press – that government spending has fallen and that it will be easy to reverse. But they have been taken in. There is no switch on spending waiting to be flipped.
This, then, is the joyous problem that the current government has to face. The voters are sure there is money now the Tories aren’t blocking it – but there ain’t. Politics isn’t about what’s true, it’s about what people believe, and 14 years of rhetorical insistence have left a large number of people convinced that all Labour has to do is spend money that doesn’t exist because it’s already being spent.
What now, then?
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