It was the Tories’ fault. It was that £22bn black hole, you see. Oh, but now it’s Trump’s fault. And in any case … erm … yes, that’s it, the world is changing.Thanks Rachel Reves. It’s easy to blame someone, anyone, else. But we all know the truth: it’s actually the fault of Labour, and Reeves herself, for borrowing billions more, for taxing billions more and for spending billions more, while dreaming that somehow it would all deliver growth.
And not just any old growth, by the way, but the fastest growth in the G7 (like we actually had under the Tories just a year ago). It was all lefty pie in the sky. Pure wishful thinking. The reality, no surprise, is that our economy is flatlining because of Reeves’ trash talk last summer, then, worse, her awful borrow-tax-spend budget. Many of us considered the OBR’s 2% growth forecast woefully optimistic. And so it’s proved. The OBR has now slashed that forecast in half. And even that might be a stretch.
Meanwhile the government will soon be spending the equivalent of the whole education budget on debt service payments (we are literally borrowing money to pay off our borrowed money), while business and consumer confidence plummets and more and more people get dragged into the higher-rate tax band. No wonder living standards are forecast to fall between now and 2030. No wonder businesses have stopped hiring.
And remember, Reeves’ £25bn jobs tax hasn’t hit yet. But it will next month, followed by a massive increase in the minimum wage and a crazy expansion in enterprise-destroying workers’ rights. If Rachel’s Recession isn’t already upon us, it could well be soon. It certainly feels like it.
A More in Common poll says that the Tories, booted out of office just last summer by an angry electorate, are now more trusted on the economy than Labour. That shows how bad things are for the government. Economic confidence has drained away with Labour’s poll ratings.
To be fair, at least Reeves has used today’s emergency Budget … I mean Spring Statement … to cut a bit of her previous spending spree, despite the howls of outrage from her own backbenchers. Cuts to the ballooning welfare bill and to the bloated civil service are welcome.
But it’s not as though she’s seen the light. Because her cuts won’t be nearly enough. They were the only option left to stay within her own fiscal rules, but the size and reach of the British state will remain grotesque, made far worse by that October budget, an ageing population and the ridiculous numbers of working-aged adults (2.7 million of them) written off as too sick to work. Meanwhile, public-sector productivity is pathetic. The big state is doing more, and worse, and that’s not going to change with a few efficiency savings.
The truth is that Britain’s sluggish economy will never get back into the fast lane until the government cuts the state by a magnitude way beyond anything Reeves is considering, thereby giving proper room for lower taxes. She can talk all she like about stimulating growth through an “active state”, but meaningful growth can only come through enterprise. The state must do less, better, and allow the private sector to flourish. But don’t hold your breath.
This Spring Statement humiliation is the price Labour pays for humongous over-promising before the election. We’ll bring “change” they proclaimed, and everything will get better once those evil Tories are out. The voters are now starting to see just how big a lie that was.
