Though Cowards Flinch

On the evening of Thursday 24 September, click here and you’ll be able to watch Conservatives arguing hard for additional borrowing.

Sounds unlikely?  Well, it’s true.

The venue for this bizarre reversal of Conservative orthodoxy will be the Council Chamber in Preston, where Lancashire’s new Conservative administration will argue for an additional £10million in immediate borrowing to cover additional revenue costs, £9 million of this for ‘highways works’, and a further £39 million over three years to cover a range of capital costs.  See press coverage here for a quick overview.

A Tory council spending massively beyond its means?  A Tory council making future generations hostage to fortune?  What’s going on?  Has Cameron, who was up in Preston on 05 June celebrating his people’s success, heard about all this? Why hasn’t the council cabinet been expelled for Keynesian heresy?

The truth of the matter is that the Conservative party is all over the place on public spending.  Behind the rhetoric, there’s the reality that the Tories in Lancashire promised the earth in Lancashire in order to get elected, and now they are being found out.

They promised all the potholes would be mended, and now they realize they can’t afford it without borrowing £9 million.

This is £9 million that is being, pretty literally, poured down holes, holes which will only reappear when the temporary filling degrades, on road which need proper resurfacing.

And, as the press coverage makes clear, it’s £9million which will be paid back through savage cuts in a range of other service areas.

Of course it makes sense for council to borrow money to invest in the future, especially when interest rates are so low.   What the Tories in charge of Lancashire County Council should be doing is borrowing enough, or taking enough from its reserves, to do the highways works properly, so that potholes repaired now don’t have to be repaired again next year.

But more importantly, Lancashire Conservatives’ borrowing exposes the national Conservative rhetoric on borrowing for what it is – empty rhetoric.  Just as an incoming Thatcher government promised fiscal restraint and then proceeded to increase public spending throughout its first term, so to the Tories will tell us one thing to get your vote, and then do another.

Just watch the Lancashire Tories in action this Thursday, on the webcams installed by a Labour administration, as they live the lie, live on your PC.

Oh, and just check where they are planning to borrow the money from.  That could be very interesting.

Follow some more debate here.

To be continued………

(Note: Both Don P and Blograde Dave have good new posts up about Tory hypocrisy and/or viciousness on local government spending.  TCF is due to host Carnival of Socialism next week, so we may make it a theme, linking into the Tory Trojan Horse that is it’s planned General Powers of Competence legislation.