John Redwood: champion of public spending growth
Frankly, the world seems a little bit crazy when Labour ministers speak proudly of making cuts ‘bigger and deeper’ than Thatcher did in the 1980s.
It seems even crazier when John Redwood, a right-winger even amongst Tories, defends the Thatcher government in these terms:
One of the myths perpetrated by Labour and the BBC is that Margaret Thatcher came in and cut public spending. She did not – spending on the main services grew rapidly under her control.
She did cut plans in 1981 to help the recovery, but the overall figures for total public spending including capital, current and debt interest were:
1978-9 (last Labour year) £71.2 billion
1980-81 (first full Cons year) £120.2 billion
1981-82 £130 billion
1983-4 £137.5 billion
What to make of it all?
Well, first Redwood is right. Public expenditure did rise in the way he sets out in the early 1980s, and there is a bit of a myth that she slashed public spending as soon as she took office.
He’s also economical with the truth, as his mates in the Commons might term it.
This is shown in the following graph from this IFS report (see also the graph on p.18 of the report):
Composition of Total Managed Expenditure as a percentage of national income, 1948-49 to 2009-10
The graph shows that, while public expenditure rose in the first Thatcher parliament by around about 2% of national income, a significant percentage of that increase was made up of spending on social security, itself a direct result of the huge rise in unemployment, which continued to increase throughout the early 1980s despite the end of the recession in 1981. Conversely, ‘other current spending’ was squeezed.
(If anyone has access to the actual raw data rather than just these graphs, I’d be happy to see it).
Thus, while Redwood is right technically to say that spending on ‘main services’ grew in the early 1980s, he is wrong to imply that what most people consider to be ‘public services’ – health, education, council services etc. - grew significantly in the same period. The spending that grew was only what had to be spent as a result of poor Tory economic policy.
Of course, this allows Alistair Darling and Liam Byrne off the hook, because they will later be able to claim that there cuts in expenditure were greater than in the Thatcher post-recession period, even though ‘real’ public services may not be as badly hit as they would be under the Tories. Why they would want to make the claim in the first place is a different matter, and a matter of regret.
The thing that bothers me is that it’s just bad politics. Middle England isn’t going to vote for Labour this time, period. Whether they’re pissed off with Europe, immigration, higher taxes and a continuing inheritance tax (neither of which affect the middling, as I ever saw it, but about which I’ve heard plenty of gripes), the wars or the attack on civil liberties and the ballooning deficit, if people want Tory policies they’ll vote for the Tories.
The most comments like this seem to do is piss off Labour loyalists – and a real danger is that a lot of them aren’t going to be out campaigning, or come out on voting day. What surprises me is why there isn’t greater anger about this amongst MPs and council candidates, whose hopes at election are being scuppered by this shallow Thatcher worship.
I have a notion that when politicians now speak of Thatcher, they are not so much invoking her policy positions or her position on the left-right spectrum, but rather her ‘spirit’ – her belief that there was a great problem in the nation and that she would tackle it, whether it made her popular or not. It’s the modern day equivalent of how past leaders might have invoked Churchill: whether or not they agreed with his politics, they wanted to be seen to share his leadership and vaguely prophetic nature.