Danny Finkelstein, the Times columnist and former adviser to William Hague, and Frazer Nelson, the editor of the Spectator, have engaged recently in an internet back and forth regarding the latter’s speech to the Centre for Policy Studies’ Keith Joseph Lecture, in which Mr. Nelson argued that the Conservative Party should be far bolder about cutting spending than it has been, especially regarding its ring-fence guarantee for the NHS.
Rightly, Mr. Finkelstein disagrees.
First, he spells out some political home truths to Mr Frazer, correctly arguing that promising to cut public services has been tremendously unpopular with the electorate. Trimming (or slashing, the verb the Parallax Brief is sure Mr Frazer would prefer used when discussing government spending) public services has traditionally been the kind of political high wire act that sees governments and oppositions topple over to their doom, as, indeed, has happened to the Conservative Party itself in recent elections.
In other words, Mr. Finkelstein concludes with a memorable tartness, it bears remembering “that a party seeking government not simply the paramilitary wing of an oped column.”
This is all very correct, and Mr. Finkelstein could have progressed to make an economic argument against immediate cuts, which if made too early would surely shatter the fragile recovery, reducing GDP and having the perverse effect of increasing the real debt burden.
But what the Parallax Brief was more interested in was Mr. Finkelstein’s implied accusation that Mr. Frazer doesn’t really have an altruistic concern about the budget and sound economics, but is simply furthering a zealous low-tax-low-spending dogma.
“Critics on the right, including Fraser, have spent the last few years before the crisis complaining that the Tories are not fiscally lax enough. They wanted the party to back unfunded supply side tax cuts that they hoped would bring in income through increased growth.
The Cameron-Osborne position that tax cuts came second after stability was ridiculed.”
There is, of course, nothing wrong with demanding tax cuts per se, but it’s a bit rich to demand tax cuts one minute and rebalancing the budget the next. But there are two sides to a budget, revenue and costs, and the right only ever want to decrease the costs. If Mr. Nelson was really concerned about balancing the national books, he would advocate sharp tax rises as well — and he’d certainly not have been advocating tax cuts when Gordon Brown was running a 3% deficit at the peak of the economic cycle from the Treasury.
What’s more amazing is that the right get away with this. It seems to have become the economic norm when a budget deficit needs to be brought under control to argue that there’ll have to be cuts. None of the medjya’s talkingheads ever seem to say, “The budget deficit has reached 12% of GDP, and that means we’re all going to have to pay higher taxes”; but that’s no more preposterous than saying “…and that means we’re going to have to suffer swingeing cuts to the NHS and schools.”
Really, the right isn’t interested in balancing the books, because if you presented them with an argument for doing so with, for instance, increases in estate tax, a new band of income tax for those earning more than a million pounds a year, and increases in VAT on luxury goods and houses costing over two million pounds, they’d balk.
What they’re actually interested in is lower tax and lower public spending.
The Parallax Brief really doesn’t like the idea of tax hikes above the already high burden, and believes it is clear that at some stage in the next parliament the public sector is going to need to be seriously deflated, but the right shouldn’t be permitted to conflate two separate issues.
Peter Hoskin on the Spectator’s Coffee House blog has an interesting take from Michael Portillo, who the Parallax Brief last remembers in Government as the uber-Thatcherite Dark Prince of the Right.
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