Political Observer offers a brief evaluation of portions of his political intervention.
Nov 03, 2024
Headline: Our £1.5 trillion state will mean nothing without innovation
Sub-headline: Kemi Badenoch beware, there is no guarantee that voters will return to the blue team after being brutalised by Labour
Sunday November 03 2024, 12.01am GMT, The Sunday Times
What might The Reader make of this report from The Times of November 3, 2024
Headline: Rachel Reeves: It was wrong to promise I wouldn’t raise taxes
Sub-headline: The chancellor defends her budget and denies it was motivated by class or ideology
Sunday November 03 2024, 12.25pm GMT, The Times
Reeves was asked whether her decision to raise taxes on private schools, users of private jets and multi-million pound farming estates was motivated by class.
“It wasn’t an ideological budget,” she told the BBC’s Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg. “It was a budget where we had to raise £40 billion to put our public finances on a firm footing and also to ensure our state schools, our NHS are properly funded and that we can build the homes and indeed invest in those long-term investment opportunities … to grow our economy and bring good jobs paying decent wages.”
Following a backlash from farmers, Reeves defended her changes to inheritance tax on agricultural estates and said they would only affect the wealthiest landowners.
Notwithstanding Mr. Colvile’s lack of knowledge of Rachiel Reeves statement:
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Labour thinks budget is a success — yet concerns mount over what’s next
The chancellor told an admiring Labour Party that they had ‘made our choices’, but the public reception to her far-reaching reforms remains highly uncertain
Friday November 01 2024, 10.10pm GMT, The Times
November 03, 2024, 12.25pm GMT, The Times
A few years ago my colleagues at the Centre for Policy Studies think tank noticed something extraordinary. Boris Johnson’s government was poised to become the first in British history to spend a trillion pounds — not just on Covid firefighting, but every single year.
Last week they noticed something else. Thanks to Rachel Reeves’s budget, that figure has risen. Substantially. In fact, by the end of this decade “total managed expenditure” will top £1.5 trillion.
It is hard to get a handle on how large this number is. By my estimate, if you gave away a £10 note every second, spending £1.5 trillion would take you more than 4,750 years. Lay those tenners end to end and you’d get to the moon and back, 25 times over.
Now, I may have got those calculations slightly wrong. There were a lot of zeroes. But by any metric, this is an absolutely staggering amount of spending — whose growth rate is completely unsupported by the economy that is paying for it.
And this is the underlying truth of the budget — what is behind the record-breaking tax rises, and the extra borrowing too. We are entering the age not so much of the big state but the super-state, the mega-state. As a result of Labour’s decisions, both taxes and spending will hit levels — as a percentage of our GDP — that have never been reached in peacetime, or, in the case of the tax take, in wartime either.
Editor: Mr. Colevile’s above paragraphs, uses the vehicle of Boris Johnson, to act as a rhetorical bridge to a critique of Rachel Reeves’ budget. And the appearance of the rhetorical phantoms of the not just the big state but the super-state, the mega-state. The Regular reader of Mr. Colvile confronts his panic about The State as anathema to the Thatcherite Hayekian civic/political romance!
Reader there are 887 words left of Colevle’s essay yet nowhere to be found is the actual fact, evidence of Tory financial profligacy, incompetence:
Headline: The lost decade: The Tories spent all the money
Sub-headline: The party’s programm of austerity has choked the economy, harmed public services and doubled the national debt.
Since the Tories came into power in 2010, the national debt has more than doubled. It now stands at more than £2 trillion. They have increased the national debt more than every Labour Government combined.
At the last Conservative Party Conference, Boris Johnson applauded the Tories for having “tackled the debt and the deficit” left by the last Labour Government. But, the truth is that the Conservatives have created a huge national debt. The Tories are the real culprits of ‘spending all the money’ rather than the disingenuous phrase of “Labour spent all the money” – which is one of the biggest myths in UK politics. What is also conveniently forgotten is that the Labour Government ran a surplus between 1998-2002 – an achievement almost unparalleled in modern history in the UK.
In 1997-1998, public sector debt as a percentage of GDP was 40.4 per cent; in 2007-2008 it was 36.4 per cent; in 2010-2011 it was 60.0 per cent; and in December 2019 it was 82.9 per cent.
…
Colvile ends his essay here, yet The Reader finds these paragraphs maladroitly comic, tinged with mendacity!
Politically, the great challenge for the government is to show that all this spending actually works — that this great swollen state can actually deliver. For its opponents, the scenario is manna from heaven. If you were trying to come up with the perfect recipe to reconcile the Tories with their electoral base, it would involve stripping benefits from the elderly, a massive tax raid on business, rising gilt yields, hikes in inheritance tax, furious farmers and a general sense that Labour promised the earth to get elected and then instantly reverted to type.
Yet the Tories’ new leader should not be complacent. There is no guarantee that voters brutalised by Labour will return to the blue team, especially given its record in office.
More to the point, even if Kemi Badenoch can pull the Conservatives back into contention, any future Tory prime minister will face the same awful situation. A state for which that £1.5 trillion figure is just a starting point; which despite those huge inputs is still failing to deliver the services its citizens expect, or the growth; which is taxing and spending at rates never before seen.
In short, the challenge for the Tories over the coming decades will be the same as for all Britain’s politicians: wrestling with Leviathan.
Political Observer
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