One of the things that makes a Labour victory more likely is that we don’t know how bad the crisis is.
The national debt currently is £31,400 for every man, woman and child. It will have gone up by the time you read this. If that’s hard to grasp, think how much of an overdraft and credit card debt you would have to be in before you were in trouble. Unless you’re in the top 5% of earners, or you’re innumerate, that would be considerably below the £31,400 we’re currently in hock by.
So I was on the train (I’m still going into the office three days a week, soon it will be two) talking to a friend who is to the right of me by a considerable margin. We were talking about the crash and we then talked about the need for cutbacks. “Take train fares” I said “there’s no way they’ll stay so low when the subsidies are lobbed off. No one’s saying they’ll do it but we’re really subsidised and most people think we’re middle class.” That, it seems, was totally unreasonable as commuters already pay too much tax.
At work I was talking to a colleague, an Economics graduate. Again we were talking about cut backs, “but what really rankles is the talk of cutting back child care vouchers for those on 40% earnings.” Guess who had children and was earning 40%.
The reason I give these two as an example is that they are economically literate people who have been following the present crisis and were working during the early 1990s. They think that they’re prepared to make sacrifices. They would scoff at the Gordon Brown idea that no cuts should be made.
However, and this is the killer, they were shocked that these sacrifices would involve them in any considerable way. And that’s what the opinion polls are showing, too, people want cuts but they believe that it can be through efficiency savings and that front line service cuts need only affect other people.
Neither political party has spelled out that cuts are going to be painful, and they are going to hurt a lot of people who will feel blameless. The Tories did start, but they’ve rowed back.
Whether it is going to be through higher taxes, spending cuts or inflation, we will be paying for a generation for the last decade of economic failure, whichever party comes in. We can’t expect people to put up with this until we tell them honestly what is going to come.
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