What is the Cause of Labour’s Cuts Problem?
By Emma.
Mark Ferguson at Labour List has written about how Labour must be wary of the fact that 49% of people still blame us the most for the cuts. I completely agree that it is essential that we continue to keep this at the heart both of our policy and our presentation of current and past policy as we go forward.
The problem I have, is that we don’t know why they blame us.
Do they blame us because the Tory narrative that we overspent on public services has caught on? It’s a populist narrative that probably does have a lot of traction despite both a lack of serious veracity and the fact that until the crash the Tories were planning to match us for spending.
Do they blame us becuase we failed to regulate the banks and failed to balance the economy properly away from fragile economic areas like finance, leaving us too exposed to the crash? If so they are quite right to do so.
It is vital that Labour conduct extensive polling and focus grouping to understand the reason for the blame so it can formulate a response to the question that resonates. That may not mean accepting wrongly apportioned blame, but it will mean moderating the language of regret to match the expectations of voters.
I suspect the truth is that the answer is mixed, but is mostly the former (if I had to I’d put it at an 80:20 split) which is difficult for Labour. We can and should apologise for and learn from the latter, but I don’t believe we did massively overspend before the crash. We can promise to ensure that investment is sustainable, strengthen and make more independent the OBR and give it some teeth to ensure that there are guarantees that we won’t be able to over-stretch in the future. That way we can promise not to do in the future what we don’t believe we did in the past, while adding independent verifiers. But we can’t promise not to invest. Investment will be needed. It’s how we articulate that while working hard to regain credibility that will be the difficult thing.
Tags: cuts, investment, Labour List, Mark Ferguson
Friday, March 25th 2011 at 00:14
I blame Labour because of a failure to tax the rich and the banks when the economy was doing well, and of course beacuse of an unnecessary war in Iraq.
The economic crash is important, for sure, but the fact is that there was a huge structural deficit before any of that came into play. You can’t trace even half of the deficit back to the crash.
It doesn’t matter whether or not you “believe” there was an overspend – there was. But that’s entirely not the same as saying that there was too much spent on public services.
It’s not just Tory talk. There is a progressive anti-deficit narrative. Vince Cable called for a return to the Golden Rule in the Lib Dem 2005 manifesto. Labour refused to make military spending cuts even when the Defence Board itself asked them to; military spending is popular of course, but is it progressive?
Friday, April 22nd 2011 at 11:05
Labour overspent for years and threw money at projects without checking – BSF is a great example, and I’ve seen first hand the purchasing of equipment from “preferred suppliers” which could be obtained cheaper elsewhere. But Labour have been in denial for so many years. Until they start to see the truth they’ll never change. And as long as Ed Balls continues to go on about how they;d do things differently – but at the same time failing to give any details – they’ll continue to lose credibility.