UK Voters Want Honesty, for a Change

Sunday Times, The Times March 28, 2010

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Dominic Lawson

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What may have been the final budget in 13 years of Labour rule was a blatant exercise in dishonesty. Alistair Darling had carefully prepared the ground for last week’s non-statement by delaying until after the election the comprehensive spending review that will spell out the necessary cuts. Expectations may be low but that does not mean our politicians have to live down to them.

As it is, voters and the financial markets remain in the dark about where a re-elected Labour government would wield the axe. Perhaps it is too painful for it to contemplate the 12% real cuts — 25% in non-priority areas — that the Institute for Fiscal Studies says will be needed. Perhaps it is the worry that the simmering spring of discontent will turn into a winter of anarchy when Labour’s friends in the public-sector unions find out.

Voters know which way the wind is blowing. They expect deep cuts in public services and big tax increases, whoever is elected. Mr Darling gets away with obfuscation because the electorate thinks all the main parties are as bad as each other. His dishonest budget was greeted with a weary shrug by voters.

David Cameron attacks the government, as he did again yesterday, for “taking people for fools”. So far at least, however, he is doing no better himself. The Tory leader’s opening pitch to voters was that he would cut the budget deficit without touching the National Health Service, as if this bloated bureaucracy, now employing a staggering 1.6m people, should be treated as a sacred cow. Even the government’s plans, as we report today, imply big cuts in health spending; NHS managers are already planning staff cuts and bed closures to cope with leaner budgets.

The government has set out its stall in Mr Darling’s budget. After conspicuously failing to provide details in his statement to the House of Commons, he promised deeper cuts than Margaret Thatcher (though she was not a particularly successful cutter).

The Conservatives will apparently provide more detail of their plans between now and polling day, having so far merely scratched at the surface. Yesterday the party published the first poster to emerge from its renewed collaboration with the Saatchi advertising team, a smiling Gordon Brown apparently boasting of doubling the national debt.

Nobody should be complacent about government debt that will, on Treasury forecasts, rise from less than £800 billion now to more than £1.4 trillion by 2014-15, having already doubled since 1997. The national debt also doubled, however, under both Baroness Thatcher and John Major. One role of opposition politicians is to remind us of the problem but the other is to offer a solution. We are still waiting.

Honesty, perhaps, is not something people expect from politicians any more. Our poll today shows voters think this is the most corrupt parliament in history, beating even the days of the rotten boroughs. Three-quarters want a public inquiry into this newspaper’s revelations that former cabinet ministers boasted about their success in lobbying the government and securing changes of policy.

It will be years before voters believe parliament has cleaned up its act. In the meantime, politicians can make a start. Tomorrow the three men who want to be chancellor will debate on television, in a precursor of the leaders’ debates that will feature in the campaign. Mr Darling, George Osborne and Vince Cable have an opportunity to tell us how much they would cut spending and raise taxes. They have a chance to be honest. Don’t hold your breath.

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