Goodbye Uncle Joe Mark II
In Gordon Brown’s long reign at the Treasury, he has often spoken of his prudence. Prudence for a purpose was the one well remembered catchphrase which he loved repeating.
Oh dear, young fresh Prudence is now into advanced middle age and no amount of cosmetic surgery, botox (micro-management) or face cream (covering the cracks) can disguise one simple terrible truth for Labour. Their great cry was that ‘investment’ in our public services would transform them beyond recognition.
Well, huge sums have indeed been hurled at the NHS with no commensurate improvement. Ever since the NHS was founded, there have been important strides in improving healthcare. However, we now have massive deficits, junior doctors unable to get jobs, and indeed emigrating, and nurses being laid off. Similarly, educational standards have simply not risen to acceptable levels. To pay for this largesse, we now have the highest burden of tax in our history. People might be more willing to pay, I suspect, if they saw the visible fruits of their tax bills. However, they are now sorely disappointed. The link, which has been at the heart of the Labour attack on Conservatives, is clearly not there, and Labour scare stories no longer resonate.
So Gordon may huff and puff but he has been rumbled. He has dispersed huge sums of money to public services without overseeing how this has been effectively spent. Commentator after commentator has observed this. Now, Lord Turnbull, Permanent Secretary at the Treasury for four years, has savagely damned the Chancellor with faint praise, ironically inviting us to “admire” the “sheer Stalinist ruthlessness” deployed by Brown in dealing with colleagues and allocating resources.
However, it should be the Chancellor’s colleagues who hold him in contempt, not the reverse, as he has dispensed public money to them without any proper consultation or prioritisation, which is why it has been so appallingly misspent.
It is in this very changed atmosphere that he presents his Budget tomorrow.