Politics

Election 2015: George Osborne has set Labour a cunning trap

A Conservative party document outlining Labour spending plans is a clever way of putting Ed Balls on the back foot

January 05, 2015
George Osborne has been tipped as a potential head of the IMF. Photo: PA
George Osborne has been tipped as a potential head of the IMF. Photo: PA

Today saw the latest dirty move of the long election campaign. As Ed Miliband sat down from giving his campaign launch speech in Salford, in London George Osborne rose at Conservative party HQ to set a rather well-calculated political trap for Labour, flanked by a sort of parliamentary Kraftwerk covers band:

Autobahn! Do autobahn! pic.twitter.com/SdDik4PwUu

— josh lowe (@JeyyLowe) January 5, 2015


Kraftwerk reunion gets off to slow start. "@SkyNews: Cons line up for Lab spending take-down http://t.co/wUFUKxRbjrpic.twitter.com/Gt7hPd55N0" — Iain Martin (@iainmartin1) January 5, 2015


New Kraftwerk line-up RT @christopherhope William Hague is on the far right of this remarkable Tory press conference. pic.twitter.com/OPkY32GdW8

— Jim Waterson (@jimwaterson) January 5, 2015
(Those tweets are an example of what they call "media groupthink," by the way...)

Osborne and his cabinet colleagues Theresa May, Home Secretary, Sajid Javid, Culture Secretary, Nicky Morgan, Education Secretary, and William Hague, Leader of the House had come to launch an attack on Labour party spending plans. The document runs through what it describes as Labour spending commitments, totting up the cash they plan to splash against the savings and revenue raisers they've already planned. The headline finding? That a Labour government would have to increase borrowing by £20.2bn in 2015/16 alone. The message? The Conservatives are the competent, stable hand on the tiller, while Labour are still the big-borrowing, fiscally irresponsible bunch that brought you the financial crisis. As Javid put it today: "they haven't learned, they haven't changed."

The Tories are attacking Labour where they're weakest: Osborne's party still enjoys a poll lead of around 15 points on managing the economy. And their basic reasoning is sound. In 2013, Miliband and Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls both promised that "any changes to Labour spending plans for 2015/16 must be fully funded." Tory advisers have done an excellent job of scouring interviews, speeches and other statements for commitments, and many voters might welcome, for instance, the information that a relatively obscure Labour policy like new borrowing powers for the Green investment bank would cost £67m in its first year, according to official Treasury costings.

But this document isn't as squeaky clean as its budget book-style layout would imply. Some of the supposed "spending commitments" here aren't cast-iron commitments from the Labour party, but rather are instances in which the "implication" of Labour's words is that they would commit to a certain level of spending. For example, Osborne was asked today about a claim in the document that Labour would cancel Conservative cuts to the arts council. This is taken from a press release quoting Harriet Harman as saying:

"The successes we now celebrate in the arts are the result of many years of public support, through funding and public policy. But this government is threatening the future of our arts and creative industries through slashing the arts council, crushing the ability of local government to support culture locally, and side-lining creative education."


That's clearly a criticism of the Tories' cuts to the arts council, but nowhere does it say that Harman or Labour wants to entirely cancel those cuts. An alternative approach might involve reversing a certain proportion of the cuts, or restoring funding gradually year by year, or once the books are balanced. Osborne doesn't agree, though. "The implication of that is that they would reverse these cuts," he said today. Maybe so, but an implication is not a commitment. Labour's response to the document makes this point, calling it a "political smear based on false assumptions made by Tory advisers."

But any Labourites gloating at the Chancellor's plans coming unstuck can think again. On a day where Labour's narrative should have been all about the NHS and its campaign launch, the Tories have forced the debate back on to the economy. At the conference today, they invited Labour to dispute any of the claims in the document, which Labour duly began doing more or less straight away:

Tories say it's our policy to ban food waste from landfill - it's not our policy. Not agreed at NPF in July 2014, not in NPF document.

— Labour Press Team (@labourpress) January 5, 2015




As a source from the Osborne camp put it to journalists after the speech: "you're going to have days now of 'Labour policy unravels as...'" The effect is both to force Labour to talk about spending, which they don't really want to do, and to smoke out any policies floated before Labour's recent National Policy Forum which haven't made it into the party's manifesto. In short, Messrs Balls and Miliband are being forced onto the back foot.

Still, Labour can't exactly complain about dirty moves—they got one in even earlier, with a claim that the Conservatives would take Britain "back to the 1930s." While it referred to a claim about levels of public spending in the next parliament from an OBR report, the comparison was roundly trounced as meaningless by, among others, Today's John Humphreys, who pointed out that the economy was ten times smaller in the 1930s—and there was no NHS.

So there you have it. Spin, squabbling and a whole load of costings which are, as a senior treasury official told Newsnight's Chris Cook, not "a terribly good use of your time." Election season truly has begun.