The Real Tory Agenda

When Conservative candidate Jim Ferguson stood up at the Kingussie Hustings and told the audience that the public sector “generated no value” he was regarded as a maverick speaking only for himself.

Now we know that his thinking was straight out of Conservative Central office.

Listening to David Cameron yesterday, speaking with scarcely concealed enthusiasm about the huge programme of cuts he is planning in public spending was chilling. Not because of the scale of the deficit – the numbers he quoted were all in Alastair Darling’s last budget report– but because of what it says about how the Tories view the public sector.

To listen to Cameron speak, you would think it was public sector workers who had caused the recession, soaking up wasteful government spending in well protected jobs, whilst the private sector withered away. The reality is that its only by keeping investment going into the public sector over the last two years that we have stopped a much worse recession; indeed the slow recovery we are now seeing – lower borrowing than predicted and lower unemployment – is probably a direct result of there still being public sector workers with jobs and therefore money to spend on their homes, consumer goods, holidays, services and all the other small economic activities that are the bedrock of our small business driven economy.

How many families have got through the past two years because at least one family member had a job in the NHS, their local council, school or a care provider? Investment in new schools and hospitals doesn’t just build smart new buildings, it employs people, experienced workers as well as apprentices.

Cut a 100,00 jobs out of the public sector – with the spending power that comes with that - and you risk plunging the private sector straight back into another recession.

Labour’s approach to rebuilding the public finances was about getting the balance right between growth and spending; stimulate the economy slowly and steadily and you eventually get higher revenues from income taxes and VAT, so you need to cut spending by much less.

What Cameron’s speech yesterday told us is that the real Tory agenda is still driven by their instinctive aversion to public services. They want a smaller public sector – full stop – and this is their magnificent opportunity to deliver it on the back of financial scaremongering, blaming it all on Labour (“a big boy did it and ran away”) and a corner shopkeepers’ approach to economic planning.

All helped of course, by LibDem willingness to wield the knife as the price for power.  Danny Alexander seems to have gone very quiet all of a sudden........