Peter Jones: Brown's refusal to cut to the chase will cost him dear

Published on Wednesday 16 September 2009 01:10

SOMETIMES it seems Gordon Brown is just far too clever by three-quarters, to borrow a half-jibe from the theatrical world.

There we were yesterday, all poised to hear him admit that cuts in public spending would be needed, and did he say that? Almost, but not quite.

Yes, he said, there would be cuts, but they would be cuts in "costs, inefficiencies, unnecessary programmes and low-priority budgets".

That immediately invites the question: what on earth has the government been doing to permit these "costs, inefficiencies, unnecessary programmes and low-priority budgets" to carry on consuming taxpayers' money these past few years?

Is it only when recession bites and people stop paying taxes because they haven't got any income that governments start trying to be efficient? I could go on, but I am sure you get the general picture.

I suppose that in the closed environment of a room in Downing Street where the speech was written, it must have looked like a clever way of dealing with a really nasty political problem.

On the one side you have voters, most of whom are suffering from the pain of recession. They are worried, not just about their jobs, but also about the wider British economy and whether it can bear the huge weight of debt that has been run up in order to rescue the banks and to keep businesses ticking over. Government borrowings are increasing at 5,500 every second and now amount to more than 20,000 per man, woman and child.

They also know that the taxes we pay are not enough to sustain current levels of public spending – something like 30 per cent of the government's budget is being financed by borrowing. And that leads about four-fifths of the public to conclude, according to opinion surveys, that public spending needs to be cut.

It is a quite reasonable calculation. David Cameron, the Conservative leader, and Vincent Cable, the Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman, made it some time ago and came to the same conclusion.

But on the other hand, Mr Brown had said back in June that "the only party proposing to cut public spending is the Conservative Party". So he could hardly say that he was now prepared to follow Mr Cameron's lead.

And he was speaking at the Trades Union Congress, whose leaders have made it quite plain they do not think there should be any spending cuts.

Paul Kenny, general secretary of the GMB union, told a meeting that if Mr Brown started to make cuts, he would be "finished" as the Labour leader and prime minister and as "a human being".

So the clever way past these two irreconcilable positions is to say that there would be cuts, but only the kind of cuts that no-one can possibly object to. Will that satisfy public opinion? I doubt it.

It could have been rather different. Alistair Darling, the Chancellor, had prepared the way last week, saying that "hard choices on public spending" were needed. Though he couched his thoughts in terms of a big efficiency drive, his admission that the NHS would not be immune to cost-cutting was a pretty big signal that the Labour government was preparing to make some difficult decisions.

Then this week, Peter Mandelson, the Business Secretary, reinforced the message by saying that there were no areas of government spending, even such iconic items as the renewal of the Trident nuclear missile system and plans to introduce ID cards, that were not being looked at.

So is Trident now being regarded as a "cost" or an "inefficiency"? Are ID cards a "low-priority budget" or an "unnecessary programme"? Because if this is the language Mr Brown wants to use, that is how any decision to save money by axeing them will be described.

He could have followed the path laid out for him and told the TUC that he thought it unacceptable for voters working in the private sector to be experiencing a lot of economic pain, while those in the public sector are anaesthetised from it. While that might have drawn a few boos in Liverpool, it would surely have earned him rather more cheers in the rest of the country. It seems that Mr Brown, instead of showing the kind of leadership that might get him re-elected, is steadily boxing himself into a corner from which there is no easy escape and wherein he is steadily disbursing the political credit he built up for his handling of the financial crisis and subsequent recession.

The decisions he and Mr Darling took then, to nationalise the failing banks and to inject a stimulus into the economy, were the right ones. The proof is that the economy appears to be recovering. What were green shoots a few months ago now seem to have sprouted some leaves. Indeed, it seems to be a recovery that is on track with Mr Darling's forecasts.

But the credit from that is now being mis-spent. Public opinion moves rather fast these days, and the question now rising in many people's minds is: how are we going to pay for this? The options there tend to be seen rather starkly. Either it means higher taxes, or it means spending cuts.

If Mr Brown cannot bring himself to use those two words in that order in the same sentence, then I rather suspect people will conclude that another Labour government means higher taxes.

Labour spent years trying to rid itself of the image deeply embedded in the public mind that it was a party of high taxes and high spending. Only when it did so, did it get elected.

Now that a high-spending spectre is once again haunting public imagination, Mr Brown's lack of boldness in tackling it may well lead people to think that Old Labour is back.

Sometimes in politics, cleverness is not a good idea.