A Dishonest Budget

The Conservatives are betting their future on the assumption that voters are only interested in tax cuts and aren’t paying attention to the dire state of our public services, especially those run by Councils. Since South East Cornwall elected a Conservative MP in 2010, the Council’s bill for Adult Social Care has increased by 125%, but real-terms Government funding for Councils has been cut by 40%! That’s why Cornwall Council still can’t balance its books, despite Council tax increasing by 52% since 2010, and the services it provides being cut every year.

The same is true across virtually every Government department: The lack of pastoral staff in schools leads to higher rates of child mental health problems; lack of youth services lead to increased rates of anti-social behaviour and crime; lack of capacity in the courts leads to trials being delayed for years; overcrowded prisons lead to increased rates of reoffending. And yet the only departments to get guaranteed real-terms funding increases over the coming years are the NHS and the Ministry of Defence.

At last week’s budget, Conservative Chancellor Jeremy Hunt announced that day-to-day Government spending will increase by just 1% each year. This means that “unprotected” departments will face real-terms cuts of around 3% per year. That’s another dose of austerity even greater than we experienced under David Cameron and George Osborne. This simply isn’t feasible. Councils will go bankrupt. Criminal trials will fall apart. Prisons will become unmanageable. The truth is that whoever is in Government after the next election will have to put up taxes significantly to avoid a complete breakdown of civil society. Yet in a desperate attempt to cling to power, the Conservatives have chosen this moment to announce a cut in National Insurance which (when added to the previous cut) will cost the Treasury £20 billion per year.

But rather than calling out this obviously unworkable plan, Labour are actually going further. Not only have they backed the Government’s pre-election bribe, they have also pledged that after the election they will not increase National Insurance, Income Tax, or VAT, and they have ruled out increasing taxes on wealth too. They even subscribe to the Conservative dogma that all borrowing is bad. So either they are intending to take the country further in the wrong direction, or they are simply lying about their plans for post-election taxation, spending and borrowing.

This cynical and cowardly electioneering from both Labour and the Conservatives is precisely the kind of behaviour which turns so many people off politics. Only the Liberal Democrats are brave enough to make the case for borrowing to invest in measures which will end up saving more than they cost, enabling us to build a fairer, more prosperous society. Personally I’d like to see a wealth tax too: A charge of just 2% on assets over £10m would raise £22 billion per year. That would almost be enough to fill all of Cornwall’s potholes!