Hiding from reality

This post is not going to discuss the individual measures in the budget. There is no point. You might as well worry about the window boxes on a house that has half fallen into the sea.  

Jeremy Hunt, highly constrained by his own party, chose to ignore reality, but that doesn’t mean the rest of us have to. He is continuing to pretend that it will be possible, after the election, to hold revenue spending increases to 1% a year for four years and to cut capital spending by almost 10%. This is untrue and he knows it is untrue. Not only does it assume that departments that have already taken the brunt of austerity can take yet another wave of cuts equally as large, but also that the vast array of demand pressures – an aging and more sickly population, the rising threat of Russia, climate change – don’t exist.

Labour have chosen to go along with this for the sake of electoral expediency. This is a lesser crime. After all they didn’t get us to this point, nor did they create a media determined to frame every hapless manoeuvre by a dying government as a clever trap for their opponents. But still they also know that these figures are a fantasy, and have chosen to play along regardless.

We often talk about “disaffected” or “disillusioned” voters as if they’re other people. Those who don’t spend much time thinking about politics. But if this is how our main parties are going to treat these critical questions about our future then I’m disaffected and disillusioned. Though it should make us angry not apathetic. The irony is that they behave this way because they think voters can’t handle the truth and, at the same time, wonder why trust in political parties has fallen to its lowest ever level.

So in this post, rather than comment on the marginal fiddling around announced today, I’m going to do something I hope those interviewing politicians during this long and painful election campaign start doing - get into some forensic detail about what the spending projections set out in this budget would really mean. And force politicians to acknowledge what they are actually proposing rather than whiffling nonsensically about some tiny amount of money spent by councils on diversity training.