An unexpected postal vote form arrived
so I figured I had better mug up a bit sharpish on who is offering what and how much it is going to cost. To this end, I
visited official websites and cheerily downloaded documents to read from the
two main contenders for government.
I was intrigued as to why the Labour
Party chose to publish their balancing of the books separately from their
Manifesto so, because it was unusual, very much shorter than the
manifesto and bound to be full of numbers, Funding Britain's Future was the
first of the three documents I read. I was impressed. It looked like a summary
profit and loss account, showing itemized policy costs being totaled and
balanced against the total of itemized policy savings or additional revenue,
with a little extra put aside to cover for fluctuations.
I then looked for a similar table within
the Conservative Manifesto to compare it with but there wasn't one. All of the
Conservative cost and saving / revenue balances were included within the body
text as each policy item was outlined so I ended up reading the whole thing.
In it the Conservatives set out their
policy stall across a relatively concise 88 unillustrated pages and mention
costs, savings and revenues and how things balance as items arise throughout
the Manifesto document. I note the policies themselves are written with a
confidence one might elsewhere associate with the statement of common sense,
the kind that requires no argument for because anything else would clearly be
silliness. End of.
My next read was the Labour Manifesto.
WTF is it with some political parties
these days feeling they have to badmouth the competition to make themselves
look good? Are not their policies supposed to stand confidently up on their own
as being obviously the sensible thing? The Labour Party felt the need to make
derisory and at times misleading mention of the Conservatives 68 times in its
123 page manifesto, which averages out as just over a jibe on every other page!
Anyway, aside from this peculiar
"we are all victims together" tone in which they were presented
alongside many brightly coloured photographs, Labour's policies included no
surprises, unlike the policies in the Conservative Manifesto which were a lot
closer to the political Centre than I had expected them to be.
The big surprise from reading the Labour
Manifesto came from their apparent hoping that no one would ever think of
comparing it with their separate Funding Britain's Future publication, you
know, the one where the sums balance. Well...
It seems Labour's ruse for getting the
books to balance is to include only the costs arising from just enough
Manifesto proposals to absorb the few savings anticipated. There are many other
proposals in the Manifesto that would incur significant additional costs that
are not included in the calculation in the document "Funding Britain's
Future" but there are no other proposals from which savings or revenue
arise.
Policies aside, the Manifesto documents
tell me:
Conservative - Vote for us. We propose
to do this stuff and pay for it this way because it makes sense to us.
Labour - Vote for us. Our stuff must be
much better because we are not horrid Conservatives.
Labour having published Funding
Britain's Future alongside but separate from their Manifesto tells me they knew
they couldn't get the books to balance if they took account of all the costs
that would arise from their proposals so they avoided including any of them in the
Manifesto itself.
Taking into account the proposals and
the presented costings for them:
If these two Manifesto packages were
tenders to design and build you a house I would have to advise you to go with
the Conservative bid and end up reliably warm and dry, even if it isn't in the
home of your dreams.
Labour's bid promises a very comfortable
and well equipped residence but their price won't cover all of it. So, unless
you were able to stump up a whole bunch of extra cash, the build would run out
of money before the roof went on, leaving you cold, wet and broke after a
relatively short period.
As to Labour's proposed £250bn
investment fund:
The idea of a government funding vast
infrastructure projects to boost an economy is an outdated one. The
consultation and planning period is lengthy and has to be carried out by
experienced people, only a handful of contractors have the experience to undertake
the work when the planning is complete and the bulk of it is undertaken using
huge machines, many of which are sourced from abroad.
Infrastructure projects are a great way
for a government to spend lots of money in a hurry, thus bumping up GDP, but
the money doesn't filter down in to as many pockets from where it can be spent
to support the rest of the economy as it used to when there were a thousand men
with shovels and families to support doing the work now undertaken by one or
two drivers of large and complex machines.
The rail construction industry is not one that needs such a massive injection of funds. Were these funds to be injected into the sector in the hope the activity in it would increase significantly
in a short period of time that hope would be promptly dashed. There simply
wouldn't be enough appropriately trained, qualified and experienced people to
make it happen. By the end of the first parliament, even if the rail projects
were launched on day one, there would be a huge bill for design, consultation
and legal fees but no material progress
whatsoever.
I don't advocate making any
commitment to borrowing billions of extra pounds to spend on anything until
Brexit is settled, until trade rules are agreed and the country can work out
what it will be able to afford to repay.
If, however, a government were hell-bent on borrowing hugely against an
unknown future, I would strongly advise them to build houses not railways.
Spending any given sum on building
houses would generate more, and more varied, employment than spending the same
sum on building railways and the benefit of all these new builders having money
to spend in the wider economy would be felt within months and the housing market
would almost immediately begin the process of rebalancing, as it adjusts to the prospect of adequate supply.
If the same pressures were applied to
buying up land for housing as would have to be applied to buying up land to run
railway lines across, and if the same overall budget were to be made available, it is
not beyond imagine that by the end of the first parliament there would be a
thriving construction industry, reduced unemployment, no housing shortage and
house prices would have fallen noticeably.
I still wouldn't recommend Britain borrowing against an unpredictable economic future, that of trading under as
yet undefined post-Brexit rules, because it is daft not to defer any
significant borrowing until enough is known to work out what Britain will be able to
afford to repay.
At least if a government invests in housebuilding and the sums are awry and the
project has to be shelved half way through there would be still be more houses
for people to live in than before, just not as many as they had promised. A half-
built railway is no use to anyone.
