The Tory Party's £1.2 Trillion Lie

In Tim Bale's history of the Conservatives, he makes the obvious point that to all intents and purposes the editorial offices of the right wing press are an arm of the party. And that was brought home this Sunday morning looking at the splash shared across the front pages of the Tory-supporting rags. All of them led with the news that the next Labour government is going to spend £1.2 trillion, which amounts to an extra £650m a day. The Tories have even set up an information gathering website to back the claim up. This has led to claim and counter-claim rocking back and forth across Sunday politics shows and social media, with the rather rash decision of Sajid Javid to challenge none other than the people's bank manager, John McDonnell, to a TV debate - a move Labour has jumped on with alacrity.

Since Labour emerged as a serious contender for government a century ago, making up stuff about Labour's spending plans is par the course. Readers with long memories will remember the 1992 general election in which the Tories accused Labour in a poster campaign of plotting a double whammy of more taxes and higher prices. So memorable in fact the Tories have put it on a tea towel. This time though the Tory attack runs the risk of overreaching. Yes, they wanted a figure out of the door that catches in the memory but £1.2tn just sounds like a ludicrous figure plucked from the sky. And when you look at the "evidence" the Tories have marshalled, this is exactly what they've done.

In the executive summary of the 36 page Tory document, they are brazen with the double dishonesty of their accounting. For one they tot up every spending commitment in the 2017 manifesto plus every commitment made by shadow ministers since, every policy passed by Labour conference, and every Labour policy paper. As anyone with a little bit of knowledge about Labour knows, conference votes on policy but there is no mechanism of forcing the leadership to accept it. Just ask Tony Blair about that. Instead, what goes into the manifesto is determined by the Clause V meeting, which variously draws on National Policy Forum documents, motions passed at conference, drafts of the manifesto, and policy papers. Lumping all this material together and totting up the price tag is the first wilful distortion the Tories accomplish. The second? They suppose every policy is going to be enacted on day one of the new parliament. They say it themselves: "All costings have been given for a five-year period, as this is the standard length of a Parliament." And so eye-catching items like the basic income trial or the four day week, which would take a while to implement - say two years into the 2019-24 parliament - are treated as if enacted from the off. To be sure, if Labour did the same trick on Tory spending commitments they would be the first crying to the press about the beastly lies told about them.

While it is useful for activists to know the nuts and bolts of this ludicrous Tory attack, as Grace Blakeley notes if you have to explain, you're losing. And so the best way of blunting the Tory lies is turning the problem back on its head - why does their spending only focus on electorally convenient items like policing and the NHS, and not the housing crisis, the crumbling infrastructure and public squalor of nine years of neglect, and flood defences in the Midlands and the North?

This brings us to the main point. Politics is about interests, and the Tories have been the traditional safeguard of bourgeois interests. And wherever there is an established, elite interest any old rope will do. We've seen it in the Labour Party as the right have crumbled, and we routinely see it from the Tories and their press helpers. It is not "conspiracy thinking" to suppose politics involves lying, as a recent silly book supposed, but a straightforward fact of political life. The Tories for their part are relying on lying about Labour because there is nothing else in the tank. How do they propose to fix the multiple problems plaguing the UK? How are they going to solve the productivity crisis, transition to a green economy, get mass property acquisition moving again, all the while in hock to the most damaging approach to Brexit designed expressly with the tax dodgers and low pay gluttons in mind? They can't, and they know they can't. And so they have to lie.

What effect will our £1.2tn lie have? Not a great deal, one would imagine. Where Labour seeks to inspire its voters, the Tories rely on fear to get theirs out. By demonising Corbyn and trotting out the old bankruptcy theme Johnson and friends are hoping the vote will firm up and give them extra reasons, apart from Brexit, to keep Labour out. And when your strategy relies not on persuading floating voters but turning out the already convinced, every body counts.

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