A few people have asked me about the speech I made during the debate on the setting of Lewisham Council’s Budget at last week’s Council Meeting. I tend not to write down my speeches so I give below my best recollection of the main points I made.
Prior to the election in 2010, Council Officers were working on three potential cuts scenarios for the 2010-14 Council administration, depending on who won that Election. The optimistic scenario involved £20m worth of savings, the middle was £40m and the pessimistic, based on a Conservative victory with its pledge to eliminate the deficit by 2015, was £60m worth of cuts. However, as was known since the 1930s, Austerity in the public services during a recession when the private sector is on its knees is self-defeating, as one man's spending is another man's income. And so it has proved to be under this government. If you want proof that Austerity has failed, look at the Council's Budget. Because the Tory-led government deficit reduction plan has failed, George Osborne has had to increase public spending cuts year after year. For Lewisham, this has meant instead of making £60m worth of cuts in 2010/15, we have had to find £93m worth. For 2015/16 we need to find a further £40m. Then, between 2016/18 we need to find another £45m. That's £178m in total, or almost three times the original amount. This is more than we spend on Adults and Children's Social Services combined. Yet despite this lamentable failure of Tory economic policy, we in the Labour Party have been made to feel ashamed of our own record of managing the economy when we were in office. We now believe the myth that the deficit was caused by our profligate spending. So, in this General Election campaign, we seem almost embarrassed to ask the electorate to vote for us. We approach voters apologetically, asking them to give us their votes because we can be trusted more on the NHS than the Tories and if they are willing to turn a blind eye to our record on the economy, we will throw in the abolition of the bedroom tax as a bonus. Rather than pouring money down the drain when we were in power, we invested wisely in our hospitals, schools and other public services, putting right years of neglect under the Tories. And it comes as a surprise to many, even in our own party, that debt as a percentage of GDP was lower in 2008 than it was in 1997. Debt was lower under Labour going into the Great Recession than it was when the Tories left office. Yet many will recall how leading Tories in the early years of the last Labour administration claimed credit for Labour's early economic achievements, claiming that they had left Labour a wondrous economic legacy. The fact is that the deficit was created not by Labour's unfunded spending plans, but by the collapse in tax receipts that followed the Great Recession, an economic disaster that was conceived, designed and built by the private sector. So let us not approach the electorate hoping that they will forgive us our past sins and take pity on us. Instead, let us fight this election with confidence, proud of our record on the economy. Let us tell the voters that a Labour government will not just build a fairer, kinder Britain, but a Britain that is dynamic and prosperous as well.
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