April 13, 2010

Why Not to Vote Tory #3793934 – Hypocrisy, Insanity and The Economy

Posted in Conservatives, Politics at 10:34 pm by Paul Sagar

The new Labour party political broadcast is good.

As well as breaking from the boring format such broadcasts usually adopt, it tells a simple truth: Labour got the big economic calls of the past 2 years right, and the Tories opposed them all.

But it’s worth probing deeper into what that tells us about the Nasty Party. Over the past few months it’s been suggested that the Conservatives couldn’t really mean any of their headline promises on debt-reduction. When every sane economist in the world was saying that to protect economic recovery government spending had to be kept up until the private sector recovered, surely the Tories couldn’t seriously mean the opposite? Indeed, if the Tories had meant any of their Look How Tough We Are On The Debt rhetoric, that would be reason enough not to vote for them. It would show that they were incompetent, and not to be trusted with the levers of economic power.

What of the alternative? This would require the Tories to know that they were proposing economic madness, and propose it anyway. That is, figuring that being Tough On The Debt would play well in key marginals, but with a sly wink and nod to economic insiders, letting it be known that they wouldn’t really do all those things. “We’re not that stupid!” they might have whispered behind closed doors – perhaps to their business leader chums, who oh-so-conveniently signed the Tory-coordinated letter attacking NIC rises.

If that’s the case, the Conservatives were hypocrites. Which in itself may not be enough to condemn them. As David Runciman points out in his excellent book Political Hypocrisy, a brute fact about modern liberal democracies is that politicians are often forced into saying one thing but doing another. Runciman urges that we reconcile ourselves to the fact of some hypocrisy in political life. For given the nature of elected politics – where backroom deals and competing interest groups force politicians to keep some things secret and to break their word on others – hypocrisy will always be inevitable at some level. The trick, Runciman argues, is to differentiate necessary, tolerable hypocrisy from that which is beyond the pale – and thereby ourselves avoid the sanctimonious hypocrisy of claiming that all political hypocrisy is necessarily wrong and contemptible.

But on the economy, if the Tories have indeed just been “playing the game” for the past 2 years then that’s definitely the wrong sort of hypocrisy. That’s not hypocrisy they didn’t originally intended to commit, forced upon them by circumstances in the name of achieving some necessary goal. It’s opportunistic hypocrisy designed to systematically deceive the electorate. Accordingly, it betrays a party which views short-term dishonest point-scoring as acceptable policy. A party that unashamedly seeks power by making promises it doesn’t intend to keep.

But what, then, to make of the latest rash of Tory economic proposals? As indicated by Hopi Sen’s 10 questions and his mystery underpants arithemetic, Tory economic policy is apparently…insane.

The Conservatives cry that Labour’s Deficit Moster Must Be Slain, and say they will drastically slash public spending. Yet out of the other side of their mouths they promise there’s enough spare cash to give tax breaks to millionaires and married couples, to avoid putting-up National Insurance, and to explicitly protected NHS, DfID and Defence spending.

Which raises the question of what the Tories ultimately are. One possibility is that they are super-hypocrites. They think the electorate can be hoodwinked into simultaneously supporting Tory spending massacres whilst also being bribed with a bunch of unaffordable freebies. All the while, CCHQ knowing full-well that the sums don’t add up.

Yet the alternative possibility may be even scarier: that the Tories are actually as economically illiterate – or insane – as their policies suggest.

Either way, you shouldn’t vote for them.

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