UK Parties: The Labour Party

[muriel_volestrangler]

12. The Tories have plans. 121 of them, in fact.

At an earlier stage of this general election, I thought about proposing one of those drinking games in which people have a shot or swig every time a Conservative on the campaign trail used the word ‘plan’. I’m glad I didn’t go ahead with that. Anyone who’d taken up the suggestion would now be in a clinic. It was already bad, but the Tory manifesto takes it to another level entirely. Guess how many times the word ‘plan’ occurs’. For purposes of reference, the Labour manifesto uses it 27 times. Answer: 121. It’s almost as if they were trying to stress the idea that they have a plan.
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The detail about this increased spending is generous. The detail about how it’s going to be paid for is less so. The cap on the amount of benefit received by a household is being lowered from £23,000 p.a. to £21,000. You would be forgiven for thinking that this will pay for everything, because it’s the only specific cut that is mentioned. Elsewhere there’s a promise, repeating something previously asserted by George Osborne, that the Tories will find £12 billion in ‘welfare savings’, added to another £13 billion in cuts in departmental spending. James Ball at the Guardian has made a vivid chart of what that ongoing £12 billion cut looks like:



That’s not a one-off: those cuts are money which would disappear from the annual budget. And that’s all we know about these cuts: further detail is lacking. These promised cuts, if they go ahead, will have an enormous bearing on every aspect of life in the UK, especially for the poor and the excluded and anyone needing social care, and this is the full discussion they get in the Conservative manifesto: ‘We will find £12 billion from welfare savings.’ Seven words. Whereas here’s the policy on polar bears: ‘We will press for full “endangered species” status for polar bears and a ban on the international trade in polar bear skins.’ Twenty-two words. The Tory manifesto promises £12 billion in welfare cuts, but gives three times as much space to its policy on polar bears.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2015/04/14/john-lanchester/episode-nine-polar-bears/

Polar bears are cute, from a distance; cuts look better from a distance too, but they never look cute.