These are long overdue. Osborne has been right more than wrong and has attracted scorn for pointing out the truth. And I’m not being Johnny-come-lately either; on two occasions I have done the unusual and sent out the whole of two of Osborne’s speeches.
The most disappointing reactions have come from the less cerebral right-wingers. Pity! It’s time for the sniping to stop.
Christina
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THE TIMES 19.9.09
The torch has passed. Give George Osborne the credit
After sniping from the City and Labour that he was a political pipsqueak, the Shadow Chancellor has been vindicated
Matthew Parris
This week the Opposition seized control. Right through until the general election, and starting with the party conference season that opens with the Liberal Democrats in Bournemouth today, the most gripping of our national debates will take place by opposition demand, in opposition territory, and on opposition terms. From this weekend onwards, the Opposition have the ball.
Earlier this year, to many raised eyebrows, including some within his own Cabinet, Gordon Brown created a dividing line with the Opposition. The crucial question at the election, he said, would be “Labour investment versus Tory cuts”. He placed his personal judgment and authority firmly on the investment side of that divide.
This week the Prime Minister has shuffled over his own dividing line and joined the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats and almost all political and economic commentary. Crossing to the other side, he has fallen in with the very consensus he had pledged his party to reject.
It would be difficult to overstate the significance of this capitulation. The debate will not, after all, be about whether to cut public spending, but about where and how. It is the debate the Opposition has for 12 months been demanding. Mr Brown starts now from the impossible position of trying to argue that he will be best fitted to do what until last week he had been adamant should not be done. But that’s his fault.
And the indignity of his eleventh-hour capitulation to reality has been made worse by Thursday’s shocking update on that reality. The deterioration in our finances is snowballing.
The Office for National Statistics reports an imbalance between spending and revenue of unprecedented and unsustainable proportions — far worse than many thought or Brown’s demented Candy Mountain rhetoric implied. His characterisation of opposition warnings as alarmist and verging on the unpatriotic now appears to verge, itself, on treason. Opposition alarm has been, if anything, understated.
To add to Labour’s difficulties it has emerged from a Treasury leak this week (one might fantasise that the much-put-upon Chancellor himself is the Tory mole) that Mr Brown had been advised all along that spending would have to be cut, on almost exactly the scale and within almost exactly the timescale that the Opposition had been insisting, even as he poured scorn and indignation on their argument. Moreover the Treasury had been making plans accordingly. So not only Mr Brown’s capability but his integrity have been called into question. And that’s his fault too.
Let’s talk about fault and credit. George Osborne’s speech to his party conference in Birmingham a year ago merits re-reading. That speech, together with David Cameron’s grim emergency opening statement warning of the severity of the crisis, stands out amid the routine noise that most political conferences are composed of. There are speeches that make an immediate splash, then sink, unremembered. Mr Osborne’s made no great splash, but seems to resurface, and with added cogency, whenever we update the economic news. It looks truer and truer as the months pass.
At the time what he said was arguable but unproven. The Shadow Chancellor stuck his neck out early in the domestic and international financial crisis by placing the Conservative Party firmly on the side of fiscal caution at a time when many, in the business and financial community, were saying that refloating the economy was the overriding priority, and paying the money back a problem for the fairly distant future.
Not so, said Mr Osborne (to some pinstriped sneers from the rentier Right as well as the public sector Left): unsustainable debt is a problem now. For the Lib Dems, Vince Cable was sounding some similar warnings with equal clarity and courage.
For both men the courage was political as well as intellectual. Even from those who knew that Mr Osborne was correct about debt, he and his party leader risked (and heard) rebuke.
“The Opposition’s job is to oppose,” ran the complaint. “Why volunteer to be lightning conductors for public anxiety about cuts in public spending? The problem may be of Labour’s making, but the solution will be unpopular, whoever recommends it. Let Labour propose such things when, in the end, they’re forced to — and face the music. This argument will win without your help. Keep your heads down until it has. You aren’t the Government: why take the flak?”
It is among the more bizarre truths of recent history that the most slavish practitioner of this broken-backed doctrine of opposition has been the Prime Minister. It remains an open question, both among human psychiatrists and tropical zoologists, whether the creature that inserts its head determinedly into the sand does so because at some deep and awful level it knows the truth, or because it is blithely oblivious to the truth.
Whatever the answer, it’s weirdly clear that Gordon Brown has been waiting for the truth, but seen no need to anticipate its arrival.
Well, there have always been those who advise that it’s no part of political leadership to go out among the populace with a chalk and blackboard and instruct, but that events will teach all necessary lessons; and the wise politician seeks out a hole and hides there until they do. And in opposition, if not in government, that’s not always wrong. Certainly there’s little to be achieved by railing against the spirit of your times years before your idea’s time has come. Now that it has, the Conservatives deserve credit for recommending the obvious before it was obvious. It means — or ought to — that we will listen to them next time too.
And it means — or ought to — that the City and banking voices who whisper to Conservative journalists that Mr Osborne is some kind of a political pipsqueak who has failed to treat their opinions and expertise with the deference their grotesque remunerations deserve should be sent packing. They and their like got us into this mess. Where were they when the conventional wisdom was that the bubble would never burst? Helping to puff it further. Why should we listen to them now? Maybe Mr Osborne should try harder to conceal his impatience with their special pleading; but heaven forbid that he should revise it.
Like my sketchwriting Times colleague Ann Treneman, if I hear anyone repeat again that Labour didn’t fix the roof when the sun was shining, I shall scream. But, if not repeated, the cliché can be updated. Gordon Brown failed to call in the roofers even when the rain came and the water was pouring through. This week we learnt that Mr Brown too is thumbing through the Yellow Pages
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DAILY MAIL 19.9.09
By George! How Osborne turned from being a widely mocked liability into the visionary who could rescue Britain PLC
By PETER OBORNE
Mocked: George Osborne was accused of 'economic madness' when he refused to back increased government spending in November
When the economic crisis of the Seventies was at its darkest, the Conservative thinker and politician Sir Keith Joseph stepped forward with a series of great speeches that reshaped British history.
Displaying extraordinary moral and - at times - physical courage, he challenged the conventional wisdom that the answer to every downturn was to embark on yet more public spending.
He argued that while pumping money into the economy might create jobs in the short term, in the medium to long-term it was destructive of growth and employment.
This message was deeply unpopular. When he went to public meetings, he was often booed and physically threatened.
Even though Sir Keith was always scrupulously polite to his opponents in government, he was viciously abused by Labour ministers, who consistently misrepresented his views.
For example, the Chancellor, Denis Healey, accused him of a 'disastrous prescription for a social breakdown on a scale unknown in this country'.
Healey's fellow Cabinet minister - and future Labour leader - Michael Foot even accused Sir Keith of lying to the British public.
Most disturbingly, even many senior Conservatives disagreed with his analysis.
Reginald Maudling, a former Tory Chancellor, described him as 'totally divorced from reality' and 'nutty as a fruitcake'.
And yet, within a short space of time, Sir Keith's lucid prose and rigorous argument won the day.
Even before the 1979 election, Healey had been humiliatingly forced to eat his words and adopt the tight spending policies advocated by Sir Keith.
Indeed, these went on to form the basis of the steady return to prosperity under Margaret Thatcher in the Eighties.
This week, Shadow Chancellor George Osborne followed in his footsteps and scored a brilliant triumph which, in years to come, historians may well decide was as memorable and as decisive as Sir Keith Joseph's great victory in the Seventies.
Osborne took a huge gamble when he refused to back the spending splurge that Gordon Brown's government launched last November.
He spoke out at a moment when the Prime Minister, fresh from dealing with the financial crisis that followed the collapse of Lehmann Brothers, enjoyed massive credibility.
Yet Osborne had the courage to say Brown was wrong and stated that, if elected to power, the Conservatives would cut back this country's out-of-control national finances.
Predictably, he was immediately mocked by Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg, who accused him of 'economic madness'.
Chancellor Alistair Darling chipped in and warned that Osborne would inflict 'long-term damage on the essential fabric of the country'.
In addition, the Financial Times (a newspaper which backed Neil Kinnock in the 1992 election and his financially profligate manifesto) loftily called for Osborne to be given a 'reprimand' and went on to argue that 'the case for fiscal action (i.e. increase the public deficit to help "pump prime" the economy) is getting stronger'.
The fashionable Left-wing economist Will Hutton then announced that 'Cameron and George Osborne have regressed to simple anti-state budgetary conservatism at just the wrong moment'.
The Prime Minister then joined battle, gloating: 'We now know that the Tories want to cut public spending by a savage 10 per cent.
'Cuts of 10 per cent would mean 44,000 fewer teachers, 15,000 fewer police and, each year, 32,000 fewer university places.'
Faced with this onslaught, Osborne initially looked terribly isolated. He confided to colleagues that he feared his realistic - yet tough - comments about the state of the British economy could have lost the Tories the next election.
There were also bitter critics inside the Conservative Party who predicted he could lose the Shadow Chancellorship and be replaced either by his deputy Philip Hammond or William Hague.
But slowly Osborne began to win the argument.
First (as I revealed in this column last March), Bank of England governor Mervyn King sent private warnings to the Treasury that he feared extra public spending would damage the official credit ratings that are awarded to the Government as an independent yardstick of the health of the nation's finances.
Then Alistair Darling finally woke up to the urgent need for financial restraint.
The Chancellor tried to raise the issue with the Prime Minister, but he refused to listen.
In despair, he went to Peter Mandelson, who was able to make a very reluctant Brown finally see sense and admit last week that George Osborne and David Cameron had been right all along.
Now Nick Clegg has also been forced to change tack. The Lib Dems are no longer denouncing Osborne for calling for cuts.
Instead, they are trying, very belatedly, to jump on the Osborne bandwagon by setting out their own economy drive.
The first point to note is that, for Osborne personally, this is a simply massive achievement. Remember that traditionally most opposition politicians try to play safe and conform to establishment wisdom.
But Osborne had the vision and courage to try to shape the political weather - and has succeeded magnificently.
Until now, his position has been a little vulnerable, open to the charge that he is essentially a backroom operator prone to juvenile errors of judgment such as his misbegotten meeting last year on a yacht off Corfu with Oleg Deripaska, the controversial billionaire Russian oligarch with disturbing links to Peter Mandelson.
All that can now be set aside.
The bravery and insight he has shown on the great matter of public spending have established him as a politician of the first rank - a development of incalculable importance as the Conservatives prepare for office.
For Gordon Brown, however, his speech last week to the TUC could not have been worse.
His entire strategy has been to contrast Tory 'cuts' with Labour 'investment' while spending limitless amounts of taxpayers' money in a forlorn bid to resuscitate the economy. Both policies are now in ruins.
The truth is that prime ministers can never recover from the destruction of their flagship policies - think of John Major after the collapse of his economic strategy on Black Wednesday, Anthony Eden after the failed Suez invasion or Tony Blair after Iraq.
It is all over for poor Gordon Brown, and the only question is whether he lingers on in Downing Street until the General Election or goes earlier, either as a result of an internal Labour coup or of his own volition.
Back in 1979, an outgoing Labour government left a legacy of catastrophic national finances.
Gradually as prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, inspired by Sir Keith Joseph's inspirational economic policies, cleaned up the mess.
As a result, 18 years later in 1997, New Labour came to power having inherited an extremely sound set of national finances.
It has since taken 12 years to squander what was, by any standards, a golden legacy.
Now history is about to repeat itself. It is surely now only a matter of months before an incoming Tory government will once again be faced with the problem of sorting out a Labour economic fiasco.
This week, George Osborne showed he has the courage, the wisdom and the moral authority to impose the urgent spending cuts that the chronic state of Britain's finances - wrecked by Gordon Brown - so urgently need.
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