AUSTERITY HASN’T GONE AWAY

ON UK POLITICS

So, how was the end of austerity for you? I had a great one, thanks for asking. Microwaved some of Sunday’s leftovers, got a few questions right on University Challenge, early night…

I only ask because it’s over now. The end of austerity that is. Not austerity itself, that’s back with a vengeance. It lasted precisely 19 hours and 40 minutes, the end of austerity, from the moment Philip Hammond sat down at the end of his budget speech, to the moment Paul Johnson, the Director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, stood up, a touch bleary-eyed to begin his post-budget briefing.

Johnson, it was heavily hinted at, had not had a good end of austerity. He and his colleagues had been up all night, poring over the details of the end of austerity, getting ready for their briefing and, what do you know, it turned out that austerity hadn’t ended at all.

“This is not a bonanza,” he told his audience. “It is not a spending spree. If I was a prison governor, or a head teacher, I would not ind much to celebrate in yesterday’s budget.”

In fairness to Hammond, he had not explicitly declared the end of austerity. He had merely said it was the beginning of the end of austerity. He had at no point said that the end of the end of austerity would not come the following day. If we’d chosen to read that into it, that’s our fault.

On 10 November 1942, Winston Churchill got himself into a rather similar pickle. And he didn’t even announce it was the end, or even the beginning of the end. All he said was that it was the end of the beginning, by which he meant it was the end of the bit of the war where, in contemporary parlance, Britain would be getting it’s a**e handed to it by the opposition. The next day, as it happens, the Germans annexed the whole of France, so predictions on the beginning of ends that turn out not to be either the end or the beginning or vice versa are evidently something of a mug’s game.

That the rabbit being plucked from the hat survives as the defining metaphor for budgets is appropriate enough. It’s all an illusion, smoke and mirrors. If Paul Daniels had ever done the now customary segment at the end of Attenborough documentaries, where they let the light in on the magic, that would be a very close approximation of the now traditional role of the IFS budget briefing.

It tends to turn out, with the aid of large numbers of graphs and an even larger panel of red-eyed analysts, that Debbie Mcgee never was sawn in half . That if you were to drive down the A303 right now then Stonehenge would still appear on your right.

And re the £20bn NHS spending, announced with great delight by Hammond yesterday, or rather confirmed by Hammond yesterday after Theresa May had announced it in June, this was what Paul Johnson described as a “gamble with the public inances”.

The end of austerity had happened, he explained, because the Ofice for Budget Responsibility (OBR), the independent body the government gets its economic forecasts from, had, in the last few months, revised down borrowing forecasts. This had delivered into Hammond’s clutches a theoretical £20bn, which he had thrown directly at the NHS as if it were a red hot potato. “But what the OBR gives the OBR can take away,” Johnson warned. Which is to say, in six months time, it may yet revise up the forecasts it had unexpectedly revised down, especially in the wake of an event you may have read something about, called Brexit. By which point that red hot potato, will have cooled down, been mashed and gleefully gobbled up.

He also had some rather remarkable facts and igures to put out there. Between 2000 and 2010, the percentage of public service spending that goes to the NHS rose from 23 per cent to 29 per cent. By 2023-24, he reckons it will be at 38 per cent.

It was the most detailed vision for post-brexit Britain that anyone has yet come up with. Namely, a care home for all the people that voted for it, funded by all the people that didn’t, with far less money than they otherwise would hoped to have had.

So how is it going to be paid for then? “At some point,” he said, “we will need to pay more tax.”

And if higher taxes won’t do it, cuts in other areas will have to. And for all but 19 and a half of the 40 minutes of the 85,568 hours that sort of thing’s had a catchy title: austerity.

Just between you and me, it never really went away.