A Letter to the Guardian - Part 94

A proper blog with my thoughts on Conservative Party Conference to follow shortly, but first more amusement in this week's Epsom Guardian, where my letter of last week seems to have struck a nerve with Dr. Ted Bailey of Larkspur Way:

I bashed out a vague reply on the train this morning. It will obviously be cut down extensively should I choose to actually send it in, but I thought I would post it here for posterity.

It would take too long to ‘fisk’ Dr. Bailey’s letter (‘Speed and depth of public cuts doom us’) in its entirety, but I do offer these brief points by way of reply.

I do not view my projections for the private sector as unduly optimistic. The private sector created more than 300,000 jobs over the Summer months. The lowering of business rates and cancellation of NI for the first ten employees of any new company point to this pattern continuing.

Dr. Bailey is also wrong to suggest that the UK has seen ‘already savage cuts’ since the election. I know of no Governmental cuts to Sure Start since May. As to the cancellation of the BSF, if he wishes to defend such a bureaucratic monstrosity good luck to him. He will have to explain the merits of a school building scheme where it can often take three years to negotiate the planning process before the first brick is laid on the building itself; a scheme that saw costs rocket from £45 to 55bn due to consultant spend and red tape; and a scheme that was already three years behind schedule in 2009.

The countries he mentions in his letter as currently heading toward ‘double-dip’ recessions make my point for me, in that they are examples of what can go wrong if high spending is not restrained over a prolonged period of time. Interestingly, I was going to use Ireland as an example of a country which successfully managed to heavily reduce its spending whilst increasing economic growth, in the 1980s, but was unable to do so for reasons of space. I welcome the chance to do so now!

A final note. Alistair Darling did not propose a slower cuts programme, merely a smaller reduction over the same time-scale; 40% structural deficit reduction in 4yrs, rather than total reduction as the current Government is planning for. However, with current interest rates on our debt coming in at over £100m per day, I believe cutting our debt completely in this time-frame is no longer an aspiration of an Opposition – it is a necessity of Government.

James Tarbit

Deputy Chair, Political

Epsom and Ewell Conservative Future

P.s. For the record, Conservative Future is the section of the Conservative Party for under-30 year olds. With a membership of approximately 20,000, it is the largest youth political organisation in the UK.

Newsnight Education Special

Although spoiled rather by politicians continually talking over oneanother, last night’s Newsnight education special was an important one. In these times of budget cuts our schools look set to be a key electoral battleground in a way that perhaps they haven’t been since Tony Blair’s famous ‘education, education, education’ pledge in 1997.

It’s a pledge that continues to haunt Labour today. The BBC’s poll for last night’s programme shows that only 25% think Labour have delivered on his promise. A similar number said they believe Labour have used the money it has spent on schooling wisely.

Here lies the key problem for the Government. The last 13 years have certainly seen some improvements in certain areas, but those improvements are completely out of step with the huge amounts of money that have been spent. Not enough has gone on front-line teachers and school funding, but instead into targets, additional tests, nonsensical initiatives, and a huge increase in regional beurocracy. Just ask my mother, a special-needs teaching specialist, who has moved further and further away from the classroom and now spends the majority of her time in a LEA office ‘co-ordinating’.

The challenge for the other parties is to show they would spend the money more wisely. Gove did a reasonable job of this last night, aided by a mother from Yorkshire whose local school is being closed and who wants to start her own up to replace it. Ed Balls could only point her in the direction of the LEA, but under Gove’s more radical plans, she would be funded directly from the central education budget.

Perhaps this is the way for the Conservatives to overcome the difficulty people have in clearly understanding their plans (the BBC poll showed that only 25% think that the Conservatives have the best education policies, a 10% drop from 2009 largely explained by a huge increase in the ‘don’t knows’). Get more people like Lesley to put the simple facts in front of the electorate. Labour has failed on education in some areas. When schools are closing, or are not good enough to stay open, rather than asking LEAs to sort out the problem it is far better to leave education in the hands of those with the greatest vested interest in seeing their children succeed, the parents.

p.s. I realise that I haven’t said much about the Liberal Democrat plans. As with so many of their policies, I find they seem completely uncosted. An increase in funding for schools to take on ‘difficult’ pupils is laudable, but they are ringfencing education spending, NHS spending – as David Laws seemed to indicate last night – and spending approx. £10bn taking the lowest earners out of income tax. They are also promising no tax increases. You have to wonder what kind of calculator they are using…