It was the week when the mask began to slip. The week when the Tories’ rhetoric could no longer conceal the reality. The week when their policy positions, whether on Europe, welfare reform or pensions, quickly unravelled under the slightest scrutiny.
In politics, what you do matters more than what you say. And at the Conservative conference last week, voters finally began to see the two faces of today’s Tories: David Cameron’s carefully-crafted public image and the true face of the Conservatives concealed beneath.
We know this is not just a Westminster discussion. Ask any voter on the doorstep what they know about David Cameron and within a few minutes you can pretty much guarantee they’ll tell you about the “environmentally-friendly” Tory leader cycling to work for the cameras while his chauffeur drives behind carrying his shoes.
But Cameron’s con-trick is not just about image. It’s also about policy and the future of Britain. Our task is to expose the truth behind the mask.
So when Cameron says he cares about poverty, we should ask why he has personally opposed all of Labour’s measures to help families on the lowest incomes – from tax credits and rises in child benefit to the New Deal and extensions to maternity and paternity leave.
When Cameron laughably claims the Conservatives are the party of the National Heath Service, we should remind him that he proposed the patient passport and opposed our National Insurance rise to boost investment in the health service. We know the Conservative Party of Daniel Hannan is no friend of the NHS.
When George Osborne says: “We’re all in this together”, we should know that it’s just more misdirection and concealment. Because if he really meant it, his promise of pay freezes and cuts to tax credits, pensions and child trust funds would have been matched by dropping his pledge to spend billions on an inheritance tax cut giveaway to benefit the 3,000 richest estates.
It’s a similar story on schools. Questioned in one Sunday newspaper last weekend, Tory education spokesman Michael Gove said he did not want his new “Swedish schools” to be allowed to raise money and make a profit. However, on the opposite page, a senior Tory revealed to a columnist that they would allow private companies to run schools simply to make a profit.
The fact is that the Tories have seized on the global recession to propose what they have always wanted: to roll back the state, slash public services and lower taxes – but only for the wealthy. We know this Tory prescription is not just deeply unfair – with ordinary families paying the heaviest price for the excesses of bankers – it’s dangerous, too.
Cameron and Osborne have not learned the lesson from their disastrous wrong call to oppose the fiscal stimulus and Government action to support the economy. Instead they want to compound their original error.
Their dogmatic desire to slash spending now – before the recovery has been secured – not only puts Britain’s economic recovery at risk, it could tip us from recession into depression.
Of course, we need to reduce the deficit steadily once the recovery has been secured – and the Chancellor has set out a fair and balanced plan to halve the deficit in four years with a mixture of higher taxes on the richest, greater efficiencies in government, asset sales and also cutbacks in low-priority programmes in order to protect vital frontline services.
But the Tory approach of withdrawing support for the economy and slashing public investment now, while the recession continues, would lead to much higher debt and higher unemployment – up to five million people unemployed if we followed “Osbornomics”, according to the respected economist David Blanchflower.
Last week, Cameron tried to con the country into believing that the global financial crisis was caused by too much “big government”. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The fact is the global downturn has shattered key assumptions the right has clung to for decades. Who would now dare claim that financial markets, left to their own devices, are efficient or inherently stabilising? Or that financial market regulation is always to be reduced wherever possible?
It was only co-ordinated action by governments around the world which saved us from the brink of catastrophe. So I do not choose my words lightly when I say that Tory economic policy is based on a perversion of the truth. It is nothing short of a big lie.
Every time we hear Tory commentators mock talk of “dividing lines”, or jeer when we point to differences in policy, or when they simply reduce everything to personality differences, they are exposing where the Conservatives’ vulnerability really lies.
The ideological divide between Labour and the Conservatives is starker today than it has been for decades. And it is time for respected media commentators to put Tory policy under the spotlight and start asking them the difficult questions.
As we move into the final months before the general election, we on the progressive centre-left should have confidence that we have the right values and policies for these times. We relish the debates ahead. This is a fight we can and must win.
Ed Balls is Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families and Labour and Co-operative MP for Normanton
