Labour have been up-in-arms this weekend about a viral Conservative campaign video, which used some dubious editing to suggest that Corbyn said ‘No’ when asked whether he would condemn the IRA. In fact, he said ‘No, I think what you have to say is all bombing has to be condemned and you have to bring about a peace process.’
This still doesn’t sound like a full-bodied condemnation, but, that aside, the Tory video still has far fewer views than a similarly dubious one by a Labour supporting group. The clip, entitled ‘We’re all in it together’ was uploaded by The People For Jeremy Corbyn, a grassroots organisation, last weekend. It features a time-lapse of a banker and a nurse (both played by actors) discussing Tory economic policy.
The nurse tells us that ‘We all have to make sacrifices to protect the economy…We have to get the national debt down or we’ll all suffer’ as she laments how government funding cuts have left her with static pay and a redundant husband. The banker boasts that ‘the tax cuts for high-earners really helped me out. When I went to the Maldives, I was able to go first class, instead of just business’. The calendar flips through the 2010s and the debt counter rises from 75 per cent of GDP to 90 per cent. It ends with the nurse’s horrified reaction to learning that, despite all her hardships, the debt has risen. The video has 3.9 million views.
Cringe-worthy banker stereotypers aside, this video is misleading in a far more pernicious way than the Conservatives’ selective editing: it’s just as dishonest, but can’t be so easily corrected. The People For Jeremy Corbyn are exploiting and encouraging widespread economic ignorance to tell a lie about the financial policies of the last two governments. The nurse in the video clearly doesn’t understand the difference between debt and the deficit, and the video’s potency depends on the fact that most viewers won’t either.
The video suggests that the Conservatives have upped government borrowing, and used all the cash they raised through austerity to fill pockets in the City. This just isn’t true. The government can’t reduce the debt until they’ve eliminated the deficit – the difference between what the government spends and what it receives in taxes and other income. When David Cameron became Prime Minister in 2010, the deficit was £144bn, or 9.9 per cent of GDP. The national debt was 76 per cent of GDP. That’s like every household in the UK spending over £5,000 more than they earn, when they’re already almost £70,000 in debt.
After massive Labour overspending, any reduction in the national debt was always a distant prospect for the last two governments. At their most ambitious, the Conservatives hoped to eliminate the deficit – and so begin to reduce the debt – in 2015. So far they’ve managed to get government borrowing down to a quarter of its 2010 levels, but the deadline for eliminating the deficit altogether has been shunted to 2025. So it’s hardly a surprise that the national debt rose between 2010 and 2017: no one ever promised otherwise.
There’s nothing very complicated about the difference between debt and deficit, but the misunderstanding is rampant. In 2012, research by the Centre for Policy Studies found that only 10 per cent of Britons realised that the national debt was rising. And the Conservatives, too, are guilty of perpetuating confusion: in 2013, David Cameron was reprimanded by statisticians after claiming that his government was ‘paying down Britain’s debts’ when in fact the national debt had risen under his watch.
Corbyn is far from the first politician to gain from public ignorance about the national debt, but his supporters are in no position to be high and mighty when accusing the Tories of ‘fake news’ – they are just as guilty of ‘fake economics’
