Bernard Ingham: Never mind the slogans, who will balance nation's books?

THIS week I want to get down to brass tacks. In fact, brass and tax because all too little is being made of them in this 'strong and stable leadership' versus 'coalition of chaos' election.
Can Chancellor Philip Hammond balance the books? Sir Bernard Ingham has his doubts.Can Chancellor Philip Hammond balance the books? Sir Bernard Ingham has his doubts.
Can Chancellor Philip Hammond balance the books? Sir Bernard Ingham has his doubts.

In advance of party manifestos, this is a campaign of meaningless slogans.

What matters – and especially for those under 30 who, along with their children and grandchildren, could be landed with a crippling bill – is how policy programmes are to be paid for.

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It is not as though we are flush with money. We still have a budget deficit of around £50bn. It may be a third of that bequeathed to us by Gordon Brown in 2010, but it has taken seven years to cut it that far and if we are to have a strong and stable economy it has to be eliminated to produce the budget surpluses that both Margaret Thatcher and John Major achieved.

There is only one end to spending far more than we are earning – credit card holders please note – and it is called trouble. It is dire trouble if we run into another 2007-08 crash which, given we are all frail human beings, is almost bound to occur sometime.

All this is on top of a fast-rising national debt which is soaring at about £5,179 per second. It is now around £1.73 trillion (thousand billion), or about 80 per cent of GDP.

It matters not that during the early 1800s and around 1950 after the Second World War it was around a monumental 250 per cent of GDP.

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What should scare the living daylights out of us is that it was a mere £300bn in 2000.

We have become the very model of a profligate nation – unless you look at the US whose finances are in no better shape. Its national debt is nearly $20 trillion and President Trump is proposing to spend money as if it grew on trees while slashing taxes.

It is true paradoxically that lower taxes can increase the Treasury’s tax take. But no one can responsibly take an axe to taxes without holding down and, where possible, cutting public spending.

This is the background to our wait – with something less than bated breath – for the publication of our parties’ election manifestos.

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Only three matter: Tory, Labour and the Scottish National Party which is running proportionately a far greater budget deficit than the UK as a whole 
and North Sea oil revenues have collapsed.

The Liberal Democrats, the UK Independence Party and the wastrel Greens are relevant only by how many votes they take from the main parties. None of them is going to influence the UK’s economy unless the poll results in an anti-Tory coalition.

Against this background of national financial incontinence and our political history, only the Conservatives can be trusted to conduct our affairs with a measure of responsibility. But let us never forget that that busted flush – ex-Chancellor George Osborne – took far longer to reduce Gordon Brown’s deficit than promised.

Nor have I the slightest idea how Chancellor Philip Hammond is going to repair his recent hamfisted Budget, given Theresa May’s apparent determination to help those “just about managing” and the loss of revenue from stymied measures such as the proposed excruciating increase in probate fees.

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The Tories have a lot of explaining to do in their pre-occupation with Brexit and self-induced pressures on spending by the PM’s determination to convert the Tories from the “nasty” to the “nice” party.

The sad truth is that as a nation we are addicted to government hand-outs. This no doubt emboldens Jeremy Corbyn to promise the earth.

I would be failing in my duty to you as taxpayers if I did not point out that it is estimated he would spend £500bn over the next Parliament – nearly one-third of the current national debt.

He claims that his proposed tax rises on the wealth-creating sectors will pay for it all. Unfortunately, he seems to have already announced 13 different ways of spending a two per cent rise in Corporation Tax.

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No wonder moderate Labour MPs who face decimation as a minimum at the election are in despair. How on earth did they allow their party to replace Gordon Brown first with Ed Miliband and now Jeremy Corbyn and then his soulmate, Nicola Sturgeon, to rise from Labour’s ashes in Scotland?

At the age of 84, I shall not be funding government for much longer. But most people who read this essay on brass tacks will have to. You have been warned.