Lies, Damned Lies, and statistics...
The views in this post are my own and not necessarily those of the Conservative party.
Question - how can you tell when there is an election coming?
Answer - Labour are running a campaign saying that the Conservatives will destroy the NHS.
Labour's previous shadow health secretary Andy Burnham had a two-page spread in the Mirror this weekend suggesting in that if the Conservatives are back in office it will be a "Death Knell" for the NHS.
Yes, that's the same Andy Burnham who started the present wave of privatisation activity (the proportion of NHS activity outsourced is about the same as it was when he was Health Secretary), presided over several notorious NHS failures, and criticised the present coalition government as "irresponsible" for exempting the NHS from the present round of spending cuts.
But of course, they do this every election.
From Neil Kinnock "I warn you not to get sick"
to Tony Blair's "24 hours to save the NHS"
to Gordon Brown who sent out scaremongering postcards in 2010 to people they thought might be worried about particular conditions such as breast cancer, alleging that the Conservatives would cut spending on those conditions,
to Miliband and Burnham's scaremongering today.
And yet, since I first saw such a campaign in 1983, the Conservatives have won most seats and votes at four General elections, there have been three Conservative Prime Ministers and eight Conservative secretaries of state for Health, who were in office for eighteen of the last thirty-one years, and the NHS still exists, is still largely free at the point of delivery and funded almost entirely from general taxation, and is one of only two areas in government where spending in real terms has been protected over the past four years.
Every Conservative or Conservative-led government since the mid-eighties has spent more money in real terms on the NHS, every year, than the previous year or any previous government including Labour ones.
Britain's health needs are vast, and are going to continue to get more and more expensive to deal with whoever is in government, funding the NHS is going to be a massive problem whoever is in government, and there are going to be problems for the NHS whoever is in government.
Nevertheless, with the Conservatives in government as the larger party in a coalition, this country has an NHS which employs more doctors and nurses than ever before, in which fewer people are waiting long periods for their operations, and which has a new cancer drugs fund. The present government has transformed cancer diagnosis so the NHS now tests 1000 more people for cancer every single day. And so far this parliament the NHS has treated a million more people for cancer than during the last one.
It is a matter of objective fact that if you measure stewardship by spending public money the Conservatives have a better record on the NHS than Labour do.
Incidentally, I don't usually measure the quality of public services by how much taxpayers' money you spend. However, as Labour usually talk as if that was the only measure which mattered, it is only fair to point out that on that measure Labour do not in fact have a better record of funding the NHS.
This is a highly personal and emotive subject for me, because my father was rung up on the morning he was due to go into hospital for an emergency heart operation and told it had been cancelled by shop stewards as part of industrial action in response to NHS cuts under a Labour government which were far more savage than anything any Conservative government has ever done to the NHS. Hence , I find these Labour campaigns dishonest and misleading, not to mention an insult to the intelligence of the electorate.
And then we go on to the ongoing argument about various spending and deficit numbers as a proportion of GDP.
1) If a country has a growing economy, and the national debt is growing but at the same rate as GDP, then you basically have a stable position in terms of ability to meet the debt.
2) If the national debt has risen in both absolute terms and relative to GDP, then your debt situation has clearly and unambiguously got worse.
3) If the national debt has risen, but by proportionately less than GDP, you can make a strong argument (which other things being equal is likely to be right) that the country is in a slightly better position to meet it's debts.
4) If the national debt has fallen in absolute terms while GDP is rising then your debt situation has clearly and unambiguously improved. And the last Labour government left Britain with so much debt that this is where we need to get to.
The four points I made above were about debt, and the argument which blew up after the Autumn Statement and how Conservatives have described it were about the deficit, which is not quite the same thing. Nevertheless, the size of debts and deficits relative to GDP is a legitimate guide to the scale of the problem we still have as a country with the National Debt.
Hence in my opinion it is entirely legitimate for the government or its' defenders to highlight progress in reducing the deficit as a proportion of GDP provided that they are clear and open that this is what the figures being quoted are.
In my opinion it is also quite legitimate for anyone else, with the exception of the Labour party, to challenge and check what is being claimed and point to the fact that in terms of reducing the deficit in absolute terms, though there certainly has been progress - it is down by more than a third - we still need to do much more.
Why do I object to Labour making this point? Because they are quite willing to employ exactly the same trick of quoting numbers relative to GDP rather than in real terms when it suits them, and they repeated one such claim this weekend as part of their campaign to suggest that the Conservatives will wreck the NHS.
Labour has been accusing the Conservatives of wanting to take public spending back to the levels seen in the 1930's, and they did use the word "levels" rather than "share of GDP" this week.
Guido Fawkes, who didn't like the Conservative argument about the deficit being halved (as a proportion of GDP) rather than cut by a third (in absolute terms) argues in a post called
"Labour hit back with their own misleading poster"
that the Labour claims are every bit as "deliberately misleading."
The "Back to the 30's" claim has been rebutted even more strongly by the Institute of Economic Affairs, who published an article by Ryan Bourne last week, called
"Is George Osborne really returning us to a 1930s government? Accurate comparisons suggest a definite No."
That article does not merely point out the misleading inferences which may be drawn when you compare public spending as a proportion of GDP between the 1930's and those projected for 2020 given how much smaller GDP was eighty years ago. It goes on to suggest that the suggestion that projected public spending as a proportion of GDP might drop under the Chancellor's proposals to 1930's levels is wrong even on its' own terms.
As the article says, debate about the Autumn Statement
"has mainly revolved around one Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) graph and the words of an excitable BBC journalist.
"The now infamous ‘Chart 1.1’, from the OBR’s Economic and Fiscal Outlook (below), was accompanied by the statement:
"This led to claims that public spending was being cut to levels last seen ‘in the 1930s’ with the BBC journalist Norman Smith claiming
'That is an extraordinary concept. You are back to the land of the Road To Wigan Pier’
– invoking memories of destitution, poverty and squalor. In our era of ‘regression to the meme’ politics, this idea that the state is being hacked back to 1930s levels (a time before the welfare state) has taken hold and is now being regularly used by politicians.
"Many column inches have been filled attacking this claim already.
"Firstly, it is evident that we are much, much richer today than we were in the 1930s. Since gross domestic product is much higher, real spending is much higher too – in absolute terms and per person.
"Secondly, despite the caricature, the 1930s were not a period of absolute destitution in much of the country. In fact, we fared much better than the US during the period prior to re-armament without a New Deal.
"Thirdly, as the Economist has pointed out, spending is not the same as provision of services. According to that paper’s analysis, in 1939 almost half of government spending at 30% of GDP was actually debt interest (14% of GDP). That left 16% of GDP for all other government functions, compared to a 30% of GDP net of debt interest forecast for 2019/20. Far from slashing spending on services to 1930s levels then, state spending excluding debt interest as a proportion of a much larger GDP will be almost double what was seen in 1939 by 2019/20.
"Aside from these facts though, nobody has really questioned the whole premise of the OBR’s claim that overall spending as a proportion of GDP will be as low as seen since the 1930s. Until now."
"IEA research fellow David B Smith has had an important commentary note published by Politiea which suggests that once one reassesses the data to allow accurate time series comparisons, and use appropriate measures of government spending and GDP, spending by 2019/20 will be as much as 11 percentage points of GDP higher than seen in 1938."
The IEA article concludes:
"If a claim sounds too unbelievable to be true, it invariably is. Spending is quite simply not going to return to levels last seen in 1930s, on any accurate comparison. In fact, on Smith’s preferred measure, and if the forecasts are right, spending in 2019/20 would be higher than seen in 2000 and about the same as seen under Gordon Brown’s Chancellorship in 2001."
You can read the full article here.
Question - how can you tell when there is an election coming?
Answer - Labour are running a campaign saying that the Conservatives will destroy the NHS.
Labour's previous shadow health secretary Andy Burnham had a two-page spread in the Mirror this weekend suggesting in that if the Conservatives are back in office it will be a "Death Knell" for the NHS.
Yes, that's the same Andy Burnham who started the present wave of privatisation activity (the proportion of NHS activity outsourced is about the same as it was when he was Health Secretary), presided over several notorious NHS failures, and criticised the present coalition government as "irresponsible" for exempting the NHS from the present round of spending cuts.
But of course, they do this every election.
From Neil Kinnock "I warn you not to get sick"
to Tony Blair's "24 hours to save the NHS"
to Gordon Brown who sent out scaremongering postcards in 2010 to people they thought might be worried about particular conditions such as breast cancer, alleging that the Conservatives would cut spending on those conditions,
to Miliband and Burnham's scaremongering today.
And yet, since I first saw such a campaign in 1983, the Conservatives have won most seats and votes at four General elections, there have been three Conservative Prime Ministers and eight Conservative secretaries of state for Health, who were in office for eighteen of the last thirty-one years, and the NHS still exists, is still largely free at the point of delivery and funded almost entirely from general taxation, and is one of only two areas in government where spending in real terms has been protected over the past four years.
Every Conservative or Conservative-led government since the mid-eighties has spent more money in real terms on the NHS, every year, than the previous year or any previous government including Labour ones.
Britain's health needs are vast, and are going to continue to get more and more expensive to deal with whoever is in government, funding the NHS is going to be a massive problem whoever is in government, and there are going to be problems for the NHS whoever is in government.
Nevertheless, with the Conservatives in government as the larger party in a coalition, this country has an NHS which employs more doctors and nurses than ever before, in which fewer people are waiting long periods for their operations, and which has a new cancer drugs fund. The present government has transformed cancer diagnosis so the NHS now tests 1000 more people for cancer every single day. And so far this parliament the NHS has treated a million more people for cancer than during the last one.
It is a matter of objective fact that if you measure stewardship by spending public money the Conservatives have a better record on the NHS than Labour do.
Incidentally, I don't usually measure the quality of public services by how much taxpayers' money you spend. However, as Labour usually talk as if that was the only measure which mattered, it is only fair to point out that on that measure Labour do not in fact have a better record of funding the NHS.
This is a highly personal and emotive subject for me, because my father was rung up on the morning he was due to go into hospital for an emergency heart operation and told it had been cancelled by shop stewards as part of industrial action in response to NHS cuts under a Labour government which were far more savage than anything any Conservative government has ever done to the NHS. Hence , I find these Labour campaigns dishonest and misleading, not to mention an insult to the intelligence of the electorate.
And then we go on to the ongoing argument about various spending and deficit numbers as a proportion of GDP.
1) If a country has a growing economy, and the national debt is growing but at the same rate as GDP, then you basically have a stable position in terms of ability to meet the debt.
2) If the national debt has risen in both absolute terms and relative to GDP, then your debt situation has clearly and unambiguously got worse.
3) If the national debt has risen, but by proportionately less than GDP, you can make a strong argument (which other things being equal is likely to be right) that the country is in a slightly better position to meet it's debts.
4) If the national debt has fallen in absolute terms while GDP is rising then your debt situation has clearly and unambiguously improved. And the last Labour government left Britain with so much debt that this is where we need to get to.
The four points I made above were about debt, and the argument which blew up after the Autumn Statement and how Conservatives have described it were about the deficit, which is not quite the same thing. Nevertheless, the size of debts and deficits relative to GDP is a legitimate guide to the scale of the problem we still have as a country with the National Debt.
Hence in my opinion it is entirely legitimate for the government or its' defenders to highlight progress in reducing the deficit as a proportion of GDP provided that they are clear and open that this is what the figures being quoted are.
In my opinion it is also quite legitimate for anyone else, with the exception of the Labour party, to challenge and check what is being claimed and point to the fact that in terms of reducing the deficit in absolute terms, though there certainly has been progress - it is down by more than a third - we still need to do much more.
Why do I object to Labour making this point? Because they are quite willing to employ exactly the same trick of quoting numbers relative to GDP rather than in real terms when it suits them, and they repeated one such claim this weekend as part of their campaign to suggest that the Conservatives will wreck the NHS.
Labour has been accusing the Conservatives of wanting to take public spending back to the levels seen in the 1930's, and they did use the word "levels" rather than "share of GDP" this week.
Guido Fawkes, who didn't like the Conservative argument about the deficit being halved (as a proportion of GDP) rather than cut by a third (in absolute terms) argues in a post called
"Labour hit back with their own misleading poster"
that the Labour claims are every bit as "deliberately misleading."
The "Back to the 30's" claim has been rebutted even more strongly by the Institute of Economic Affairs, who published an article by Ryan Bourne last week, called
"Is George Osborne really returning us to a 1930s government? Accurate comparisons suggest a definite No."
That article does not merely point out the misleading inferences which may be drawn when you compare public spending as a proportion of GDP between the 1930's and those projected for 2020 given how much smaller GDP was eighty years ago. It goes on to suggest that the suggestion that projected public spending as a proportion of GDP might drop under the Chancellor's proposals to 1930's levels is wrong even on its' own terms.
As the article says, debate about the Autumn Statement
"has mainly revolved around one Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) graph and the words of an excitable BBC journalist.
"The now infamous ‘Chart 1.1’, from the OBR’s Economic and Fiscal Outlook (below), was accompanied by the statement:
‘total public spending is now projected to fall to 35.2 per cent of GDP in 2019/20, taking it below the previous post-war lows…to what would probably be its lowest level in 80 years’.
"This led to claims that public spending was being cut to levels last seen ‘in the 1930s’ with the BBC journalist Norman Smith claiming
'That is an extraordinary concept. You are back to the land of the Road To Wigan Pier’
– invoking memories of destitution, poverty and squalor. In our era of ‘regression to the meme’ politics, this idea that the state is being hacked back to 1930s levels (a time before the welfare state) has taken hold and is now being regularly used by politicians.
"Many column inches have been filled attacking this claim already.
"Firstly, it is evident that we are much, much richer today than we were in the 1930s. Since gross domestic product is much higher, real spending is much higher too – in absolute terms and per person.
"Secondly, despite the caricature, the 1930s were not a period of absolute destitution in much of the country. In fact, we fared much better than the US during the period prior to re-armament without a New Deal.
"Thirdly, as the Economist has pointed out, spending is not the same as provision of services. According to that paper’s analysis, in 1939 almost half of government spending at 30% of GDP was actually debt interest (14% of GDP). That left 16% of GDP for all other government functions, compared to a 30% of GDP net of debt interest forecast for 2019/20. Far from slashing spending on services to 1930s levels then, state spending excluding debt interest as a proportion of a much larger GDP will be almost double what was seen in 1939 by 2019/20.
"Aside from these facts though, nobody has really questioned the whole premise of the OBR’s claim that overall spending as a proportion of GDP will be as low as seen since the 1930s. Until now."
"IEA research fellow David B Smith has had an important commentary note published by Politiea which suggests that once one reassesses the data to allow accurate time series comparisons, and use appropriate measures of government spending and GDP, spending by 2019/20 will be as much as 11 percentage points of GDP higher than seen in 1938."
The IEA article concludes:
"If a claim sounds too unbelievable to be true, it invariably is. Spending is quite simply not going to return to levels last seen in 1930s, on any accurate comparison. In fact, on Smith’s preferred measure, and if the forecasts are right, spending in 2019/20 would be higher than seen in 2000 and about the same as seen under Gordon Brown’s Chancellorship in 2001."
You can read the full article here.
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