Though of course we would like gov policies to be immediately costed against income, I wouldn’t mind if the gov borrowed to pay for value-adding policies like reversing austerity and spending on infrastructure, or if money was spent on schemes to increase gov income directly, without making money for businesses who are out to extort and exploit. This is not just because it is the priority of the gov to take care of the lives of our fellow citizens on our behalf, but because, as we have seen in America, there is economic gain to be had in nurture, rather aggression and greed.
When we play the ‘how are they going to afford it’ game with labour we have to remember that the tories’ income is based on incredible short termism, a strategy of slash and burn, selling off everything they can get away with and ruining people’s lives, communities, and the working of the country in the process. The idea that becoming a ‘more efficient place to do (only a select few kinds of) business’, which is how they justify their economic policies of deregulation, crushing labour rights, lowering taxes and privatisation, is pure speculation, especially with Brexit on the horizon. Labour are so much on the back foot about costing, and the fear in the media is about how things might be if labour borrowed rather than what is actually going on now. (I am saying this NOT out of skepticism about the manifesto but because of what I think would be a fairer representation of what is going on.)
All this is especially rich coming from the tories because the borrowing figures have increased under the tories, not decreased, but the emphasis on the deficit (which is much easier to fiddle and puts short against long term effects) instead of borrowing, has obscured this.
The other thing I think is very unfair about representations in the media is the description of policies of re-making public, of taking back royal mail, for example, as ‘radical’. Presumably re-making public those areas of the NHS (or the whole of it, or the education system as things are going) that are already private would be described as radical too? Why wouldn’t it be described the other way around? Here is a load of great things that people have paid for together over a long history, that no one party owns, that WE own, and which people have grafted at all their lives at because they believe helping others and doing good: wouldn’t it be pretty radical for an group of aristocrats and businessmen to sell those things to their mates?
