Autumn Statement

Lord Skidelsky Excerpts

Thursday 4th December 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Skidelsky (CB)]

My Lords, I do not have time to answer the disparagement by the noble Lord, Lord Lawson, of Keynesian stimulus. Perhaps one day we will be allowed to have a proper economic debate in this House in which we can pursue these issues further.

I will concentrate on one point: the Chancellor’s failure to meet his budgetary targets. Growth has been revised up to 3% this year, to be followed by 2.4% in 2015, then 2.2% and then 2.3% thereafter for ever and ever. My first point is that these forecasts are not worth the paper that they are written on because they are conditional on all sorts of unlikely things happening in that period. Their importance lies in the fact that they are the basis of his budget projections. In 2010 the Chancellor forecast GDP growth of 2.3% in 2010-11, 2.8% in 2011-12 and 2.9% in 2012-13. In fact the upwardly revised figures show that it was 1.6% in 2010-11, 0.7% in 2011-12 and 1.7% in 2012-13. According to the Chancellor the economy should have grown 8.2% compounded in that period, but in fact it grew by 4.1%. No wonder his deficit reduction plans went awry.

Agreed, it was not all his fault. Of course it was not; what happens to the budget is determined by what happens to the economy, and what happens to the economy is not all within the Treasury’s control. It is equally important to remember, though—here we do a little bit of Keynesian economics—that what happens to the economy is also determined by budgetary policy. That could hardly not be so, as government spending accounts for about 40% of GDP.

Ever since I started writing and speaking about these matters in 2010, I have been predicting that the Chancellor would not meet his budget targets. The reason I gave was that the pursuit of those targets in itself would slow down the economic growth on which their achievement depended. Why? Because it slows down the rate of spending in the economy, and growth depends on spending. The cuts have hit spending, and the spending has hit growth. So it is not surprising that the Chancellor finds himself with a projected deficit of £91.3 billion this year, when in 2010 he promised to balance the budget by the end of this Parliament.

According to the OBR, the discrepancy between the projection and outcome results from the “unexpectedly weak” performance of tax receipts. Perhaps it was unexpected only to the experts at the Treasury. In fact it was the logical consequence of growth being so much below what was expected between 2010 and 2013, and of what has been happening to the labour market since then. The Government have congratulated themselves on the fall in unemployment. We would expect falling unemployment to increase tax revenues and reduce public spending—but not if unemployment is replaced by jobs that pay so little that those who fill them pay no direct tax and their income has to be propped up by benefits. For example, the number of housing benefit claimants who are in work has doubled since 2009.

So why has the British economy been growing at all? The answer is very largely because there are more people in the country. The population was 62.3 million in 2010; today there are 64.1 million, 2 million more, virtually all of them of working age, and more people are coming in every month. Any economy will grow if it has more people working. The only relevant welfare measure—the measure by which any Government deserve to be judged—is GDP or national income per head. Our GDP grew by 4.1% between 2010 and 2013, but GDP per head has grown by only 2.3%. Real wages have fallen between 5% and 10%, and the typical earner is £1,600 a year worse off.

In conclusion, we are left with the prospect of another round of brutal spending cuts with the rolling five-year deficit reduction programme rolling ever further into the future. With productivity growth likely to be so weak, for the reasons pointed out by the noble Lord, Lord Desai, the Chancellor’s new projections will prove as delusional as his previous ones. It sometimes helps if the people running economic policy do know some Keynesian economics.