For the last month it's been like hearing a music track that sampled something from your past but you just can't remember the original. Something was wrong, no not wrong, just strangely familiar about the Sustainable Growth Commission's report, and in particular their deficit reduction policy.
It was that, apparently, oh so clever line of having increases in public spending whilst at the same time reducing public spending (as a proportion of GDP) that kept rolling around in my head... I've heard this before. I just couldn't remember where.
Then it all came flooding back: Michael Portillo!
Shortly after his return to the Commons in the Kensington & Chelsea by-election Portillo was appointed to William Hague's Shadow Cabinet as Shadow Chancellor. Portillo presenting himself as a man on a journey from Major's bastards to a progressive Tory who seemed to accept aspects of the Blair/Brown revolution.
However Portillo needed a way of facing in both directions, favouring tax cuts whilst not falling into Brown's trap of arguing for public service cuts to pay for it.
He found a novel way of squaring the circle:
Public spending would increase in real terms under the Tories but would do so at a rate which was lower than the rate of growth in the economy.
Tax cuts and public spending increases, what a clever wheeze!
I recall thinking at the time, what an interesting way of presenting Tory spending cuts and wondered how Brown would ever counter it. He didn't need to, no one seemed to buy it and Hague was obliterated at the next election.
Apparently it was clever, just too clever by half.
The Wilson remix of Portillo
If you replace 'tax cuts' in the above with 'paying for independence' then Wilson's strategy is almost identical to Portillo's. At the time the SNP were opposed tooth-in-claw to such a strategy. This was the SNP under Swinney's leadership, the party that had campaigned on a Penny for Scotland, policy designed to increase tax a proportion of the economy.
The SNP were opposed to this Tory austerity then (they didn't use the term then as it hadn't entered the lexicon) but for some reason are now proposing the same too clever by half austerity policy as their own.
It's a new tune but the same melody. The philosophy behind the Sustainable Growth Commission was always deeply grounded in Conservative economics, i just didn't realise it was a total rip off.
