The British Election’s Trillion-Pound Question
Whoever wins on Dec. 12, the result will be a bonanza of public spending. But whose bonanza it will be matters a lot.
Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell wants to see more government spending, though probably not a trillion pounds more.
Photographer: Leon Neal/Getty ImagesThe Labour Party’s Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell recently promised 55 billion pounds ($70.64 billion) of extra spending a year on investment, if elected on Dec. 12, considerably more than the 20 billion in extra annual spending on capital projects that Chancellor of the Exchequer Sajid Javid has pledged. Voters might wonder, if a little more spending is good, why wouldn’t a lot more be even better?
The Tories have come up with a neat way to answer that. After Mark Sedwill, the head of the civil service, blocked a government plan to publish a report on Labour’s fiscal plans (deemed a breach of impartiality rules), Conservative Party number-crunchers put out their own, which found that Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party plan will add up to more than 1.2 trillion pounds of new spending. That’s a whopping number, even spread over a five-year parliament. It’s also probably fictional. The methodology suggests the Conservatives began with a trillion in mind and worked backward until there were enough inputs to reach it.