Solicitors In - Economical Credibility Gap...

'Credibility gap': The thought doesn't count

"gosh, I can't vote Tory" - Quote below

It wasn't so long ago that the prime minister was drawing battles lines for the election between Labour investment and "Tory cuts". Now, it's Conservative profligacy versus Labour austerity and restraint.

Or that's today's message, anyway. No doubt there will be another worthy skirmish between the major parties tomorrow (sigh).

The chancellor says that the Tories have made pledges to raise spending or cut taxes worth at least £45bn a year by the end of the next parliament - but offered only £11bn in tax rises and spending cuts to pay for them.

If you don't believe him, he's got a 150-page document to show you, costing each and every Tory aspiration.

I'm sure the numbers are right, as far as they go.

But - with apologies to the poor souls who had to come up with all of those pages - the numbers aren't the issue. The issue is whether any of this is Tory policy, and whether any of it would actually be implemented by any Conservative administration on the timetable that Darling's document suggests.

The Conservatives have been quick to jump on the "dodgy dossier" - there's a detailed rebuttal due to land in my inbox any minute. David Cameron claimed to have seen at least £11bn wrong with the paper in the first seconds of looking at it.

For example, to get the £45bn figure. Labour has thrown in nearly £5bn in tax cuts for married couples, and another £5bn from abolishing stamp duty on shares. Yet the Tories have have not made any detailed policy pledges in either area, as is perhaps demonstrated by the fact that the Labour researchers only throw these tax cuts into the last year of a putative Tory parliament in their calculations.

This happens rather a lot in the course of those 150 pages: not having a firm commitment from any minister, the authors assume that a given tax cut or spending increase will only happen in 2014-15. The result is the so-called "credibility gap" goes up from £13bn in 2013-14 to £34bn in just one year.

Labour says this shows them being "generous" with the Conservatives - because the cost would be that much greater if the changes were assumed to be implemented any earlier. You could also say it shows the arbitrariness of the entire exercise.

I don't think people will come away from this thinking: "gosh, I can't vote Tory - they're going to be throwing too much tax-payer money around". Labour wouldn't want anyone to think that either.

But it's true that there have been a number of not-quite-pledges in the rhetoric of senior Tories over the past year - like the talk of tax cuts for married couples, or reversing the 50p rate for top earners. Here and elsewhere, they have wanted to gain credit for aspiration, without having to pay for it.

Yet, to coin a phrase, it's not the thought that counts.

The only message that Labour wanted to get across with this document is that you can't have your cake and cut it too. To the extent that the Conservatives are now forced to clarify what they have and have not promised for a Tory first term, I suspect Labour will consider this first big day of the 2010 campaign a success.

In fact, no sooner had I written those words than the Chief Secretary of the Treasury, Liam Byrne, called me to say he was "not unhappy" that the Tory leader had already come out denying that these were formal pledges. It's a question of trust, he said, which Labour is planning to keep running with, right through the next few months.

Which is all fine and dandy. But there are risks to this particular credibility game.

The first is that, while voters are unlikely ever to think of the Conservatives as profligate spenders, all the talk of uncosted pledges makes it that much harder for Labour to paint the Conservatives as the party of reckless spending cuts (whatever the true differences between the parties).

The other is that pre-election slanging matches involving big headline numbers can come back to haunt you.

At the last election, Labour said that Conservative policies would involve a £35bn cut in spending on public services, and spent most of the campaign going on about it. But using the same (rather flawed) methodology, the IFS has calculated that Labour now plans a cut of more than £80bn.

In the coming months, you can bank on the Conservatives to make as much hay with that big headline number as they possibly can.

Stephanie Flanders

BBC NEWS

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Article Reference: bbc .co.uk/blogs/thereporters/stephanieflanders/2010/01/the_thought_doesnt_count.html

Photo: newsimg. bbc.co.uk/media/images/47029000/jpg/_47029655_cameron226ap.jpg