Look what they did last time they were in power. After years of spending splurges, much of which was wasted by inefficient bureaucracy or squandered on grand vanity projects, the Blair and Brown governments left us with a vast deficit (over and above the cost of bailing out the banks) and a severely damaged economy. They could have used the bounty of the good years to harden the nation against the risk of a downturn – instead they left us acutely vulnerable. Even after five years of austerity and reforms, Britain is still recovering from the damage. The very people who now pitch a Labour “alternative” to difficult decisions, Ed Miliband and Ed Balls, were at the heart of that calamitous administration.
Time and again they’ve been wrong about the recovery. Remember how dealing with the deficit would cause a triple dip recession? Or how it would drive up unemployment? Or how the private sector could never create more jobs than the public sector? At every stage Labour have predicted doom and disaster – and at every stage they have been proved wrong. If wrecking the economy and the public finances wasn’t bad enough, they have spent the last five years trying their level best to wreck the recovery. Why trust a party that not only starts fires but throws stones at the fire brigade when they work to extinguish them?
They have no idea how business works. Just look at the energy price freeze – if Miliband had had his way, he would have frozen energy prices right at the peak of the market, denying consumers any access to the fall in global fuel costs that we have seen since. Just his threat of a freeze has cost households money – energy companies have hedged against the danger of a Labour government by reducing prices more slowly than they otherwise would.
Their existing plans are full of holes. Take the Bank Bonus tax as an example. Despite claiming to have changed their spots on fiscal responsibility, Labour have so far pledged to spend the revenue from this magic money tree tax eleven times over. It’s deceitful in theory – if they ever have to put it into practice, such black holes would be disastrous.
Every single Labour government in history has left unemployment higher than it found it at the beginning of its term. Every. Single. One. Labour isn’t a party of the workers – it’s a destroyer of jobs.