Making up Labour spending figures may backfire on the Tories

If there is one lesson of British politics of recent years, it is that politicians underestimate the public’s appetite for change at their peril. So the Tories may yet come to regret dedicating the weekend to promoting a dodgy dossier from the Conservative research department that grossly overstated Labour’s spending plans.

The Conservatives claim that Labour’s plans will cost the public purse an additional £1.2tn during the next parliament. It is designed to generate “sticker shock” – to be a number that fixes in the public consciousness as a sign that Labour cannot be trusted with the economy. The dossier is not a serious attempt at public policy analysis but a political hatchet job with a calculator. No matter that Labour is yet to agree or publish its 2019 manifesto. The Tories are always happy to speculate wildly – especially when a pliant rightwing press are unwilling to pick apart their claims.

Meanwhile, the chancellor has promised that under a Conservative government public investment will not exceed 3% of national income. That is the current average of OECD countries (the Paris-based club of developed states) and below the G7 average of 3.5%. But investment is a good thing – it is the engine of economic growth – and so it is utterly bizarre to promise to artificially limit it. Yet after a decade of austerity, perhaps it is little surprise that the summit of ambition for the Tories is to be no better than average.

In fact, Britain has suffered from chronic under-investment for the past four decades. Since Thatcher came to power in 1979, public investment has never exceeded the OECD average and, taken together with private investment, we lag well behind other countries. According to the Bank of England, nine-tenths of Britain’s economic growth comes from consumption, rather than investment, which is financed by rising household borrowing against inflated house prices. It is as unsustainable as it sounds.

What’s more, most people know from their own experiences that Britain does not invest enough. We see it in crumbling hospitals and in antiquated railways, in cramped classrooms and congested roads. So while a figure like £1.2tn is so unfathomably large as to be meaningless, what it does do is signal to the public that Labour represents a decisive break with the past. When the public are hungry for real change, it might just prove to be an electoral asset.

By its very nature, investment is a commitment to the future – and that future is imperilled by climate breakdown. There surely cannot be a stronger case for investment than the survival of the planet. Given the unprecedented scale of the crisis, it is absurd to think that what the country needs is yet more of the same. Indeed, sustaining the broken status quo as we hurtle towards disaster is a peculiar form of nihilistic radicalism.

As we enter the 2020s, it is well past time to abandon the discredited orthodoxy of the 1980s. As we have seen this year, a whole new generation has awoken to politics as a result of the climate crisis – from Extinction Rebellion to the student climate strikers. These young people are unlikely to be won over by arguments that originate from an era before they were born, having come of age in the wake of the financial crisis that showed the old economic order had collapsed in all but name. They won’t be persuaded that inaction on the climate crisis is preferable to modest increases in marginal tax rates for the already well-off of their parents’ generation. And after all the blows to trust in politics in the 21st century – from the Iraq war to MPs’ expenses to austerity to tuition fees to the Brexit campaign – they certainly won’t be persuaded by a dodgy dossier peddled by newspapers that a declining number of their parents read.

• Tom Kibasi is a writer and researcher on politics and economics. He is writing in a personal capacity