Big Spending Tories

A year ago, the Tory leader, Michael Howard set out his ideas for less government in his speech, The British Dream. He said:

And I will tell you today, in all honesty and as starkly as I am able to, that the size and scope of government in this country – and the means of its financing by the people through taxation – is quite simply too big.

So the Tories are the party of small government? Are they hell! The individual knows better how to spend his money than government? Er, not really ...

Claiming to identify £35 billion of waste expenditure, the Tories want the government to spend most of it on their pet programmes like health and education. Only £4 billion - £6 billion would be repatriated to taxpayers as tax cuts. Pathetic.

Sounds to me more like a way of promising extra spending without admitting the need for additional taxation. If they didn't make the 'savings', what then? Would they hold back on the spending? Fat chance!

Do the Tories think the huge extra monies spent on health and education by Labour has been money well spent, or even that it can be well spent? Not according to that speech of Howard's last year:

Opponents of change [to the NHS] assiduously propagated two myths. First, that no country had better health care. And secondly that there was nothing wrong with the system that just a little bit more money would not solve.

But now we have seen those myths blown out of the water. The current Government has spent a huge amount more of people's taxes on the NHS: they have set hundreds of targets and bench marks. But we still lag behind many of our neighbours.

[... T]his approach has been tried, it has been given time to work and it has failed. Public sector productivity has not increased. The public's expectations, raised by the rhetoric of politicians, have not been realised. There is now a fundamental imbalance between what voters want and what government is able to deliver.

So why spend even more?

The Tories should be proposing to cut out whole functions of government. That is the only way to small government.