He’s supposed to be one of only two shadow cabinet members guaranteed his job if David Cameron’s Conservatives ever make it to government. And yet Andrew Lansley, the apparently ‘untouchable’ Tory shadow health spokesperson, got himself into real trouble when he revealed in a Times interview that he wanted health spending under the Conservatives to take up an extra two per cent of GDP.
To be fair, Lansley was making the perfectly valid point that demographic trends and the high cost of new equipment and drugs will inevitably drive up the cost of running the NHS in future years.
And in one sense, Labour strategists should be flattered by Lansley’s intervention: it provides yet another example of the increasing willingness of Cameron’s Conservatives to accept much of the Blairite legacy of large-scale investment in the public services. Under Labour, the health budget has increased by an average of seven per cent per year since 1997 – the largest injection of cash into the NHS since its foundation 60 years ago.
So far, so good. But Lansley’s mistake was twofold. One, he appeared to go beyond George Osborne’s 2007 pledge to match Labour’s spending totals until 2011. And, two, he admitted that such increases in NHS funding would require cuts elsewhere in public services. As Labour politicians know from the bitter experience of the run-up to John Smith’s shadow budget in 1992, shadow spokespeople from high-spending briefs simply cannot afford to make uncosted commitments without first squaring them with the shadow chancellor.
It didn’t take long for Yvette Cooper, the chief secretary to the Treasury, to accuse the Conservatives of planning £10bn in spending cuts. Sweet revenge for Cooper, who was on the other end of Conservative misrepresentations of Labour’s ‘tax-and-spend’ when she was a junior economic adviser to Smith in 1992.
Labour will also be delighted that Lansley’s intervention has temporarily silenced that so oft-heard Tory refrain during the last general election campaign: ‘where has all the money gone?’ Meanwhile, voters will be left asking themselves how on earth the Conservatives can hope to meet their long-term pledge of reducing government spending as a proportion of national wealth, while simultaneously boosting health spending to even greater levels than those so far agreed by Labour.
But the loudest howls of protest over the Lansley interview were from the Tory right. With the possible exception of an all-day debate on the supposed horrors of the Lisbon treaty, there is nothing like the lure of a tax cut to make a Tory rightwinger go all feral. Osborne, Cameron’s other ‘untouchable’, fell victim to that temptation with his audacious inheritance tax proposals back in the autumn, and may believe that similar headline-grabbing, tax-cutting measures will yield political dividends again.
Such an approach would be bonkers. Slowing growth means there is absolutely no scope for major tax cuts after the next general election: something that Kenneth Clarke, the only Tory with any fiscal sense, knows full well.
In recent months, the economic slowdown has taken some of the shine off Brown’s achievements at the Treasury, but one other political side effect in its wake is the much greater pressure it puts on the Conservatives to make carefully costed commitments – ones that actually add up. Take note, Mr Lansley.