Politics, declared Douglas Alexander at the Progress political weekend, is a game of ‘competing truths’. Over the past year, we’ve all seen how true this is with the Tories setting the agenda, no matter how shameless their claims about Labour councils cutting more deeply than Tory ones, or dodgy their comparisons between the NHS and its European counterparts.
While George Osborne peddled the myth that his deficit reduction package was an economic necessity rather than a political choice, Labour let itself be caught on the back foot – not helped, admittedly, by Gordon Brown’s refusal for a long time to admit the need even to talk about cuts, and by a media and Tory narrative of Conservatives ‘cleaning up after Labour’s mess’ which is both familiar and easy to conjure up when needed.
But if Labour is to achieve the target Jim Murphy set for it at the political weekend – ‘a score draw on the deficit, and a win on growth against the coalition’ – we should perhaps start with one small semantic change in how we discuss the deficit. Indeed, as the American professor George Lakoff reminded us in his book Don’t Think of An Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate, we shouldn’t underestimate how much words matter in political discourse. Take one example: the US right likes to talk about ‘tax relief’ because the phrase itself implies that taxes are an affliction from which we need relief.
So instead of referring to ‘cutting’ the deficit, we should start talking about ‘closing’ it. Understandably, the concept of the deficit gets all too easily conflated with the more familiar idea of debt. But the concept isn’t all that hard to explain if you frame it right. Talking about ‘closing’ the deficit makes clear in its very imagery that the deficit is not debt, but is simply a gap.
How does this help? It could underscore that deficit reduction is about getting two sides of the equation right, and drive home the need to achieve growth. Margaret Thatcher’s favourite household budget analogy of balancing the books could actually be turned to our advantage here.
If the deficit is the gap between what you spend in a month and what you receive in at the end of a month, then clearly there are two ways of closing that gap. One is reducing spending – what the government is doing – and the other is increasing your income – what the government is not doing.
If we are to push the government hard on asking where growth is going to come from, talking about closure of the deficit gap, rather than simply ‘cutting the deficit’, sets us on firmer ground. Otherwise, the image of the deficit in everyone’s mind is of a big pile of debt that needs to be cut down to the ground by diverting resources away from public spending into paying down that debt. Worse, it remains ‘Labour’s mountain of debt’ rather than coalition’s deficit that it promised to close.
This is a really very good idea. Talk of “cutting the deficit” ties the idea of the deficit to the act of cutting – the image of a deficit as a burden that needs to be cut. Shifting our language and the mental image we create is an essential step. The basic problem we have is that our argument seems counter-intuitive, as it is not obvious that on a macro level our income depends on our spending. Allowing our opponents to frame the debate means that we have to struggle to sound credible, and in the process of doing so we reinforce their frame.
Brilliant! Rather than all that hard work of understanding the nature and causes of the deficit in order to explain to the public the best way of handling it all we have to do is to change the way we talk about it. That is so much easier.