By placing a photo of Nigel Lawson behind his desk, artfully positioned to be caught by the official photographer, Jeremy Hunt shows himself to be a keen student of previous Tory chancellors. But if he is guided too much by them, that can only be a problem: for him, for his party and for all of us.
Tory chancellors have held the purse strings for 30 of the past 43 years, and from Geoffrey Howe through Norman Lamont to Rishi Sunak, they have nearly all left the UK economy in a worse state than they found it. Of the 11 previous Conservative chancellors since 1979, most left office with poverty rates higher or unchanged from when they started. Although these figures are not yet available for Rishi Sunak, Nadhim Zahawi or Kwasi Kwarteng, the extremely high use of foodbanks during their stints is surely a bad sign, and no Conservative chancellor has managed to reduce inequality anywhere close to pre-1979 levels.
As for GDP, the unweighted average annual growth for a Conservative chancellor since 1979 has been a pallid 1.34% – compared with Gordon Brown’s 2.7% during his 10 years as chancellor. It bodes ill for the already dismal Tory record that the current chancellor used the opening remarks of his autumn statement to confirm that the UK is already in recession.
On the value of the pound, no Tory chancellor of the past four decades has shepherded sterling’s return to its May 1979 value of $2.07, with only Labour managing to bring it back above $2, in 2007. In the time it took the chancellor to deliver his statement, the pound actually fell by a full percentage point.
The Coalition-era chancellor, George Osborne, saw wages fall and presided over a programme of austerity that created the conditions for profound and far-reaching crises in our public services, from days-long A&E wait times to schools with huge budget shortfalls. Food banks have seen a 100-fold increase in demand since 2010. Analysis suggests that depressed incomes and chilled consumer spending from austerity delivers an annual £100bn hit to GDP.
And all of that is without Brexit – another Tory spanner in the UK’s economic engine – which is estimated to have cost the UK economy £31bn last year alone. In addition to this lost growth, our research reveals the Tories have wasted nearly £70bn in public funds since 2019. The man in charge of the public purse for the majority of that time? Rishi Sunak.
The five chancellors who have presided over the Conservatives’ post-Brexit economic free-for-all have let the pound slip into seemingly terminal decline. Its recent near-parity with the dollar has only one precedent: in 1985, under, you guessed it, a Conservative government.
The economic pain is only likely to continue under Hunt’s fiscal three-card Monte last week, where taxes were introduced on the sly, levies on corporations and the wealthy remain vulnerable to loopholes, and “giveaways” will be wiped out by inflation.
What are the party donors thinking? Certainly they fail to deploy the critical faculties that in other spheres make them successful. No sensible investor would continue funnelling cash to a venture with a 30-year record of mismanagement and failure. As economic stewards, they aren’t worth talking about, but as illusionists, they are brilliant.
Naomi Smith is chief executive of Best for Britain
