If you watch the Daily Politics, Dominic Raab keeps up today's attack on Labour quoting JM saying that "spending and borrowing pays for itself" over and over and over. He keeps saying it is just not credible, that can't be right, that can't be credible which to me showed he has the economic sense of the nursery.
Turning to Linda Yueh, the economist and not, I would suggest, left-wing or a Labour supporter, Jo Coburn reminded her of what she had said earlier, that perhaps this is exactly what Philip Hammond should have done. He should have thrown away the Red Box and the Red Book in terms of constraint and actually spent a lot more.
Linda Yueh's reply was "I would reconfigure the Red Box. So, one thing the government hasn't done is separate out current spending from capital spending. So what you can do, the only way to raise productivity and it is a big puzzle, but the key thing the bank of England identifies is you have to raise investment. So investment in hard and soft infrastructure, human capital, all of that, if you count that as capital spending you can borrow at very low rates and invest in something which will be paid off in the future and you can separate that from current spending so you don't scare financial markets and I think that is something where he probably could have done a bit more given how dire our productivity prospects are. But it is something that requires reconfiguring how we think entirely, about the deficit."
Linda Yueh went on to say that private firms are not investing, in part because public investment has been slashed to less than 2% of GDP. It used to be over 3% of GDP before the crisis. She commented that we can't have better jobs in the future unless there is more investment in STEM education and technical education. That is why there is a good argument for putting investment in human capital - people - as well as hard and soft infrastructure and that would go a long way without going into the more politically disputed areas such as nationalisation.
This is exactly what Labour has been suggesting we do. You can argue about nationalisation - I would - but I do want a party that understands economics, not a collection of book-keepers, running the country and the Tory party view of this doesn't come anywhere near economics they are still at the coffee pot stage with one for the rent, one for the 'leccy, etc.
