All in it together? After Osborne’s set piece, it’s everyone out for themselves

Three talking points drew our attention away from telling details of the spending plans

Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne prior to delivering his Autumn Statement today (AFP PHOTO / ANDY RAIN / POOLANDY RAIN/AFP/Getty Images)

Be on guard. George Osborne’s set-piece statements are artfully constructed to hide bad news, emphasise favourable developments and generally reassure us “that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds”. The former Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Danny Alexander, admitted recently that, in his time, the Treasury had deliberately masked the impact of policy changes on Britain’s households by “completely changing” the way these things are measured.

The key to the statement are two unexpectedly favourable developments. Tax receipts are turning out better than expected and lower interest rates mean that payments on debt will be less. This gave the Chancellor room to confound his critics by scrapping his planned cuts in tax credits and to protect police budgets. Together with the big-number investments in massively increasing house building, three talking points were provided to draw attention away from the small but telling details of the spending plans.

Take house building: the plans are bold, but the building industry is in no position to deliver on them in full. The increase in output already achieved has raised the costs of bricklayers, carpenters, joiners, plasterers and site managers. That would not matter if house prices were rising sufficiently quickly to cover these extra costs. But, in many places, they are not.

Yet, if readers will forgive my cynicism, it doesn’t really matter to career politicians if the reality down the road doesn’t live up to the promise. What counts in their PR minds is the impact of the first announcement, published as it will be in every national newspaper and on every radio and TV news programme. “The biggest house-building programme by any government since the 1970s.” Job done.

That is a detail. The larger truth is that by international standards, the quality of Britain’s public services is uninspiring. Don’t forget that the authoritative Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) rates the British healthcare system as one of the worst systems in the developed world. According to the OECD, we have an “outstandingly poor” record of preventing ill-health. The UK came 21st out of 23 countries on cervical cancer survival rates, 20th out of 23 countries on breast and bowel cancer survival and 19th out of 31 on stroke.

The same organisation judged that UK graduates leave university with lower numeracy skills than their peers in any other country except the US. The study, which sought to identify the barriers to young people entering the labour market based on interviews with 165,000 participants across 33 developed countries, found that about 25 per cent of new graduates in the UK were assessed as having poor numeracy, compared with levels of well below 10 per cent in competing economies such as Korea, Japan, Finland and the Netherlands.

These findings put the habitual boasting by the Prime Minister and Chancellor of Britain’s supposed world-beating qualities into perspective. If, as Mr Osborne said, we’ve grown almost three times faster than Japan, twice as fast as France, faster than Germany and at the same rate as the United States over the past five years, then why are some of our public services among the worst in the world?

For me, however, the most important question is whether Mr Osborne, in making draconian cuts in some public services is being merely prudent, albeit excessively so, or is he surreptitiously intent on creating a small state such as we have not experienced in this country since the 1930s? The Prime Minister gets close to this notion when he expounds his belief in a “smarter state”. As he said, in a speech in Leeds in September, “with a smarter state, we can spend less and deliver more”. Is this disguise for small-state doctrine? And to see what this means, look at the Republican Party in the US.

Republicans worship the notion of the small state. For them, it’s not so much that it would be smarter, but that it would expand the liberty of individuals to manage their own lives. See who supports the idea in the US – militant taxpayer groups, people who worry about the sanctity of their property rights, the business community, the two million Americans who educate their children at home and the gun rights lobby.

That sort of thinking has absolutely no place in our political culture. There is no “we’re all in this together” in it. Instead, it would be each person for him or herself. Is that the destination Mr Osborne has chosen to use his political power to reach? Possible, but the evidence is mixed.