Caricature in politics is distorting the truth – from understanding student debt to ‘ending’ austerity Politics is an exercise in caricature. Politicians are caricatured as heroes and heroines by their supporters – as villains and […]

Politics is an exercise in caricature. Politicians are caricatured as heroes and heroines by their supporters – as villains and hexes by their enemies. One moment they’re up, the next they’re down (don’t I know it). One moment Theresa May was held aloft as a latter day Boudica, the next she is condemned as the most hapless PM in modern times. One moment Jeremy Corbyn is condemned as a bumbling fool, the next he is held aloft as a man with the wisdom of a Buddhist monk and the radicalism of Che Guevara.

You know you’re in trouble when Polly Toynbee from the Guardian and Paul Dacre from the Mail direct the same level of spleen at you

Sometimes caricature helps to illuminate an underlying truth. But often it only serves to obscure reality.

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Labour’s unradical manifesto

The caricature of Labour’s recent election manifesto, for instance, as a document of rare radicalism and socialist ambition – a caricature repeated by its critics as much as by McDonnell et al – hides a more mundane truth: the manifesto was in fact a somewhat unoriginal, nostalgic rehash of old fashioned nationalisation and implausible “soak the rich” taxes.

It is silent on the need for radical reform of our politics, Eurosceptic in intent, and redistributes wealth to the middle classes with nothing left for the very poorest.

It was, in the strictest sense, a small “c” conservative document – yet the caricature that it was an explosive, swashbuckling manifesto will no doubt live on.

Caricature’s curse

Caricatures tend to stick, too. The Lib Dems are used to getting it in the neck from both left and right, especially when we were in Government.

You know you’re in trouble when Polly Toynbee from the Guardian and Paul Dacre from the Daily Mail – united by that odd mix of sanctimony and rage you find on the hard left and hard right of British politics – direct the same level of spleen at you from opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. When caricature replaces analysis, any old tosh will do.

But the dangers of caricature are more serious when it comes to Government policies, because it can lead to distorting decisions with real life consequences. Take last weekend’s furore about Jeremy Corbyn’s u-turn on his commitment to “deal” with the stock of student debt. In many ways, Corbyn was just being hoisted by his own petard (I know how he feels).

This Conservative Government has introduced various sneaky tweaks and changes to the student debt system which have made it far less progressive than it used to be

The Labour leader has spent the last several months caricaturing the system as imposing regressive tuition fees to be paid by hard pressed students at University when, as Martin Lewis, the consumer rights guru, and others have rightly pointed out it is in fact a system of repayments made by graduates dependent on their earnings long after they have left University.

Student debt? Call it graduate tax

Indeed, the Institute of Fiscal Studies concluded that the system designed by Vince Cable and David Willetts in Coalition was more progressive than the tuition fees introduced, and then tripled, by the previous Labour Government. Under the Cable/Willetts system repayments start once earnings reached £21000 rather than £15000 and are subsequently increased according to how much people earn. It amounts, in effect, to a graduate tax.

Yet, it is also highly disingenuous for Jo Johnson, the Conservative Minister responsible for Universities, to defend the system as infallible. This Conservative Government has introduced various sneaky tweaks and changes to the system which have made it far less progressive than it used to be. One of the first acts by George Osborne in 2015, once he was free of the constraints of Coalition with the Lib Dems, was to freeze the repayment threshold at £21000 – a direct breach of the commitment made to students that the threshold would rise in line with average earnings. Most punitively, he converted the grants provided to the poorest students to cover their living expenses into loans, so increasing the total amount to be repaid by those who come from the poorest families. When the Conservatives first proposed this as a money-saving measure in 2013, I vetoed it.

Now that the Conservatives have imposed this change, much of the progressive design of the repayment system has diminished. That is why Vince Cable is right to say that it must now be reformed again to restore greater fairness to the way in which graduates make their repayments in future.

The Conservatives have insisted on £12bn of deeply regressive in-work welfare cuts (vetoed by Lib Dems prior to 2015)

Approaching austerity sensibly but fairly

Caricature has also disfigured the debate around austerity. One of the most appealing pitches made by Jeremy Corbyn to voters at the last election was to “end austerity”. But Corbyn does people no favours by asserting that fiscal policy since 2010 has been deliberately beastly when the Coalition reduced the deficit at a slower pace than the plans announced by Alistair Darling and Gordon Brown before they left office. Nor is it honest to pretend that a stock of national debt inching towards 90% of GDP, and the billions of pounds spent servicing our interest on it, can just be ignored.

What’s more, inequality remained largely stable and at its lowest level since the 1980s throughout the five years of the Coalition Government. That is not to say the Coalition did not take controversial decisions, or that austerity was pain free, but as both the Resolution Foundation and the IFS have demonstrated, the Conservatives’ insistence on £12bn of deeply regressive in-work welfare cuts (again, vetoed by Lib Dems prior to 2015) and their fetish of chasing a wholly symbolic budget surplus will lead to a dramatic increase in inequality during this Parliament.

By failing to understand the huge difference in fiscal policy between the 2010-2015 Coalition Government and the current Conservative Government – because the political caricature demands that no distinction should be made – there is a real danger that the wrong conclusions will now be drawn on how to strike the right balance between fiscal constraint and social fairness.

Caricature is inevitable in politics. But we shouldn’t allow it to rewrite history – otherwise we’ll simply carry on repeating the mistakes of the past.