Notice that this disastrous forecasting performance is being presented by Cameron and Osborne as a triumph of good management. The Forecast Osborne relied on in 2011 for the Net Debt in 2015-16 is almost £200Bn below the Net Debt prediction the Government is now making in 2015 for next year – only twelve months ahead (this should gives us zero confidence in Conservative government forecasts four or five years down the pike). The sheer scale of the differences between starting-point and end-point; between forecasts and outturns does not provide a simple statistical ‘margin of error’ framework that justifies Osborne’s clearly lame economic management, but instead provides quite the opposite conclusion to the Conservative scare-mongers; there is scope for radically different policies to the intellectually bankrupt Austerity programme. This offers us the opportunity to choose investment rather than austerity; and even more rare in Britain – investment beyond London.

What the Conservatives are claiming to be a triumph of planned management, nobody should doubt is nothing of the kind; the same Cameron and Osborne would claim in outrage that this 2015 debt and deficit position was the Apocalypse, if their 2015 Budget had been presented at the close of a Labour Government after five years in office, had it been Labour that had claimed they would eliminate the deficit and halt the increase in Debt in one Parliament. The Conservatives are peddling crude partisan politics and not wise government; it is all a matter of ‘spin’. In short, the Conservative position on debt and deficit is absurd; unsustainable. It is quite astonishing that Labour should have drawn the conclusion from this policy farce, that the clever thing to do in the 2015 Labour Manifesto is to promise to eliminate the Deficit by 2020; but that is the nature of the modern Labour Party.

Why are Cameron and Osborne able to ‘get away’ with this patent absurdity? Why are Labour so spineless? The support of the City and the media for this policy are both significant factors, and this in turn is a product of the ridiculous, prevailing neo-liberal ideology. With the public, the common- sense attraction of what we may call ‘household economics’ is also a factor (the shibboleth of ‘balancing the books’); but there is a much more fundamental reason.

Cameron and Osborne can cover-up their total failure of planning, management and even basic economic understanding – only because the deficit and debt were not in reality the critical, knife- edge, precarious economic problem that they, even now continue to claim. They have conflated a dangerous threat of contagion in a banking crisis in 2007-8 with a quite separate deficit and debt issue that is an inevitable consequence of Government being required to shore-up the economy after a catastrophic private sector banking collapse. The deficit and debt were more manageable than the Conservatives realised in 2010; or now wish the public to understand was the case all along. The Conservative ‘triumph’ is the proof that they have comprehensively failed.

The Conservatives have survived the disaster of their own economic ineptitude because they exaggerated the nature of the deficit and debt problem that they sold to the British people. They have presented as ‘science’ and as ‘fact’ what is mere ideology; and they are still selling the British public a discredited snake-oil ideology into the bargain.

The Conservatives have thus deprived Britain of investment and economic growth over the last five years that would in turn quite possibly have on balance reduced the deficit over the period and have at least slowed the rate of the rise in debt. During this wasted period in office they might have pursued aggressive tax avoidance and evasion measures, or tackled the tax-haven status of ‘offshore’ Britain. They could have raised substantial tax revenues from these sources alone, and perhaps even reduced nominal tax rates for the many: but they didn’t. They sanctioned the poor instead. They cut welfare to hapless people who had never participated in the boom and had no hand in the bust. Five years late, and long after the horse has bolted, they now promise to half-close the tax avoidance door. This is Conservative planning in action.