Abstract
This chapter further unpacks the source of beliefs about the deficit and public spending that were identified in Chap. 5. In particular, it examines how two beliefs common in my focus groups reflected recurrent themes in press reporting in the period following Labour’s re-election in 2001. These were the belief that much of Labour’s post-2001 spending increases had been wasted and that public sector pensions, immigration and welfare had become increasingly unfair and unsustainable burdens on the taxpayer. To locate the development of these narratives Nexis searches going back to 2000 were conducted in four right-wing national newspapers. These revealed that the frequency of these themes rose substantially after 2001 and then increased again when the financial crisis hit in 2008. The chapter concludes by considering the contribution of the media in relation to other factors which may have influenced public knowledge and attitudes in this area.
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- 1.
There is no evidence that most of Labour’s increase in spending was wasted or that the NHS is overly bureaucratised. An LSE study found that the major public spending increases introduced by Labour led to large increases in frontline resources such as ‘new hospitals, schools, equipment and ICT, 48,000 extra FTE equivalent teachers, 3500 new children’s centres, more doctors and nurses, and many new programmes aimed at neighbourhood renewal’ leading to substantial improvements in waiting times and pupil-teacher ratios (Lupton et al. 2013: 7). Was all this money well spent? Research from the IFS (2010) found that spending increases had been associated with a small decline in productivity of 0.3 per cent per year between 1997 and 2007. On a separate calculation of ‘bang for buck’ the organisation reported a larger fall of 1.3 per cent per year. However the IFS noted that measuring productivity in public services is ‘notoriously difficult’ and that the extra funding may ‘have improved the quality of outputs in ways not measured’ (2010: 11–12). Alternative research by the ONS (2013) found that productivity in public services remained broadly constant during this period. Reports concentrating specifically on the NHS report a largely positive picture. A report by the Commonwealth Fund found that the NHS was the third most efficient health systems in a study of 11 developed nations (Schneider et al. 2017). Furthermore the Nuffield Trust found that ‘idea that the NHS employs an unjustifiably huge number of full-time managers is just wrong’ citing research which found that the NHS employed less than half the proportion of managers compared to the economy as a whole (Dayan and Edwards 2015).
- 2.
Labour did not increase the number of workless people living on benefits, the proportion of public spending going to social security, nor did it make it more comfortable for those reliant on welfare. The claimant count which measures the number of people claiming benefits due to unemployment fell from 1.6 million in May 1997 to 815,200 at the end of 2007 (ONS 2017). The Labour Force Survey which includes a broader range of those who are unemployed recorded a smaller fall from just over 2 million in 1997 to 1.6 million in 2007, whilst the unemployment rate fell from 7.2 per cent to 5.4 per cent over the same period (Full Fact 2011). The broadest measure of benefits paid to those not in work, the out of work benefits numbers which includes job seekers allowance, income support and incapacity benefit also reported a fall from 5 million in 1999 (data on this measure only goes back to 1999) to just under 4.4 million in 2007 (Full Fact 2011). Social security fell from 33.0 per cent of total public spending in 1997 to 27.1 per cent in 2007 despite substantial real terms increases in benefits directed at pensioners and children (IFS 2010) In terms of the level of benefits again there is no evidence that these had increased making life more comfortable for those reliant on them. The real level of income support and incapacity benefit was static between 1997 and 2007 whilst the value of job seekers allowance fell in real terms (Rutherford 2013).
- 3.
There is no evidence that migrants accessed out of work benefits at a level above British citizens or acted as a significant drain on public spending—if anything the balance of research finds that migrants—and particularly EEA migrants are net contributors to the state. Research from the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford found that EU and non-EU migrants were half as likely to be claiming out of work benefits as British nationals (Full Fact 2015). EU migrants- particularly those from the post 2004 accession states- did however claim tax credits at a higher rate than UK nationals because they were more concentrated in low wage sectors (Full Fact 2015). When the net contribution of migration is calculated by subtracting the costs of the public services migrants use from the tax they pay research finds that the overall fiscal impact is small—+/− 1 per cent of GDP—with most studies finding EU migrants are net contributors (Vargas-Silva 2017). Furthermore the OBR (2013) has argued that cutting migration will actually make it harder to reduce the deficit—the exact opposite view of many participants in our focus groups—because migrants are more likely to be of working age and thus add to the tax base.
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Berry, M. (2019). Long-term Media Socialisation and Support for Austerity. In: The Media, the Public and the Great Financial Crisis. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-49973-8_6
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