The biggest of the Labour foxes that George Osborne sought to shoot in his Budget was the line that he’s taking public spending “back to the 1930s”. After last year’s Autumn Statement exposed him to this attack (with the state forecast to shrink to just 35.2 per cent of GDP in 2019-20), the Chancellor announced that expenditure would now stand at 36 per cent: merely the lowest level since 1999-2000. As I noted earlier, this was before any of Labour’s major spending increases to health, education and other areas, but it’s a more comfortable comparison for the Chancellor than The Road To Wigan Pier.
But at his usual post-Budget briefing for lobby journalists, Ed Balls (who I recently profiled) highlighted an OBR table which he said showed “spending on day-to-day public services by 2018 falls to its lowest share of GDP since 1938”. Midway through Balls’s take, the Tory Treasury Twitter account riposted that spending actually falls to its lowest level since 1964
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