It's worth pointing out here that this shift, while dramatic, will actually make Britain a 'normal' nation in terms of infra spending. Public investment in UK has been low for a long time 
As has investment more widely - hence why we at @CPSThinkTank have pushed for action to incentivise business investment via full expensing
(There is also a point here that as a services-based economy we need less investment, but even on that score we are undershooting, as these final charts show...)
For me, the success or failure of the Javid plan rests on the extent to which the govt is militant about restricting investment only to those things that really do pay for themselves - ie enhancing growth/productivity/revenues
The problem with the Gordon Brown approach to this was that 'investment' became a big bucket of wasteful spending, eg Building Schools for the Future.
So not spending for spending's sake, or purely to reach the 3% target, but targeted investment in things like broadband, transport links, hospital tech and buildings, helping regions as per our recent report by @nickphking cps.org.uk/files/reports/…
I'd also like to see govt adjust its definitions of capital spending to account for the new world of tech, eg making it easier to upgrade to cloud (which is treated as day to day cos subscription) vs buying servers (which are capital cost)
BUT ANYWAY. That's Sajid's plan. Interesting, disciplined, v plausible justification given monetary circs, a departure for UK but not in the wider context of how developed nations go about spending money.
And then there's Labour.
I'm seeing a lot of people on Twitter this morning saying that Lab and Con are now basically in the same fiscal place - want to borrow more and spend more and invest more.
But that's ridiculous. The Tory plans involve - and this is a fairly rough estimate - about £150 billion in extra infrastructure spending over 10 years. Plus a hard cap on spending as a proportion of GDP and on debt repayments likewise.
Labour are up to £400 billion at this point, without even counting renationalisation and associated costs, or £140 billion in decarbonisation loans to homeowners, or £70 billion in extra private funding for all their wind farms, or the four-day week, or or or...
The dividing line isn't spend vs spend. It's spend more money vs spend all the money.
I mean last time Labour reportedly felt that you could have costed their promises at a trillion quid. (newstatesman.com/politics/econo…) And this time they've ladled on even more.
In other words, both sides have set out their spending stalls. And they are setting them up in very different territory indeed.
Annoyingly I broke this thread accidentally. The first section is here for Colvile completists
