Or take the four-day week, which @CPSthinktank did some research on. To do this tomorrow, it would cost £45 billion a year in extra staff costs for the public sector. If you waved a magic wand and assumed significant productivity gains, it might get you to £17 billion.
But rather than taking the easy way out and saying it was an ambition over a decade, not a concrete pledge, Labour instead produced the genuinely lunatic argument that it would entirely pay for itself due to productivity gains.
Average productivity gains in the public sector, over the last 20 years, stand at 0.2 per cent a year. For the Labour measure to pay for itself, productivity would have to increase at 10 times the rate over the next 10 years.
The best part of this is that Labour’s OWN REPORT – the one commissioned by Lord Skidelsky to justify the policy – says that any such productivity gains will largely be driven by automation, ie getting rid of people and putting in machines.
Skidelsky's report, which is a serious and respectable piece of work, also makes the point that there is more scope for this in the public sector because it has been much crapper than the private sector about switching from people to PCs for admin tasks.
But it also points out that sectors which are heavily dependent on person-to-person interactions, like hospitals and social care, will struggle to make productivity gains – and points to the massive problems that France suffered when it tried to limit working hours in hospitals.
But Labour’s own manifesto also includes a right for workplaces to veto the introduction of labour-saving technology! (Specifically, for there to be ‘collective consultation’, plus far greater unionisation, secondary picketing etc.)
In other words, Labour are simultaneously promising the most extraordinary revolution in public sector productivity that Britain has ever seen, and to block or at least slow the process of automation that is, according to their own report, the only real way for it to come about
And let’s say that Labour’s miraculous productivity gains did appear – despite decades of public sector precedent, the party’s union-friendly desire to restrict automation, and the actual findings of Labour’s own report on this.
For the numbers to work, Labour would have to devote every scrap of benefit from this miraculous productivity boost to cutting workers’ hours – rather than improving public services, or indeed allowing workers to raise their pay rather than cut their hours.
In short, the spending splurge that Labour is actually willing to own up to is already enormous – to the point where there is no possible way that they can restrict the tax rises just to ‘the rich’ and ‘the corporations’.
(And that’s without getting into Labour’s again heroic assumptions about how much extra tax they can wring out of them without them all buggering off.)
But once you add in the mountains of stuff that hasn't been costed properly, or at all, you're looking at tens or hundreds of billions more
(I haven't even mentioned, for example, the £190 billion extra in loans for people to insulate their homes, or the £70 billion borrowed from the private sector to build more wind farms.)
In short, to paraphrase Jezza himself: Fully costed? Jog on with your daft ideas.
(First half of this thread found here )
