Tony Blair can’t escape blame for trashing the economy

The New Statesman today publishes a splendid centenary edition, to celebrate its 100 years — a collectors’ item. It also carries some vintage blame-dodging by Tony Blair who pretends 13 years of Labour rule was not responsible for the mess we’re still in. Overspending is not to blame for the debt crisis, he says. It’s nonsense on first reading, of course: what else creates a debt crisis, rather than overspending? Bad weather? A bad debt fairy? Blair claims that Labour need to be ‘very robust in knocking down the notion that it “created” the crisis’. Here are his words, some of them flatly untrue:

‘Labour should be very robust in knocking down the notion that it “created” the crisis. In 2007/2008 the cyclically adjusted current Budget balance was under 1 per cent of GDP. Public debt was significantly below 1997.’

The following graphs give the lie to this nonsense. The first is what he doesn’t mention.