A language deficit

This piece by Will Dunn in the New Statesman Why George Osborne still runs Britain is fascinating in its analysis but ultimately flawed in its adoption of Osborne's language.

The premise is that Osborne's narrative about "the deficit" still pervades the political orthodoxy, boxing in current chancellor Rachel Reeves and the government as a whole.

But it begins with a crass error: 

Fifteen years ago, on 11 May 2010, George Osborne arrived in the Treasury with a mandate to change the British economy. The deficit had reached more than £100bn, a hole in Britain’s finances twice the size of the armed forces.

And 

Part of the reason Osborne’s cuts to the state were so deep was that he planned to eliminate the deficit in four years.

There's no such thing as "the deficit". In recent years, governments have spent more than they receive in tax or other income but, as Dunn acknowledges without realising in the second quote, a deficit is not a permanent fixture so as to require the definite article. 

Despite setting out clearly how Osborne managed to make his story about public spending the dominant narrative since 2010, Dunn has failed to realise that Osborne's presentation of "the deficit" as an inevitability was his ultimate lie.

As the Tories continued to spend more than was coming in, increasing the country's debt, they convinced the media and therefore the public that because they had reduced "the deficit" their management of the public finances was a success. 

It is of course possible to run a surplus and for the national debt to go down, but Osborne presented a slowing down of the rate at which the debt went up as if that was what he had achieved.

The lie continued for the whole of the decade as the Tories continued to run a deficit and the national debt ballooned. 

In 2020, Rishi Sunak, then chancellor, said the Tories would "always balance the books".

There's another strange lack of sensitivity to language elsewhere in the piece:

The first and most important means by which the British economy would be healed, he said, was “active monetary policy”. Or, as a normal person would put it, cheap debt.

Economists use "debt" as synonym for borrowing in a way that normal people don't. Economists, and business journalists like Dunn, talk about corporate acquisitions for example as being financed by debt, by which they mean borrowing. 

But for normal people debt not borrowing itself but the outcome of it. 

In attempting to translate the euphemism, Dunn has merely given the reader another euphemism.