This is interesting:
"A detailed, and far from uncritical, analysis of Labour’s fiscal record by Malcolm Sawyer of Leeds University, dating from 2007, found that between 1997-98 and 2005-2006 Brown, as chancellor, “nearly met” his fiscal targets. The current account deficit was close to zero over the period and the national debt stayed under 40 per cent of GDP. Sawyer put this record “close to achievement of the golden rule” partly down to good luck – surpluses generated by the dotcom boom of the late 1990s, reduction in world nominal interest rates – but partly to tricky (“creative”, in the jargon) accounting. The use of the private finance initiative (PFI) to fund the building of schools and hospitals “off budget” lowered the deficit in “real time” at the cost of raising it in the future. Had this investment programme been financed by conventional borrowing, the net debt-to-GDP ratio would have been closer to 50 per cent, rather than the recorded 33.6 per cent.
Second, the Brown Treasury kept redating the “economic cycle” (a fuzzy concept at best) to make its fiscal rules easier to meet. The main effect of this redating was to postpone the achievement of the zero balance on public investment needed to meet the sustainable investment rule. It was for these reasons that in 2005 the OECD noted that Britain’s fiscal policy “required attention”.
By 2007 the Treasury admitted that it was time to slow down the public-sector growth engine. Its Comprehensive Spending Review of February 2007 cut projected public spending from 4 per cent a year to 2.1 per cent a year over the following three years, less than the expected growth of the economy, which was itself expected to be lower than in the previous boom years. This would yield a current account surplus of 0.3 per cent and cap the national debt at 39.8 per cent by 2010-11. However, Brown’s luck finally ran out: instead of slipping gently into a new economic cycle, the economy fell into a deep hole. Economic growth did not slow down – it collapsed.
To summarise: in its first ten years Labour may have fiddled the books a bit, as all governments do, but it had certainly not created a mess. And it had built lots of hospitals and schools."
