Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, has said he would like a Conservative campaign video on the party’s YouTube channel, which includes quotes from him, to be taken down as it presents his words out of context.
Johnson said he was not given any warning that his comments on Labour’s economic policy would be featured, adding: “I would like [the video] removed, but in the end I thought it was quite funny.”
“Of course, the clips that you’ve just heard are small clips of a much broader and more balanced interview that I gave,” he told the BBC.
“What I was saying in that interview was, actually, that I think this is rather a good position that we’re in politically because we’ve got two very different economic prospectuses from the two parties.”
The video, which was posted online on 15 January, features audio from a radio interview Johnson gave a few days earlier.
He is heard to say: “Borrowing would be higher under a Labour government ... The debt would be higher ... More risk with the public finances.”
Speaking on the BBC’s the World at One on Wednesday, Johnson explained the point he had been trying to make in the original interview: “Under the Conservatives what you have is significant spending cuts, which would result in a lower deficit and a faster-falling debt and under Labour you would have less in the way of spending cuts and a bigger deficit at the end of the parliament.”
He added: “It’s not clear that one is economically better than the other, but it does put a real choice in front of the electorate.”
The Conservative party has said that Johnson’s comments, which were originally made in an interview on the BBC’s Today programme on the 13 January, have not been taken out of context and that they are not planning to take the video down.
In the interview Johnson says that, although they sound similar, the economic plans of the two major parties are very different. The Conservatives’ planned budget cuts would, he says, reduce spending on non-protected sections of public services to “an average of at least 30% less than they were in 2010” and that the effect of their economic plans would be “clearly less good public services”.
But, he says that “borrowing would be higher under a Labour government and if you kept to that kind of fiscal rule, the debt would be higher in the long-run”.
He added: “The effect under Labour would be that we’re starting at the moment with the highest level of national debt since the late 1960s, at the point when the debt from the second world war was being paid off, and if that debt doesn’t begin to be paid down relatively quickly, when we come to the next recession, you’ve got more risk with the public finances.”
A Tory party spokesperson said: “Paul Johnson is perfectly clear that Labour’s economic offering would mean higher borrowing and more debt and that, in turn, created more risk with the public finances. And that was exactly the point we were making. Voters will decide if they want that or not.”
