Following the budget, according to the BBC, Gordon Brown is to invest an extra £17billion or so in public services, such as skoolz'n'ospitalz etc. Now this sort of blatant sophistry might be okay for the larcenous Scotsman, the great pillager from the North, who is to private pensions what the Vikings were to Christian monasteries, but for the BBC to follow suit is just, well, outrageous, and if they have never been accused of left-wing bias before, please allow me to so now.
Investment, as it is put, is, so far as I understand the term, what businesses do. They cough up for a new production line, and, ergo, produce more of whatever it was that they were producing, or at a lower price, and hence sell more things and therefore receive a fiscal return. Money is put in, and money comes out.
However, splash out on a new suit, or paying a cleaner to clean up one's squalid flat (thinking of no-one in particular and however much it might be needed), is what is traditionally known as, if you'll excuse the expert technical financial terminology, 'spending'. It is no more 'investment' than a child buying sweets is 'investing' in a sweet shop.
If, as we are led to believe, the BBC takes a neutral stance, as we think it is meant to, as opposed to using the term 'investing' it could quite legitimately describe it as 'wasting'. As in, 'This year, Her Majesty's government will be wasting a further £17billion on making junior doctors redundant or failing to teach schoolchildren to read or write...'
And besides, despite the legerdemain where a cut in income tax rates from 22p to 20p in the pound is virtually wiped out (and worse, in poorer people's wage packets) by the abolition of the 10p tax rate - which Gordon introduced (how's that for joined up government?) - if he really needed to raise large amounts of revenue to (delete as applicable) a) 'invest', b) 'spend', or c) 'waste', why did he not slap VAT on the sale of honours to Labour party donors? Should have brought in a tidy sum.