It started as soon as they came into government in July.

“If we cannot afford it, we cannot do it.”

This was obviously a rebuttal to the Keynes statement from the 1940s:

“Anything we can actually do, we can afford.”

The list of things “we can’t afford” started to grow, including:

1. Winter fuel payments for pensioners not on Pensions Credit. This cut the number of pensioners receiving the winter fuel payment from 11.4 million to 1.5 million and will save £1.5bn in the next financial year.
2. Stopping reforms to social care proposed by Sir Andrew Dilnot. These would have meant making the means test for local authority support more generous and raising the capital limit from £23,500 to £100,000. Estimated saving: £1 billion.
3. In April, the employer national insurance rates will increase (from a previous decrease we now “cannot afford”). These are forecast to raise between £23.8 billion and £25.7 billion a year, for the five years 2025/26 to 2029/30.

So far, so predictable, based on the we-cannot-afford-it-we-cannot-do-it (WCAIWCDI) philosophy. But then we had a tweak.

In response to criticisms of the decision to approve the construction of a third runway at Heathrow, the UK’s Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds came up with a new formulation:

“We simply cannot afford to say we don’t build reservoirs any more, we don’t build railways, we don’t build runways. That’s not good enough, we will be left behind.”

Burrowing through the double negative we have a complete reversal of WCAIWCDI. Instead we now have we-cannot-afford-to-say-we-don’t-build-X, where X is something they desire to build. WCATSWDBX if someone wanted to reduce it to an acronym. Obviously you would have to be fairly determined to do so.

So we-can’t-afford-it can be used both positively and negatively it seems. We can’t do it if it is bad spending, we can’t afford to say we don’t do it if it’s good spending.

And now we come to defence spending as the US support for Ukraine starts to look highly conditional. We are still not sure whether this is in the WCAIWCDI or the WCATSWDBX camp. On the one hand, the PM has said that we are prepared to send troups to Ukraine, which sounds like WCATSWDBX. On the other hand, recent statements by the defence secretary and the PM also suggest that they are not considering anything beyond an increase in defence spending from 2.3% of GDP to 2.5%. Which sounds more like WCAWCDI.

Elsewhere there has been optimism amongst some (eg here and here) that the need to increase defence spending will topple the WCAIWCDI regime and allow other spending priorities in too. Others fear that any increases will just lead to further cuts to other public spending.

It’s no way to run a railroad. The government needs to be more Phoebe Buffay and just tell us what they do and don’t want to spend money on instead of telling us that we can’t afford things to avoid the discussion like an overbearing parent. Then we could have a proper family argument about them.