Isn't it more likely that the answer is somewhere between "neolib lies" and "the debt will kill us all"?
It's not unimportant. The debt, I mean. As it stands, we don't just turn on the printing press so when we spend more than we raise, we end up paying interest. Right now, we pay more interest a year than we spend on all the schools in the country. If we were to simply print it a la MMT thanks to the BoE, we'd just hit another barrier, one of inflation. Not only is that obviously troublesome for everyone, but you have to look at the 97-2010 period when our public spending went up quite a lot and ask if the negative impact of inflation (for example, on the cost of living) will be less than the benefits to the poorest of whatever the government spending goes on. Of course no one can say for sure where that inflationary barrier might be, but it simply dreamland to assume that the value of goods represented by a currency goes up without inflation occuring as a result. It just then comes down to how much inflation you're willing to put up with.
However, I think too many on the right are lazy and simply use "the deficit" as an excuse to cut, because making actual arguments in favour of cutting state spending is a lot harder (which isn't to say it's wrong - I don't think it is, natch). It's a bit of a nebulous concept about who gains when you cut something, whether it's a civil servant job or a scarcely used bus route. It's immediately obvious who loses out, though, which makes them hard arguments to make. But there are problems to misused state spending - far more than can be neatly spit into one post, but to name a few, there are problems when specific areas become disproportionately reliant on government spending, there are problems when the state enters other-wise market-based industries and distorts them, there are problems when you have overstaffed areas of government (whether they are cabinet offices or local governments) etc. But the nature of public spending is such that everyone takes the burden whilst only a few get the benefit, and therefore when you go the other way, a few take a disproportionate amount of the pain. That doesn't immediately invalidate the decisions, but it's hard to describe in a succinct way. So they go on about the deficit as a proxy, which is disappointing but understandable.
In other news, Hannan outright promised he wasn't defecting to Andrew Neil on TV earlier.
Edit: I'd also point out that all the deficit targets are about the cyclical debt, not the absolute debt - ie, things like infrastructure spending aren't taken into account when talking about cutting the deficit down to X or whatever. As such, if there's a reason why the Tories don't want to build 200,000 houses, I don't think it's a desire to keep the deficit down.
