Is this what the Labour counterattack will look like?

Anonymous

Surely though it only works as a short term strategy - i.e., for a Spring 09 election - because over an 18 month period, changing the narrative to "who can bear down on public spending most" is a race Labour will lose. If the narrative changes that way, Cameron will be bolder about saying what to cut, freed from the "Tory cuts vs Labour investment" line as you say. It will though, work for 6 months...

Hereford

The Gershon savings are over reported anyway. I doubt very much if they have achieved anywhere near the savings they have been billed to.

Having worked for some time in Government Departments, I know that savings a claimed where actually the people, and therefore the costs are redeployed to other Departments.

Someone should ask, what is the net loss in Government costs over the Gershon savings period. I bet it is well short of what is claimed.

TGF UKIP

Sorry folks, but going back over the months I have been predicting that this would be exactly Gordon's masterstroke and one which would give him great pleasure. To shoot the fox which should have been the Tory fox for at least the past twelve months but wasn't until, looking desperate, they finally put it up today.

The only thing I got wrong was that it was Darling who gave my quote to Sky News and not Gordon himself.

Jim

But we've heard committments to save costs and be more efficient from Brown before.

Those "costed" promises, along with "tax cuts" which will be partly made up of deferred tax increases like VED, will be as much smoke and mirrors as anything else we hear or have heard from Gordon Brown.

But he and this government will deliver the spin over and over again, supported by a largely compliant media.

Very sad. I weep for my country.

David

Isn't "tightening belts" the complete opposite of borrowing £X billion for tax cuts? So what is the point, exactly? Take out a gigantic loan to pay for tax cuts, then cut a bit of wasteful expenditure to pay off the debt that loan left you with - with a bit of adjustment (tax rises) around the edges as Mandelson has said. At best, you're back to square one - gigantic debt, the government owning a load of banks, and an economy that's still tanking. The only thing such thinking might do is make stupid people vote Labour in the short-term, which shows what their true intention is.

David

Well Peter and Fraser- you've got what you wanted, and it's going to kill us. Wonderful.

C Powell

"This is Labour saying 'we are already getting maximum value for money for the taxpayer and cutting spending back as much as possible. If the Tories cut any more, they will cut into the bone of real services'."

This from a government which has just come out with a guide on how to treat our pets, which tells us how many steps per year we should take etc. Look at Haringey for an example of effective spending, for heaven's sake!

I will only believe that Labour is cutting back when the Guardian appointments pages are empty, when they announce a public sector hiring freeze, when they state that there will be no salary increases for the public sector, when Ministers and MPs take a 10% pay cut (as has happened in Ireland), when they do something to cut back the enormous cost of public sector pensions, when they actually start cutting programmes and sacking people, when they stop sending government bumf out translated into innumerable languages etc.,. Then and not before.

Meanwhile, back on Planet Earth I'm wondering how to pay a three-fold increase in my gas bill so I could give a few tips to Darling and Yvette Cooper (whose 2 houses I pay for, dammit) on what cutting back really means.

David Lindsay

The Tories are finally coming out as what they really are: believers that super-rich people such as themselves should be exempt from tax, with the bill picked up by the middle and working classes, including the very low-paid, and those dependent on the state pension or on certain other benefits.

Burt

This should bear considerable analysis. Brown has always concocted screaming headline figures in dubious ways like treble counting, deferred taxes, hidden PFI. CPI/RPI etc.

Tragically, untill our taxpayer funded, state owned, monopoly broadcaster ceases to be scared of exposing Brown we are stuck with this dangerous zealot.

WINSTON PLACE

We the tax payer are raising £28billion in the Open Offer for LLOYDS TSB/HBOS/RBS
Our loss at the close today is £10.3324 BILLION
HBOS 63p-113.6p(£8.5BN)
Lloyds Tsb 131.2-173.3p(£4.5Bn)
RBS 41.7p-65.5p(£15BN)
of course I can guarantee some shareholders will take up the open offers.

William Norton

It's deja vu all over again.

When we launched our James Review in 2004, Brown as Chancellor launched his Gershon Review. It wasn't clear at the time whether Brown had made a clunking mistake or a shrewd move. In the end, he did just enough to kill the waste issue: I've already rooted out the waste, he claimed, anything more is dangerous Tory cuts.

Intellectually it's rubbish, but Brown is probably gambling on the same outcome again, and might try to cause problems by quoting back remarks from the last few years about "destabilising tax cuts" etc. But I've always thought that if we had played the issue differently in 2004/5 we could have turned the issue into a solid vote-winner.

We're never going to have a better chance to kill the spending = investment lie.

jon

Tax land value and abolish income tax would solve the problems.

Travis Bickle

David Lindsay

that sounds rather like Brown's tax strategy over the past 11 years. No Tory government would ever have doubled the starting rate of tax for the lowest paid.

cuffleyburgers

@ David Lindsay

your post barely deserves comment but I will anyway.

The people posting here and commenting are people who want to see less money wasted by government. there are frequent postings to the effect that the poorest workers should be taken out of tax, and that government spending should be subject to the same canons of commonsense and reasonable cost benefit as applies in the private sector, which is of course, as you probably don't realize being a nuliebor clone, where the money is made in the first place.

Read C Powell's intelligent posting and you will see a person driven to anger to see the waste and the incompetence which have characterised labour's regime.

Big government means massive waste, governments of both colours I would add, (and in all countries and at all periods in history) it's just that the tories tend to look for small government solutions that leave money in working peoples' pockets, where labours' apparachik mentality assumes that submarxist student union failures like G Brown know best.

And I think we can all see where that leads us.

Nicholas

"The Tories are finally coming out as what they really are: believers that super-rich people such as themselves should be exempt from tax, with the bill picked up by the middle and working classes, including the very low-paid, and those dependent on the state pension or on certain other benefits."

Laughable.

Letters From A Tory

For a change, it's Labour and not the Conservatives who are panicking.

Gordon Musgo

Tax cuts might be an economic stimulus. GB has been telling us how in recent days, and how it isn't irresponsible at all. BUT if he balances the tax cuts with responsible expenditure cuts, the balance is restored. EXCEPT that the stimulus is removed because waste works better than sense if throwing money around is the aim. GB is trying to have it both ways. The tories should stick to just one of these theories.

Ian C

GB is too late. There is nothing he can do to avert the worst downturn known since the war at least. Interest rate reductions, tax cuts, bribes, giveaways, fivers floated from helicopters - will all be saved. Because tomorrow you will be able to buy more with your money.

He should be praying for inflation to rise, but he is deluding himself and his party (and the public at present) that he can have an affect by the spring - of at least 2010 if not 2009.

liz Brown

So Mrs Balls is droning again. All that happened as a result of the Gershon review is that tho public posts may have been cut, those people were moved out of the public sector and cost vastly more than before. This MUST be exposed

mart

Cameron and Osborne are saying the right things. Hopefully it won't be long before the U-turn is forgiven and forgotten.

However, while the Tories are completing their U-turn, Labour can boldly perform one of their own, while saying, "look at the Tories performing a U-turn".

A plea to the Tories: please own up to the U-turn, 'fess up, say you had it wrong. Say you had it very wrong.

If they do this they'll have some moral authority to point out that both they and the government are U-turning at the same time.

If, as British politics so often requires, U-turns are performed while pretending otherwise, then cynicism just grows.

David Lindsay

"There are frequent postings to the effect that the poorest workers should be taken out of tax"

Not from the Tories as such, there aren't. And there never will be.

Those saying these things might vote Tory, but they might as well vote for any of them, since none of them wants to do this. Unless, of course, Brown and Darling do it next week. They certainly haven't yet.

The threshold for income tax should be the median wage for full-time work (currently about £23,000 per annum), with tax thereafter at a flat rate with no further exemptions or allowances. That this would mean the same rate for everyone does not, of course, mean that it would be the same sum for everyone.

It does, however, mean the unaccustomed arrival of a tax bill for those whose only current relationship to the taxation system is that of being bailed out by taxpayers when they look like becoming so poor that they might join our number.

There are many uses to which the vast revenues thus accessed for the first time might be put, not including, for example, nuclear weapons, or wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, or bailing out super-rich non-taxpayers in order to keep them super-rich and non-taxpaying.

One such good use would and should be the amalgamation of all current Social Security payments into something called, and providing, Social Security, and guaranteeing that no one's income ever fell below half the national median wage for full-time work.

Both this new tax system and this new benefit system would be dazzling simple to understand, and would cost next to nothing to administer.

But don't hold your breath.

Hysteria

@ D Lindsay -

thanks to Cuffleyburgers for the intelligent reply - please rad it and if you have a sensible counter argument to make I am sure we would love to hear it.

Cuffley (and others) - my concern is that the statist mentality is so well embedded (G20 meetings, bale out the motor industry etc etc ) in all governments that we on the right have an uphill battle - and that there will be blood on the streets. Perhaps not in Islington, but almost certainly Islamabad.....

There will be a period of desperate leftist posturing until reality sets in.

Just my view of course....

Pass me my AK-47 - there's a dear.......

ChrisD

A Labour counter attack?

Over the last few weeks the messages coming out of No10 and No11 have not been consistent.
Now we are to have a supposed counter attack from the government aimed at neutralising the Tory strategy?

To me it smells of an inconsistent and incoherent message from Labour being spun as something different.
This is a very worrying development, and I would imagine that its not helping the stability in the financial markets either?

I thought that strong and decisive leadership meant finding your message and sticking to it?

Spin is Spin, but you tend to get away with it in the good times. But if the government keep flip flopping in this way during a recession, it will come back to bite them a lot harder than anything the Conservatives can throw at them if it damages the economy even further.

Steve

I suspect that Hereford is an ex whitehall type like myself, and seen these efficiency savings - which always seem to increase costs- in action. I am convinced that the term efficiency savings in the context of the public sector is utter, utter b*****ks. There is only one way to make savings in the public sector and that is to slash and burn your way through Whitehall. At some point some-one is going to have to take a long hard look at entire departments and ask - "do we actually need these?" To take a few examples: DCMS - Do we really need people sitting in Whitehall pondering the future of the Premier League, appropriate levels of subsidy to Covent Garden etc, etc. DCLG do we really need a central department for local government? Can anyone cite anything useful that DBERR has done in its admittedly brief existence?

I was quite interested in Camerons talk of the post bureaucratic age a while ago, but he seems to have gone pretty quiet on it of late

Hysteria

Steve - you are correct - it is similar in large businesses - it takes a strong man to say "we ain't doing that no more" - fortunately in the private sector we are rather more attuned to the concept of risk/reward, responding to our customer needs and the like.

In my industry (oil exploration and production) the belts are being tightened on a daily basis - which is fine as it will lead to a stronger business.

I think many folks in the public sector simply don't "get" it.

(and yes - I used to work in the public sector too before anyone shouts me down!)

Clare

You need to be old enough to remember an episode of "Yes Minister" to know how easy it is for the Government to claim as savings that has merely shifted to another department