While avoiding one trap, Mr Cameron might fall into another
James Forsyth 11:07am
David Cameron is understandably eager not to allow Gordon Brown to present the Tories as slash n’ burn merchants intent on starving schools and hospitals of funding. However, unfair it was the £35bn of Tory cuts jibe at the last election hit home—as the IFS points out, by Brown’s own logic he will have cut spending by £9bn by the next election—and the current Tory pledge to match Labour spending commitments until 2011 is probably a necessary act of reassurance. But the danger is that Labour box the Tories in by projecting their spending plans further and further into the future.
Here’s how Cameron responded when asked about whether he would extend the matching pledge beyond 2011 by The Times: “He rejected calls from his own Right to ditch a commitment to stick to the Government’s spending plans to 2011 and said that he did not rule out doing so into the years beyond. “We will look at [the projected spending figures] and see if they are consistent with our principles. If they are we will support them.
If he is not careful, Cameron could arrive in government having already committed to a spending programme for the whole of his first term. Considering that, as a percentage of GDP, public spending in Britain is already higher than in Germany that can’t be a good idea.
“I am being very careful because if you say anything else that strange man in Downing Street will cook up an enormous package of Tory spending cuts. It is complete and utter fiction. I have seen it done before and I have learnt a thing or two in the last few years.”
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Comments
Simon
January 23rd, 2008 11:57amYeah but he has to win first. They tried your approach three times and it failed. If the electorate was confined to the ranks of Spectator readers a more ambitious approach would be in order.
James Sproule
January 23rd, 2008 1:43pmThe argument that tax cuts have been tried and don’t work is very tiring. We found, through the exhaustive James review, some £20 in government waste. We then allocated £12 billion to debt repayment and £8 to tax cuts. This is in a budget which was at the time something like £450 billion, so reducing something like 2% of government spending through tax cuts forever damns the concept? If we do not think that a budget that has since gone up to £550+ (just wait until unemployment starts to rise, already city bonuses are down and the deficit was out of control before N Rock) does not contain waste, we really have given up. Are we proposing to merely be reflections of public opinion (which is in any case changing, and was never as anti-tax cuts as we might have feared) or do we have any principles?
Marcus Cotswell
January 23rd, 2008 1:56pmSpending plans, schmending plans - they can always nuance that once they're in power, and Cameron gave enough wiggle room with that guiff about it fitting in with our principles (days were when sound financial management was pretty much the only Tory principle there was - or at least the only one worth a damn). Surely what's interesting here is Cameron's use of the phrase 'that strange man in Downing Street' to describe Gordon Brown. Truly fascinating. There's a sustained attempt to frame the PM in voters' minds as a bit of a weirdo, a freak, almost alien. What's even more interesting is that so far the whizzkids at No.10 don't seem to have figured out what the right counter to it is. Probably because they're spending too much time listening to Bob Shrum.
simon hb
January 23rd, 2008 2:26pmTwenty quid in government waste? Blimey, has Jacqui Smith been over-ordering doughnuts or something? Assuming you mean £20billion... and assuming that these are genuine and not of a 'do you really need all those CDs/shoes' form of perceived waste, you've got a massive hole in your figures because you're not factoring in the cost of reducing waste. The negotiations and redundancy payment; the replacing of systems that cease to work with new ones, and so on. Frankly, any budget based on "efficiencies" isn't worth firing up an Excel Spreadsheet for.