Portillo: the Tories won't succeed in cutting public spending - they'll have to raise taxes

Hawkeye

John Redwood has a few ideas on how to slash without too many upsets.

JONNY

Watching the programme last night, the pessimistic negative side of Portillo struck me again.
There's a certain gloomy touch of the Petainiste about him. A built-in defeatism.

Had he been made Leader, he wouldn't exactly have inspired the troops, especially when the going got tough. Though there's no denying his acute political intelligence - perhaps that's his problem.

2trueblue

Hawkeye, very interesting and balanced. Redwood is a very bright politician.

Whoever gets in is going to have to manage the mess that Labour have created. The austerity that we will have to endure to get the finances sorted should be shared equally and right now the public sector are mostly unaffected. The reality for those in the private sector is a million miles away. They are grasping the nettle and doing what they can to stay afloat.
Austerity is very hard to bear without some aspiration and there is not going to be a lot of that for some time.

Yow Min Lye

What happens if the bond markets pull the plug on the Government big time. Spending will have to be cut then, difficult or not.

Marcher Baron

Let's see - a bonfire of the QUANGOs, a cull of diversity officers, the elimination of a few layers of management, a simplification of the tax system - none of this will impact on front line services. Admittedly, the benefits bill will go up slightly, but the savings will outweigh the costs, surely. After all, we ran an Empire that covered half the globe with a fraction of the public sector we've got now. Taxes will have to go up as well, of course, because the black hole Labour has left us is colossal, but I for one won't mind quite so much if the intrusive, controlling, Stasi aspects of Labour's State Britain feels the pain first.

Martyn Rowe

Two words: attention seeker.

Moraymint

" ... but the black hole is so big that placing the burden on tax rises would stunt the economy for decades to come ..."

... and ensure a mass exodus of wealth creators, graduates with proper, crunchy degrees and middle-class professionals like me who are utterly sick to death of being milked by an incompetent, detached and thoroughly disgraced political class.

If the Tory Party or government of any persuasion goes down the route of taxing us to death (which means taxing the middle-classes to death) before slashing the size of the state, then we're looking at the UK becoming a failed, East European lookalike within less than a decade.

You can keep that Portillo. I'll wager that your net worth means that a high-taxing government would make no bloody difference at all to your way of life. It would ruin mine.

So you and your Tory pals can stick it if you think I'm voting for that.

Michael Booth

No - taxes do not have to be raised. What we have to do is get real.
1) accept the fact that we are no longer a world player and are certainly not the world's policeman.
2) apply the principle of 'best value' to the money we pour into the EU... and think again.
3) reduce micro-management, government interference and jobsworthy-ness by culling all the quangos and using the money saved more wisely.
4) seriously audit what government should and should not do, come up with a figure, then halve it and divide by four.
5) stop overseas aid - all it does is shore up tyrannical and authoritarian governments.

Why the f--k should we accept the mantra that taxes should be raised when the ones saying this have got us into the god-awful mess we are in?

The Puppet Master

Spoken like a true statist. It'll be interesting to see if Cameron agrees. It looks like the market will have to force the cuts.

Athesius the Facilitator

The reason Portillo didn't manage to make any cuts is because he is not very good at anything he does.

He's half dead on This Week, almost falling to sleep on Diane Abbott's ample shoulders like a dormouse that's just done a double shift.

Why would anybody want his opinion unless it's something controversial such as tax raising. Another BBC grenade to throw at the Tory's I suspect. And please don't say his opinion holds weight because he was once the shadow Chancellor. He was 'rubbish' as the shadow chancellor and now he's a tired old has been.

Minnie Ovens

Michael Booth sums up nicely.
The greatest enemy we face is not terrorism but the encroaching power of government.
Quite simply,the best balance of tax to GDP is 30/70%.
The only way by which to drive government back to efficiently carrying out its basic responsibilities is to cut spending over a five year period to 30% of GDP.
This allows families to commence, once again, being responsible for their well being, not a nanny government but most important is the fact that private enterprise must be unbound from the fetters put around it by new Labour.
It does not seem to have been learned by government that every tax or restriction they put on business and commerce most likely puts three times the amount it costs on the wholesale price.
What commerce and industry we have left has to be nurtured in order for the UK to retake a place in the global market ie Exports.
At this time only 65% of every pound taken in tax is effectively and economically spent (note the lack of the word "invested").
Every pound given back to commerce or industry is probably worth two pounds in five years.
It is quite obvious from the expenses scandal that there is precious little that government gets. They have cut the Golden Goose's wings, feet and head off and cannot understand why the golden eggs have stopped flowing (look at the picture of Darling upon realising his tax receipts are evaporating)
Left unrestrained we have seen over the past fifty years that government is a greedy and unthinking beast.
It belches out the words "More power, more power"
This started with the disastrous Labour Government of 1945 which twisted and edited the Beverage report when enacting those parts of it with which it agreed.
Then, instead of putting it to good use, used Marshal plan money to buy new ceremonial robes for Empire.
We are a small, very overcrowded Island in which the infrastructure is creaking due to ill thought through programs which have added immensely to the problem, while the Government continues to order and eat cake.
We need to think small and go from there.
Our problem is that I do not see one person who recognises the true nature of the problems and has the guts to do anything about it.

bernerlap

Portillo is jealous. He made a mistake by standing down and now he is out in the cold. There has to be spending cuts.
The pay freeze is good start, but more important is a recruitment freeze in all management grade admin posts throughout the public sector.
If things get tough they can employ temps. They are invariably more efficient and cheaper than public service managers anyway.
You can also sack every diversity officer in the country.

strapworld

I think Portillo is basing his theory on studying Cameron.
Portillo has come to the same conclusion as man of us. Cameron is no fighter, he is no man of courage, he will never take the hard decisions, he will talk a good game but could never play it!

Portillo is spot on!

Nick

Why was it a hard slog? Answer is that they tried slicing. Small cuts here and there.

That might work for a bit but its not sufficient. The government needs to cut 28% of its spending to get back to some sort of balance. 5%, 10% pay cuts won't work.

It needs hacking. Removing whole 'services'

Nick

TGF UKIP

Usual self-serving dishonest bullshit from Portaloo. A runaway deficit wasn't Mrs Thatcher's particular problem. To a large extent that had been addressed, under IMF duress, by Denis Healey post their 1976 intervention.

Her bigger problem, apart from who ran Britain, unions or government, was inflation caused in large part by a runaway money supply and an enfeebled private sector greatly in need of the kick up the arse and accompanying carrot which it duly received.

JONNY

Both Athesius the Facilitator and bernalap are spot on.
Portillo is still seething with jealousy and spite at his Rejection as Leader.
He is also the perfect Laval-clone defeatist pseudo-Tory the Beeb can present to sort of put Cameron's argument. Against the 5 anti-Tory spokemen I counted last Thursday.

But I like his buttoned pink shirt.

Simon Denis

He does seem to be something of a broken man. Apparently, he's never got over the experience of 97 - all that routine hatred; all those New Labour muck rakers sniffing about his private life; his own surprise defeat. It has to be admitted that the public pillory is not a pleasant place. Others, however, have emerged with their "cojones" in tact. Redwood for one. Lady Thatcher for another. Portillo? I think not. He has told the tale of being phoned up by the great woman on the morning of the defeat. He offered a "Spitting Image" version of her voice and clearly implied that she was crazy, but what she said carries conviction and weight, even now: "The fight back starts today!" If only it had. If only the Tory party had not allowed itself to become so inwardly defeated. Yes, he is something of a Petain. The aged Marshall abominated the Germans, but he swallowed far too much of his pride in the way he dealt with them. Portillo is similarly schizoid. He will offer right wing theories and solutions with one side of his mouth, whilst with the other he whimpers that too few people will agree with him. Arguing for victory is now wholly foreign to his nature. Sometimes he slips from a cowardly and excessive pragmatism into peevish, pinko rant, flinging words such as "reactionary" and "chauvinist" at his conservative critics. In the same way I suppose the men of Vichy found themselves extolling teutonic courage to those of their friends or relations who attacked their latest betrayal. Of course, comparisons of this sort are in their way excessive. Portillo has not, after all, collaborated with totalitarian evil. He is clearly a man of intelligence and good will. There is something essentially upright in his nature, too - despite the deplorably over sophisticated nature of his politics. And yet, the comparison hits home in one respect - Petain and Portillo equally represent despair. To listen too attentively to their counsels is fatal.

TrevorsDen

Portillo is quite right. Its no use moaning. The spending genie is out of the bottle

Its going to be horrid trying to squeeze it back in. Cutting spending means inevitably cutting jobs. Cutting jobs means adding to unemployment payouts.

Raising taxes means cutting spending power which means cutting jobs which means higher unemployment costs.

Go figure - but its no point shooting the messenger.

The best real chance for the Conservatives is to uncover a huge black hole in the books when and if they take office and press the nuclear button in the first month - heaping the blame where it belongs, on Gordon Brown.

Spending on all benefits needs to be cut - taking away all means tested benefits and credits and splitting the difference between raising the flat rate for beneficiaries and a big rise in thresholds for tax payers. Together with tax cuts on job creation we need to cut spending to make way for genuine growth and encourage (force!) people off benefits into work.

Brown and Labours deceit is to pretend that spending can be reduced painlessly. But their economic crimes can only result in our own hard punishment.

TrevorsDen

PS -

Since the EU is in the news at the moment - will the economic crisis result in a cut back in ITS spending?

If ever there was an apt way to cut spending it is surely the EU. No matter by what proportion spending is cut, the EU budget (certainly our contribution to it) should take its fair share.

Sam ARMSTRONG

Was it me or did a load of uneconomic coal mines get shut down by the Tories? Was that or was that not a spending cut? And a big one? Wasn't the sale of the nation's industries an attempt to halt outflow of wasted money and raise money instead for the exchequer?

I think Portillo may have spent time sat next to the champagne socialist Diane Abbott on the This Week sofa - liberal derangement has set in, bless.

He has never got over election night 97 has he?

Frank Leader

Gordon Brown's best time a Chancellor was when he continued to follow Ken Clarke's policy. Left to his own devices he was a failure. Another 4 or 5 years of New Labour would be an utter disaster for the Country. It would mean Hard Labour for the foreseeable future.