The spending battle begins
Peter Hoskin 9:15am
Mark the date, dear CoffeeHouser – for this the day when the spending cuts
began. George Osborne is set to give details on his £6.2 billion cuts package later today, but we already know the broad outlines of it all: £900 million from the business department budget, £500 million from chopping down some
quangos, £150 million from cutting Whitehall recruitment, and so on. One encouraging fact is that only £500 million of these cuts will be "recycled" back into the public
sector. The rest will go towards getting the government's annual overspend down.
But let's not pretend that this is anything other than a start. With the deficit at £160 billion (not to mention total debt rising towards £1.4 trillion), much more will need to be done to get the public finances under control. In which case, it's striking that the unions are already grumbling about these initial cuts, describing them as "dangerous" and as a risk to the recovery. These words foreshadow the battle for hearts and minds that will be waged over the next few years. But the more blame the coalition sucessfully pins on Gordon Brown's government, and the more the unions engage in unpopular disputes like BA, then the more likely it is that Cameron and Clegg will triumph.
Previous
Arthur
May 24th, 2010 9:51am Report this commentWill the ban on civil service recruitment drive the Guardian bankrupt? How will they cope without the advertising income? And does Osborne really care?
JohnPage
May 24th, 2010 9:59am Report this commentAll this fuss over such a small cut!
The coalition must keep on pushing out examples of labour waste, so that people gradually get disgusted by the profligacy. Do they have the discipline to keep that up? One waste story from them a day, please.
Ian Walker
May 24th, 2010 10:05am Report this commentYou are forgetting the might of the Labour Party Propaganda Department (otherwise known as the BBC) You can be sure that in five years tome, 60-70% of the country will be convinced that this was all "Tory toffs" stomping on "hard-working families."
alexsandr
May 24th, 2010 10:14am Report this commentWell I would start by turning off street lights on trunk roads and motorways.
Why do we need all these lights?
Rita Lomax
May 24th, 2010 10:40am Report this commentCut the bbc licence fee. Don't freeze it - cut it and wait for the screams. This is my dream - don't disappoint me George
strapworld
May 24th, 2010 10:44am Report this commentThe BBC has got to be sold.
Wouldn't it be sweet justice if a right wing organistion bought it! The queue to the job centres would be long.
Tim Carpenter LPUK
May 24th, 2010 10:47am Report this commentThis is pathetic - calling £6bln "painful".
We need 25x that amount before we can even BEGIN to tackle the debt mountain. Yes, twenty five times.
Trying to "boil the union frog" is likely to be a fruitless task and in fact misses the point. The whole problem is that very many people think our current SocDem Welfarist set-up was, is and will still be affordable. It is not.
Unless you bite the bullet, any signs or green shoots will result in the herd of goats let loose to eat it up yet again before any fruit can be harvested.
Olaf Rye
May 24th, 2010 6:18pm Report this commentIs it possible to say 'hard working families' and 'public sector employees' with a straight face ? If any mob has shown themselves to be lazy, incompetent, and promoted well beyond their natural intelligence and ability, it is those in the public sector. The party is over--they have enjoyed screwing us, regulating us, and raking in their salaries for a long time, you would think that they might feel that they have had a good innings. But no, they want to escape the reckoning !
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