Osborne needs to make the moral case for cuts

AndyinBrum

I though both he and Lawes were quite clear about money being spent now will have to be recouped through taxation later.

Lots of "irresponsibility of previous incumbents" thrown around too

Abandon Ship!

As usual the BBC this morning sounded like the voice of Gordon, or the voice of the Guardian, or both.

Osborne should not be frightened of the cuts - the Guardianistas at the BBC may be quaking, but the public are well prepared and want a serious Government to get on with it.

I look forward to a BBC documentary about Gordon Brown's financial mismanagement and handling of public spending and the defecit. Naughtie will be j=keen to front that one no doubt.

strapworld

I am sure that whatever Mr Osborne and Mr Laws say Mr Nelson will criticise them.

Mr Nelson has joined the Bill Cash moaning club I think

Sean Haffey

It remains alarming that the Tory Government has not felt strong enough to make the case for ELIMINATING the deficit, not just reducing it.

A commentator this morning on BBC Radio4 pointed out that the interest alone on our debt exceeds the amount spent on schools.

Lizzy

I think they need to do something about the BBC. I was not entirely convinced about the cries of "bias" towards the Tories, mainly because I heard all parties make the same claim.
However I made a point of watching all channels and the blogs during the GE and, sure enough, I spotted the anti Tory bias.
The only exception I found was Andrew Neil who, as a serious journalist, gave everyone a hard time.
They need the BBC to get their message across so as well as a bonfire of the quangoes perhaps a similar exorcision of the Nu Lab placemen and women at the broadcaster would be appropriate.

Rhoda Klapp

Tell me what difference interest rates make when nobody, nobody at all, can borrow at anything like the base rate. If it was double, it would not make any difference.

(I do realise how low rates help a hopeless borrower addicted to debt like the government)

We need a long-term plan to get government spending down to half of what it is now as a % of GDP. Might take a while, say ten or twenty years. The thing is to make the government ask itself 'do we absolutely have to do that?'. And that might mean it could stop intefering in our lives. Yep. fantasy.

Dennis Churchill

The Conservatives must deal with the broadcasting media bias as part of an overall strategy to rebalance the political debate in the UK.
The “right” has allowed various “Givens” to be entrenched not only in the Broadcasting media but in the Education system that prepares our next generation of graduate intake .Not for nothing did the Stasi concentrate on identifying Agents of Influence at our universities.
By the way did we ever get details of just who they were when the records became available?

AlanL

You write as if you think a rise in rates is a bad thing (talking about a six-fold rise from their ridiculously low level)

A healthy economy should have *real* rates of about 2% or so - so if inflation is a healthy 2% then rates should be at 4%.

Having negative real rates just encourages the culture of leveraged borrowing, punishing savings.

james

There's talk of privatising the road network & C4:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1280656/Will-motorway-network-sale-pay-national-debt.html?ITO=1490

The priority should be to sell/destroy the pro-big-government anti-Tory BBC.
Why can't the Cameroons see this?

PuppetMaster

The cuts aren't something to be regretted, even you are caught up by the statist argument. maggie had this same debate with Labour when she was in opposition, it didn't do her any harm.
No, I think the problem with the modern Tories is that they are intellectually weak and generally pro-state. Nobody seems to be making the argument that stealing the wealth of the middle class via bank bailouts and inflation is wrong. When our oil crunch hits home in a year or two from now, the state will have no choice other than to contract rapidly, we need to shift our mentality to innovation very quickly. I'm not sure how easy that will be if we still follow the corporatist restrictions imposed by Brussels, assuming the EU still exists then.

Nash

Another great article by Fraser - beats me why those charts weren't used as election posters showing what went wrong with Labour.

Maybe the best way to show what this means is to do a chart showing the interest paid on government debt v amount spent on education, health, defence etc.

Tim Carpenter LPUK

"and that the Tory party is about to rebalance power away from government and towards communities."

Er, no, by your own admission he is just going to slow down the power grab by the State. However, as this is about "efficiency savings" as opposed to "doing less", it will probably do little to stem the tide of State expansion - "the Big Society" being an important arm of taking control on the cheap.

However, I do agree with the overall message here of taking back the argument, though it is not just moral, but pragmatic, necessary, unavoidable.

Brown was like a cartoon character that had run off a cliff and did not know it. The Credit Crunch told him. He jumped into the elevator and stepped out just before it hit the floor. Cameron and Clegg got in as he got out. It is going to be messy.

stephen

Fraser I could not hear the voice of Brown!
Thank God he seems like a nightmare now long past; although it's only just over two weeks since he walked the walk with Sarah and his kids out of Downing St!

AAE

Fraser, you've fallen someway into the Brown/Leftie narrative yourself. What exactly are "communities"? Are you in one? Or are you and the Tories terrified of talking about the "Individual"? Would that word be too toxic?

Chuck Unsworth

"The BBC was still expressing this in terms of frontline service cuts – the equivalent of 150 schools, apparently"

Yes exactly. Once again the BBC deliberately chooses to use emotive description. It's the equivalent of 150 NEW schools (incidentally does this figure actually include staffing costs?). Now, the questions are these:

1. Is it really necessary to build all this new infrastructure, or is this merely part of the NuLab money-go-round?

2. What evidence is there at all that new schools, hospitals etc have any effect on outcomes, quality of teaching and quality of medical care?

and,

3. Why does the BBC see its job as providing the opposition to the Conservative Party?

I watched the Sian Williams person interrogating Osborne this morning. Once again she trotted out the same anti-Tory garbage she was spouting before and during the General Election. Her political position was quite obvious. It is time that her performance and job description is reviewed. Possibly she could be re-trained to do something slightly less taxing, after all, age takes its toll.

Simon Stephenson

"This was the root intellectual error which sent Britain on the path of fiscal ruin – the idea that extra spending magically means extra, better services. If that were true, Britain should have the best schools on the planet and healthiest population in the world, given that our spending over the last decade years increased, quite literally, faster than any other country over any other postwar decade*.

* I first heard this point made to me not at a think tank or from a Tory, but by Nick Clegg at a reception by CentreForum, a Lib Dem think tank, about three years ago."

Were you at this reception as a journalist, Fraser, or as a lay-invitee? Because if it was the latter, then I can understand you being taken in by a piece of rhetoric that's not really true. But if you were there as a journalist, I should have thought you would have been on your guard for this, and that you would have recognised that Mr Clegg had failed to differentiate between the rate at which spending had increased and the absolute level it had reached. A rapid rate of growth from a low start-point would not, in any rational sense, lead one to conclude that "Britain should have the best schools on the planet and healthiest population in the world".

But, hey, who cares about the logic or the reality when it comes to making a good soundbite?

Simon

Strapline - Where have you been? Nelson has been the poor man's Simon Heffer for years now. Although to be fair at least Heffer is funny with it.

mongoose

AlanL (11:00am), right!
What if the BoE set the real interest rate at 2% instead of fixing the nominal rate trying to hit an inflation target?

Alfred T Mahan

BoE holding the nominal rate low is merely a backdoor way to recapitalise the banks. Any new or rolled over finance is only available at a huge margin, which is acceptable to customers only so long as the base headline rate is low. Savers, on the other hand, are conned into being paid interest too low to maintain the value of their cash.

So I don't now expect rates to rise until the banks have healthy balance sheets again. Could be some time - unless we have a gilts strike, but as it's the banks who do the buying, I can't see that happening either. Turkeys, Christmas, and so on.

Ian Walker

The Beeb's "150 new schools" line seems a bit odd - it implies that a new school costs 40 million quid.

While that might be the case for a large inner-city Academy, I doubt a village primary costs that much.

Snowman

Fraser, you stressing the idiocy of coupling spending with outcomes as the one being directly proportional to the other is so right, for there lies the hub of the argument implanted in the psyche of not only the elites of whatever colour (hence the feeble Tory excuse that they could have done little when in opposition), but the great unwashed, too: money, money and again money solves it all, it’s argued and believed. Utter bollocks on par with the ‘no boom and bust’ insanity.

The £6bn comes to less than one per cent of the aggregate government spend. If we cannot manage that we are truly doomed. We would ideally need to shave off close to a third to get the wealth creating private sector moving again, I reckon.

Rhoda, am afraid you wrong thinking that hiking the cost of money won’t make any difference. It will, the cost of mortgages and other loans will soar. The banks can borrow near nothing now, then charge us a lot, those in charge minding not as the juicy margins strengthen the banks’ balance sheets making it less likely they’ll come begging again when the waves of re-financing hits their clients.

Fatbloke on tour

Travor aka "Fraser" ...

Blow it out your arse.
Nonsense from start to finish.
You and those like you are the people who have got the whole 1997-2010 period wrong.

You are claiming that the performance of a service is not based on how much money is actually spent on it but that performance is actually related to the rate of increase in the resources allocated to it.

You really don't understand the difference between speed and acceleration.

Didn't they teach calculus at your MOD subsidised school?

Consequently I repeat, rubbish dressed up as reasoned argument.

You really need to do better.

Simon Stephenson

Fatbloke on tour : 1.09pm

Your argument is just as ridiculous as the one you seek to discredit. The truth is that the performance of a service is determined exclusively neither by the quantity of money allocated to it, nor by the rate at which this quantity is changing. What determines the performance is a combination of the level of resource allocation and the efficiency with which the resource is utilised.

There was a colossal amount of Parkinsonian inefficiency in the public-sector in 1997, and the reform-light flooding of it with extra resources since then has led to far more in the way of greater inefficiency than in additional output of service.

You Big-State apologists need to have drummed into you the fact that there is only so much resource to go round, and that wasting it in one area can never be made up for by efficiency elsewhere. Wake up to the fact that £600billion of spend is not giving us anywhere near £600billion of value, and try, try not to blank out the conclusion that greater efficiency promises far more dividends than greater resource allocation.

Chris lancashire

Rhoda Klapp, AlanL, Alfred T Mahan: Low interest rates have been a substantial benefit to normal SMEs. And loans are still available at anything from 1.5% to 6% over base depending how creditworthy you are. The benefits in my own compamy's case have been to make Capital Expenditure (real investment as opposed to Brown's "investment")more affordable and to eat up existing debt faster if you choose to maintain repayments at the rate they were prior to interest rates falling.
Finally, low interest rates have undoubtedly positively contributed to increased liquidity in my own and every other company with every type of debt.

Low interest rates are not something to be lightly thrown away.

P.S can we find a translator for this fatbloke person? Can't understand a word he writes.

Fatbloke on tour

Simple Simon @ 1.40pm

Away and bile yer heid ya muppet.
I did not offer an alternative argument, "Trevor"'s article was so bad that it fell down under the weight of its own stupidity without needing an opposing narrative.

Before I put forward any alternative could you please explain "Parkinsonian inefficiency"?

New one to me!
Any relation to Cecil the Secretary S*agger?

Snowman

Simon Stephenson @ 1.40:

Dead right, the tragedy lies in that the phylum of the Fats is either unable to comprehend this simple truth, or unwilling. I fear there are millions in the latter category.

Holly ......

Let's have a thread on Labour making the moral case for all the hand tying spending pledges made just before the election!!!!!
We can either continue wasting taxpayers money or we can get a bloody grip,stop the rot and avoid stupid tax rises later.
Do all the taxpayers mind that cutting spending will keep their taxes lower?
Why should the people still in jobs have to keep funding the entire country????
Time to grow up and stop making out Labour were not the spiteful,nasty,unfit party.

stephen

Don't lump poor Fraser with Bill Cash Fraser must be nearly half his age.
Is there not a case for MP's who reach the age of 70 having to be assessed to see if they are suitable to be MP's like for holding a driving license? Ha Ha

Simon Stephenson

Fatbloke on tour : 2.33pm

No, nothing to do with Lord Parkinson. You'll find some illumination here:-

http://www.heretical.com/miscella/parkinsl.html

And whether you are in the public-sector or the private, if you've never seen the frequency and regularity with which people pad out three hours useful work so that it takes a week, then I suggest you must have deliberately averted your eyes.

Tim Carpenter LPUK

Simon Stephenson @ 1.40 : "You Big-State apologists need to have drummed into you the fact that there is only so much resource to go round, and that wasting it in one area can never be made up for by efficiency elsewhere. "

Seconded.

And the amount of resource to go round is £150bln less per year than is currently being dished out.

TGF UKIP

Of course you are quite right Fraser as you have been so often over the past few years, not just in the points you make and the political language in which they can be sold, but also regarding the pusillanimity of the Cameron Clique when it comes to making any remotely conservative argument. It is this as much as anything else which makes me so puzzled over your continuing cheeleading for them.

Olaf Rye

Oh, ignore the raving leftists and their sophistry. No left-leaning person grasps economic affairs at all, or they would not be peddling their nonsense policies and would not have sunk the nation into this abyss. As I have said before, the leftists have had thirteen years of feeding at the public trough, and the party is now over. It is bad enough they have come close to bankrupting this nation and destroying its future, but to expect to remain unpunished and retain their worthless jobs meddling in our affairs is just greedy !

TGF UKIP

PS but there again I was fogetting that it's probably just all part of the job description for Political Editor or Editor of the Cameron Tory house magazine.

Ali C

I read somewhere that Birmingham council more people working for it earning over 100k a year than any other council in the UK. That's unsustainable.

I don't believe that any local council job should pay that much salary. It's service, not a bottomless gravy train. Why not cap all top council jobs at 50k? If you don't like that salary then leave....

Fabian Solutions

I warn you now.

If Cameron and Osborne cut even one job, or freeze even one pay cheque, there will be strikes.

There will be protests and riots – the Poll Tax riots will seem a picnic in comparison.

The public sector unions and our friends will bring this country to a standstill if necessary. Just like we brought down the Heath government, we will bring down Cameron’s Tories.

And if the Old Etonian Tories try to impose an “austerity” regime on the people, while sipping champagne and eating caviar in their moated mansions, it will create the worst class war, ill-feeling and animosity this country has ever seen. There will be chaos.

The Greek government will hopefully learn its lesson soon. Let’s hope the Tories do. No public sector redundancies!

You have been warned.

London Calling

Hello Fraser…

Good to see you have retained your journalistic independence in spectators corner…:)

Moral = responsible, fair and just.
Cuts= necessary, unavoidable and inevitable.

And the kitty is bare, squandered and looted. Therefore morally a balance must be made, the question is are the cuts too deep, have the consequences been thoroughly thought through and will infrastructure cope under an already an already fractured system…or will it be Strikes, On ya Bike and take a Hike?

Meanwhile the World Cup is a distraction…the ripples of discontent therefore will experience a time delay me thinks… :0

MikeF

Fabian - You forgot to add:

'continued on page 94'.

Bob T

The bulk of government borrowing was having to bail out the banks.

Spending cuts are not like household management to "live within ones means" - recession will wipe out industries and have skilled workers going abroad. Also recession feeds on recession - jobless stop spending on UK goods and services creating more jobless. It is an economic question - what is needed is a very wise and competent economist to advise. Encouraging spending on UK goods and services will bring in the multiplier effect Keynes wrote about - unfortunately unfashionble among herd like economists who have rowed us up **** creek

Simon Stephenson

Fatbloke on tour

Have you had a chance to read the Parkinson's Law link I supplied you with in answer to your earlier query?

It's just that I'd like to know if your motive for asking questions is to expand your knowledge and understanding, or if instead you fall into the group, which includes Richard of York and Justicia, to whom the point of asking questions extends no further than to waste the other party's time.