Politics

20 June 2009

Fraser Nelson reviews the week in politics

The aim would be to conduct such negotiations in as collegiate a way as possible. Those who objected to Mr Hammond’s proposals would be sent to a ‘star chamber’ to have their claims adjudicated by other Cabinet members. Chancellor Osborne will argue that he is cutting not because he wants to, but because the OBR says he has to — and that Britain may go bust if he does not. In this way, the cuts agenda will dominate the first term.

These are still rough plans, by necessity. There is no point in fixing too much detail while the public finances are changing so quickly. But the principles are being set. Mr Osborne has been struck by the Economist’s headline after the first Thatcher budget: ‘This is what you voted for’. He would like a similar verdict on his first budget. But that means making the case for cuts now and trying to wrestle the economic agenda away from Mr Brown, who has dominated it for so long, with such calamitous results.

In this way, the tactical error of Mr Lansley may yet yield a strategic victory. It has led Mr Osborne to declare that the Tories have been ‘tiptoeing around one of those discredited Gordon Brown dividing lines for too long’. This is true, in all too many regards. Fear of what Gordon Brown might say is a phobia that has stymied Tory thinking for more than a decade. But now, at long last, the party may finally be shaking free of it.