Gordon Brown does not change his ways, or his tactics. It will have shocked him to find the newspapers rejecting as a lie his claim that he would not cut spending. But he’ll be thinking, “they’ll get bored of this rebuttal and I won’t get bored of my attack.” So his strategy is to bulldoze his lie through to the public over the media’s objections.
Labour has just released a dossier setting out what 10 percent cuts would supposedly mean. But as we know from the IFS and the 2009 Budget, Labour plans to cut by 7 percent – the difference between the two figures is simply because the Tories would spare health.
In a mature, truthful debate (which Brown feels confident he will avoid) the question should be: who would cut what? So I have gone through Labour’s cuts dossier—which assumes all cuts hit frontline services—changing the wording (from “the Tories are” to “Brown is”) and the figures so they correspond to Brown’s planned 7 percent cuts post-2011 as opposed to the 10 percent cuts which Lansley spoke about post-2011.
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