Tick, tock, tick, tock: only three-and-a-bit days to go until George Osborne’s
long-anticipated austerity Budget, and the coalition is gearing up its efforts to prepare us for the worst. Exhibit A is David Cameron’s interview in the Times this morning, which contains
few pleasantries and a whole heap of stern talk – particularly for those in the public sector. As the PM puts it:
After that, the rhetoric mirrors George Osborne’s speech to the last party conference (which was seen, at the time, as the straight-talking flipside to Cameron’s sunnier speech). And so we’re told that it will be necessary to deal with this spending to “protect jobs,” and to ensure that we have “great schools and hospitals and police on the streets.” But the implications are different now. Then, the Tories were talking about freezing public sector pay and restricting child benefits. Here, Cameron hints, perhaps, at more substantial cuts.“There is no way of dealing with an 11 per cent budget deficit just by hitting either the rich of the welfare scrounger … there are three large items of spending that you can’t ignore and those are public sector pay, public sector pensions and benefits.”
Which is all sensible enough. Our deficit and debt burdens are what they are, and need dealing with in swift order. But it will be worth keeping an eye on whether all this austerity is leavened with some positivity over the coming week: a glimpse, as Andrew Grice says in the Independent, of the “destination,” and not just the budget airline that’s taking us there.
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