Clegg and spending

Nick Clegg continues to say the right things. This passage from Steve Richards’s interview on GMTV Sunday Programme this morning:

“We understand that the years of unprecedented increase in public spending, and let’s remember the increases in public spending since 2000, three years after New Labour came into power, is probably without precedent anywhere in the Western world since the war.  There’s been an explosion in public spending.  That is not going to continue, in fact it’s going to very much level off.”

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Of course, he “envisages” that taxes will lower – while the Tories say taxes will fall “over the cycle”. So the Tory policy is still harder. But I like Clegg’s language, his correctly choosing 2000 as the starting point to an “explosion”. The days of Kennedy’s “penny on the pound of income tax to pay for education” is gone.