The Spending Review, one year on

It’s been a year since the Coalition’s Comprehensive Spending Review, but the public is in no mood to celebrate its anniversary. As the economy has failed to recover – GDP was no higher in June this year than at the time of the Review – sentiment has turned against the government.

The latest YouGov polling shows that just one-in-three think the government is handling the economy well, against 58 per cent who say “badly”. At the time of the Spending Review, the public was split evenly on this question.

Similarly, just 33 per cent think the government’s spending cuts are good for the economy, while half say they’re bad. But people do think the cuts are necessary – by a two-to-one margin. That figure has not been eroded at all by the bad economic news or Labour’s claims that what we need is a Keynesian stimulus.

And the good news for the Coalition is that, while the public don’t like the cuts, they’re more inclined to blame the last government for them. Although Labour succeeded in shifting some of this blame onto the Coalition in the months after the election, they haven’t made any progress since Christmas:

But even though people think the government had no choice but to cut, they don’t really like the way they’re going about it. 59 per cent say they’re being done “unfairly” – despite the government’s obsession with those decile charts. And Labour’s “too far, too fast” charge seems to be sticking: 51 per cent say they’re going too quickly, and 47 per cent say too deep.