The mood of this morning’s ‘Growth Forum’ hosted by the Free Enterprise Group of Tory MPs and the Institute for Economic Affairs was summed up by Kwasi Kwarteng’s introductory remark that to meet the OBR’s ‘ambitious growth targets’, the coalition ‘can’t just bumble along’.
The headline news coming out of the event is Andrew Tyrie, the influential chair of the Treasury Select Committee, calling for it to be made clear that the government’s ambition is to get state spending down to 40 per cent of GDP. David Ruffley also caused a stir by saying that BIS and, possibly, DCMS should be abolished.
But, in the session that I attended, what struck me most was George Osborne’s PPS Sajid Javid implying that the Tories are not certain that the Liberal Democrats will go into the next election committed to eliminating the structural deficit by 2017, which is the coalition’s agreed position. Javid started off by saying that at the next election the two parties will be advocating more cuts, before correcting himself to say ‘at least one of them [will be] arguing that we are going to have to make more cuts’.
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