The Spending Review document is available here, but we’ve collected the cuts facing some of the main departments in the table below. This is not the complete picture of Osborne’s announcements today: much of the action takes place in the separate social security budget, but we’ll have more on that shortly.
1350, PH: And that’s Johnson finished now. Osborne is responding, but we’ll leave the live blog there. Plenty more coverage on Coffee House soon. 1348, PH: Johnson claims that Osborne’s final point about 19 percent departmental cuts is misleading. He goes on to say that Labour would now cut departmental budgets by half the amount.
QUICK VERDICT: More heat than light today, but Cameron easily got the better of Ed Miliband. Now to the Spending Review live blog. 1230: Cameron says that as cuts are made, the government will have to reform the way it does criminal justice. This is a prelude for the deep cuts that the Home Office
With the Spending Review less than two hours away, I thought CoffeeHousers might like to be armed with a few graphs that set the scene. What follows is by no means the complete picture of the fiscal landscape, but these are certainly some of most prominent landmarks. First up, real terms spending (aka Total Managed
Welcome to Stage Two of the government’s life. The first stage was the Budget, which established the size of the fiscal mountain looming over the coalition. The third stage will be the difficult, four-year slog up to the top. But today – the Spending Review – is all about determining the route for that ascent.
We will be presented with the full defence review at around 1430 today – but already its contents are spilling out across the papers. Much of it is unsurprising: a delay for the Trident upgrade, two new aircraft carriers, etc. But some of it is slightly more surprising: for instance, the immediate decommissioning of both
What a curious creature this National Security Strategy is. For some reason, I expected something more than a 39-page document in the same mushy pea colour scheme as the coalition agreement. But that is what we’ve got – and it doesn’t really tell us much. The centrepiece of the document comes on page 27 (reproduced
Here’s one grace note to this parliamentary term so far: the return of David Laws to public life. Since it was revealed that the former chief secretary to the Treasury has written a book about the formation of the coalition government, he has made more and more regular forays into the outside world. Last week,
The most shameless line of Alan Johnson’s big speech came at the beginning. “Being in opposition does not mean pretending to be in government,” he averred, “we will not be producting a shadow spending review.” Which would be fair enough, were it not for one simple fact: the Brown government didn’t produce a spending review
Rule 97 in the Practitioner’s Guide to Westminster Politics: if you want to get a message out pronto, then corral a bunch of impressive names into writing a letter to a national newspaper. We saw the tactic used by both Labour and the Tories before the election. And we see it again today, with a
A wander through to p.14 of the Sunday Times delivers one of the most eyecatching political stories (£) of the day. The headline: “Cambridge may go private in fees row”. And the content: that officials at Cambridge Uni are dissatisfied with the findings of the Browne review, which they see as too restrictive. Their issue
As we know, education and defence have now had their budgets settled – another two ticks alongside the checklist. But that still leaves the third member of the coalition’s trio of sticky settlements unresolved: welfare. The “quad” of David Cameron, George Osborne, Nick Clegg and Danny Alexander will meet today to bash out the final
If you heard Australian bluesman C.W. Stoneking’s first album, King Hokum, then you will know what to expect from his second: Jungle Blues. If you heard Australian bluesman C.W. Stoneking’s first album, King Hokum, then you will know what to expect from his second: Jungle Blues. If you didn’t, then let me point out that
This latest piece from the Spectator archives isn’t topical in any specific sense, but it does chart a problem which has spread over recent years until it has seeped into everything from government to football: namely, debt. In it, Dominic Lawson visits a Merseyside housing estate towards the end of the 80s, to find a
Only five days to go until the spending review – and after weeks of emphasis on the cuts we’re about to see, the government has today unveiled a new spending commitment. It comes courtesy of Nick Clegg: a new “fairness premium” targeted at the least well-off young people. Lib Dem Voice has full details here,
VERDICT: Well, who would have thought it? In his first PMQs performance, Ed Miliband not only put in a solid showing – but he got the better of David Cameron. I certainly don’t agree with the Labour leader’s central argument: that it is unfair to restrict child benefit. But he put his point across in
Only one week to go, folks, until the main event itself: the Comprehensive Spending Review. And judging by this morning’s papers, the Treasury have almost settled on their final acts. Only the welfare, eduction and defence budgets have any significant question marks hanging over them. Those question marks, though, are fading fast. A story in
As Alex says, the rescue of the Chilean miners has to be the “feel-good story of the year”. The first, Florencio Avalos, was winched out of his underground cell at 0310 British time, and a further four have been delivered to the surface since. With 28 more miners to come, this is by no means
Philip Green’s business background is writ plain across his review of government waste – right down to its PowerPoint style layout. Many of its recommendations reduce down to a claim made on p.20: “There is no reason why the thinking in the public sector needs to be different from the private sector.” And so we
A little snippet from today’s Times (£) that is worth noting down: “Tory rebels will this week lift their threat to the date of next year’s proposed referendum on voting changes – because they believe May 5 offers the best chance of stopping the alternative vote (AV) system. That date coincides with the council elections