A reminder about those “cuts”

For the avoidance of doubt there are none!

Public spending, as I have already pointed out, is planned to continue increasing year on year over the life of this Parliament, public debt will continue to rise year on year, and the budget deficit will not be eradicated even by 2015, our government will continue to overspend and the budget will not be balanced.

You can see John Redwood giving Kirsty Wark a fun time here on Newsnight, and read his blog post here.

However some of the reports of reductions in the increase of spending make great headlines for journalists, public bodies, local councils, and other public quangos as they stake their claims for a slice of the still growing cake, this was all predictable as they paint the coalition government as evil and heartless. The battle is now more about generating publicity for those who depend upon the public purse for their lifestyles, and are determined to continue seeking a rise in their allocations of cash.

The only real cut around here is the amount of time that I have to spend at this keyboard, for which I apologise, posts may now appear here only at weekends as I balance my commitments between work, family, and photography.

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Ron Paul on sovereign debt

Liberal Democrats should think carefully about continuing the life of the current government and their own fiscal and EU policies.

European Socialism and the entitlement culture which has ran out of money.

A little simplistic perhaps, Thatcherite clear thinking maybe? The debt needs to be paid down fast! The spending needs to be reigned back now! Taxes may need to rise, the medicine will not be sugar coated.

Our three political parties argued a whole load of nonsense during the election campaign as Gordon Brown dragged both the Tories and the Lib-Dems onto his chosen battleground the “cuts vs investment” theme. Yet with one man wanting to scare the living daylights out of the electorate about the size of threatened Tory cuts (and he succeeded to some extent), and two not wanting to frighten voters away, we ended up with very little clarity or honesty about the size of the debt problem here. All three parties were arguing over a narrow range of expenditure figures that covered the £8bn to £14bn worth of identified “cuts”.

The IFS stated just a few days before the election that not a single party was being clear or honest about the scale of expenditure reduction that would be need to reduce the budget deficit by half within the next five years, of course it is easy to make a statement like this about two parties which have no access to the real time up to date figures, we rely on the governing party to give us the data. Leading economists are agreed that cuts in UK government spending of at least £50bn are required in the next financial year to have any real impact on the markets, and with currency turmoil likely to reappear in Europe a solid financial basis here would help to protect the pound. £50bn of cuts in one year!

Do you realise that (taking into account price inflation) this would scale back public spending to the levels that we last saw in 2007-08, and wasn’t that a very austere year!

That’s right, they were scared of talking about spending cuts that would have sent us back two whole years!

If the Liberal Democrats want to get into government by forming a coalition or agreement with either of the other two parties, they have to ask themselves if Nick Clegg and “low voltage” Cable really do understand the depth of our £1.5 trillion debt crisis, and would they be capable of going along with cuts at a rate much higher than was talked about during the election, or would they prefer to stick with the spendthrift Mr. Brown who has helped to stoke the debt crisis with his increased borrowings?

Choices , choices lads.

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