Changed lives but same old Tories

David Cameron and his coalition team are softening up Britain for cuts that will change the lives of everyone and transform the country

by Tribune Editorial
Friday, June 11th, 2010
You’ll never have had it so bad, warns the Government as David Cameron and his coalition team soften up Britain for cuts that will change the lives of everyone and transform the country. It’s one of the oldest tricks in the book. We are being braced for austerity and we are all in it together. The Government need hardly have bothered, to judge by the absence of any opposition alternative being mounted by the would-be leadership of the Labour Party.

The second oldest trick in the book is the synthetic astonishment at having arrived in office to find that the state of the economy is worse than the last lot were letting on. It’s not worse, it’s better, with the deficit down around £20 billion on the former Chancellor Alistair Darling’s projections. That has been achieved through public spending investment, not cuts, an uncomfortable pea under Vince Cable’s ministerial cushion as he squints out of his glass Business Department prison to the Treasury.

The Government has done what it said it would and made reducing the £156 billion deficit the virility test of its tenure in office. Tribune has argued consistently that investment not cuts is the more efficacious and socially responsible way of achieving this. Wherever the Tory model (for it is that which the coalition is following) has been tried – Ireland, Mexico or Japan, for example – it has led to economic collapse or, as in Canada, a “bloodbath” in the public sector. Canada’s resulting economic growth was aided by

the rising global economy. There is no clear evidence of any government drastically reducing a budget deficit while the global economy is weak and coming out of it with a stronger economy.

The danger is that the Government has headed into a perfect storm with a stalled recovery turning into a full-blown recession. And they’re taking us all with them.