As yes, the “more debt is the solution to a debt fuelled crisis” solution to the problem, as put forward by Krugman et al and would have Keynes spinning in his grave.

Not least because it hasn’t worked in the best example of all; real life.

“But with the new orthodoxy depressing demand in our main trading partners this ain’t going to happen.”

Just a thought. We could go and look for new trading partners? China, India, Brazil, Indonesia…..huge countries, huge populations, economies growing very quickly?

You know, really try and buy into this idea about markets: that they’re dynamic?

Or is this something that you bureaucrats at the TUC haven’t quite managed to grasp yet?

Utter tribal nonsense. How long were Labour in Office? How many promises have they broken. Write again, five years hence.

They are of course right to cover those lobbying against particular cuts but they should never let anyone oppose a cut without challenging them with . . . where the cuts should fall if not on their particular interest.

Are you going to follow your own advice?

And do you have actual evidence that the promises have been broken? I mean, £5 million cuts in “Every Child a Reader” doesn’t tell you anything. Is that just removing over-the-top administrative costs i.e. efficiency? Or is the programme itself not efficacious i.e. waste?

To be honest the Labour party were going to make similar cuts.
My wife is a teacher and we have to accept the pay freeze for the next 2 years.
I think most will accept this if
1. Individuals don’t lose their jobs and the resulting misery
2. Banks, bailed out by the government are regulated in regards to bonus payments.

The trouble you feel many of the right wing posters want their pound of flesh. I feel the coalition may take the middle ground.

@2 Tim Worstall: “Just a thought. We could go and look for new trading partners? China, India, Brazil, Indonesia…..huge countries, huge populations, economies growing very quickly?”

I’m not knocking the idea entirely. But my understanding is that it is very easy to invest money in, for example China, and very difficult to export profits in the form of cash.

I note that some big European manufacturers have established plants in China (in cars we have BMW and VW). They are able to sell their own product in the local market at local rates. They are also able to export their product (with associated lower manufacturing cost) to more developed nations and thus recoup their investment.

But apart from a few multinationals who have made a deal with government, who can export cash from China?

Let’s assume that my company makes widgets that are essential to a market sector that only exists in China. I could make widgets in the EU (at higher cost) and export them to China. Or I could make them in China to be sold locally; there is no market for widgets anywhere else in the world, so my profit is stuck in China.

Just a thought. We could go and look for new trading partners?

Well, we might, but with private investment down even with interest rates at rock bottom, our jolly country-saving entrepreneurs don’t seem to want to.

“Well, we might, but with private investment down even with interest rates at rock bottom, our jolly country-saving entrepreneurs don’t seem to want to.”

Dunno about that you know….I’m trying at least to set one up on Tyneside that would export to China….no, really, I am!

I suppose we can look forward to many more posts like this.

There’s tens of billions of further cuts to come.
Cuts which any government would have had to make.

I assume, as you’re so concerned about service users, that you at the TUC will be encouraging public sector workers to accept frozen pay for a while, and maybe (shock horror) to accept the same retirement age as the rest of us??

Or is that too much to ask?

“This government has broken all its promises on spending cuts”
Really! In its first month before it has unveiled its first (emergency) budget. Including the one about accelerating spending cuts in the second, third and fourth years of this Parliament and, in the first few days of June, that one about the Winter fuel allowance and …
That is impressive! Really impressive.
Are you a Doctor Who fan believing in time travel?
Has anyone told you that he is just as real as Father Christmas?

David Cameron has made a point of saying that the ‘new’ Conservative party will not be the like old Tory party in terms of letting the brunt of cuts fall on the most vulnerable in society. That is quite explicitly his claim.

So when Nigel Stanley points out that one of the first cuts is to the Every Child a Reader programme, I think this is entirely legitimate – it is pointing to an apparent contradiction between the ‘protect the vulnerable’ or ‘priority to the worst off’ standpoint which Cameron has said the government will be guided by and what it is actually doing.

One could also mention the abolition of BECTA, which helped schools with their IT provision for children with special educational needs; and the decision to abolish the Child Trust Fund not just for the children of more affluent families but also for the poorest third – contrary to the Conservatives’ own manifesto commitment.

The point is not just or primarily that the government is making cuts, but that they do not seem to be following their own declared principles in the way they are making them.

I don’t see the problem with the article.

Cameron et al promised pre-election that his £6 billion of cuts in 2010-11 would all be ‘efficiency savings’ and not touch ‘front-line services’.

And yet most of them are designed to cut programmes and reduce outputs such as cutting the Child Trust Fund.

Regardless of whether these cuts are the right thing to do or not, it is not an efficiency saving. Cameron and Osborne were lying.

Tory trolls don’t like criticism of the tory party. They just can’t deal with it.

Well they better get used to it because as the promises are broken, and the lies revealed the critics will mount up.

Before the election on 6 May, Alistair Darling was quoted in The Guardian as saying a Labour government would cut deeper than Margaret Thatcher:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/mar/25/alistair-darling-cut-deeper-margaret-thatcher

So far, the present government’s announced cuts in public spending, net of increased commitments, amount to less than 1 per cent of public spending.

This table in Saturday’s The Economist gives comparative estimates of the state of budget balances for affluent economies – Britain’s budget deficit, relative to national GDP, is larger than that of almost all the other countries shown:
http://www.economist.com/markets/indicators/displaystory.cfm?story_id=16274565

Btw despite that, last year, foreign investors evidently had more confidence about investing in business projects in Britain than in Europe:

“The number of FDI [Foreign Direct Investment] projects (defined as investment in physical assets, and excluding sectors such as retail and leisure, and extracting natural resources) in Europe as a whole fell by 11% in 2009 from 2008, and the number of jobs created dropped by 16%. In Britain, however—the favourite European destination for foreign investment—projects and new employment stayed virtually the same.”
http://www.economist.com/world/britain/displaystory.cfm?story_id=16277917

I don’t see the problem with the article.

Cameron et al promised pre-election that his £6 billion of cuts in 2010-11 would all be ‘efficiency savings’ and not touch ‘front-line services’.

And yet most of them are designed to cut programmes and reduce outputs such as cutting the Child Trust Fund.

Regardless of whether these cuts are the right thing to do or not, it is not an efficiency saving. Cameron and Osborne were lying.

Me either.

During the Howard/Crosby election they tried pulling this same shit – claimed they were going to make £35bn out of ‘efficiency savings’ the IFS(?) were inevitably a bit sniffy about such plans (they may have even refused to sign off on them, I forget) because anybody vaguely rational knows its a pile of shite. It’s little more than a post-hoc excuse.

Vince Cable: “Growth will have to come from the business sector. It will need to come from trade.”

That’s true since business investment in the first quarter was running at 11% down on the same period a year ago. But prospects for relying on trade don’t look encouraging because of the fragile state of the Eurozone economy – which usually takes more than half Britain’s exports. Besides that, the Euro has depreciated against the Pound from about 91 pence for a Euro in early March to a cost of just over 82 pence for a Euro now:
http://www.x-rates.com/d/GBP/EUR/graph120.html

once again a powerful intellect selling the audience false bill of goods -

A positional stance has been taken by an author without any logical explanation as to why he has taken that position.

Some here have talked about Becta being cut. Becta has done its job and has been around for almost 9 years – and in the nine years if they haven`t been able to complete their job which was to assist schools with ICT – they would never get it done. And they have done a fine job at it as well.

Child Trust Fund – sadly we do not have the money – and interestingly in my opinion this programme did not help the most vulnerable – parents with very little resources would not have the opportunity to add to the government provided 50 quid – it helped the affluent middle class and the rich. And, I do not know how you would measure output on the CTF for at least another 10-12 years – then only those children who had received the initial 50 quid would reach 18.

I could go on and on. The headline suggested revelations about specific promises that were broke – alas it just turned out to be one of those usual unfounded , unimpressive typical blog post that is more about propaganda with scant respect for the truth.

Well done -

The arguments against reducing public spending deliberately ignore the potential for cuts in the public sector, when most people know the scope is huge and the accompanying argument that higher taxes alone should reduce the debt is flawed.

These views require the private sector to carry the public sector through the downturn, maintaining their conditions while they deteriorate for the low paid in the private sector and overlooking the need for restructuring and greater efficiency.

The frontline should be protected as much as possible, though I fear the way some cuts will be made internally, as budgets are reduced.

And making cuts to inefficient and bloated departments is not exactly the same as reducing any fiscal stimulus, of course the famous ‘removing £6 billion from the economy’. That’s ‘six thousand million’, thanks Gordon…

The biggest problem with cuts to the public service is those who will be instigating them. They can easily be identified as those who profited greatly out of the financially mismanaged and profligate Labour government years. All those diversity departments, departments for useless statistics, etc, etc.

Vast public sector empires which serve no purpose will have to go, as the previous Secretary to the Treasury said “All the monies gone”.

Vast hordes of hospital administrators who outnumber frontline staff as a proportion, why so many? Like most of the public service side, there are too many chiefs and not enough indians, and turkeys if they had the vote would ask for Christmas to be banned. So who will the chiefs get rid of? front line staff of course.

Not a particularly PC statement, but to hell with PC, lets say what we mean and do what we say.

Let Matrons run hospitals, with clinical care and cleanliness at the top of the agenda, rather than waiting lists and times.
Let teachers teach, thats their job to educate, they love doing it, let them get on with it.
Let police officers, police properly in the community, forget about gobbledegook stats etc, more warranted police officers on the beat doing the job they joined the police for.

If there is anything I forget I’m sure you’ll remind me.

@19 Ian Ward. I think you’re right, frontline jobs could go first. The way in which budgets are applied internally could see services cut unnecessarily, because of defensive actions by managers and possibly simply because of poor management.

It should be a concern and something that is monitored, because frontline cuts will be used a political tool, no matter how they came about. And that includes the Tories cutting unnecessarily.

A lot of people who claim to be in the know, scoff at the notion of cutting bureaucracy, saying that managers are still needed; schools, hospitals, etc, etc, can’t run themselves and frontline staff don’t have time to manage. It is true, administration and management is necessary and so to Government departments/agencies, but not to the extent that they now exist. To create a ‘functioning’ public sector did Gordon Brown need to create one million more jobs? And how many were frontline?

The view deliberately ignores massive inefficiency. This may only be anecdotal, but I’ve worked in the public sector and throughout the private sector; the difference is frightening… I’m not saying they need to be brought into line, that wouldn’t even be possible, but there is huge scope for restructure in the public sector.

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