Originally published @ 7:57 am, Wed 23rd Jun 2010
So the budget was flint faced and slashing spending, despite David Cameron's promise given in March 2009 –
“We are not going to behave like flint faced turbo-charged accountants, slashing spending without regard to the social consequences.”
A number of measures were announced to mediate the impact on the poorest, but Newsnight showed that after the top 30%, the most hardest hit are the bottom 10%. And the overall profile is much less progressive than that planned by Labour.
Newsnight also featured the Lib Dem Chief Secretary to the Treasury. Such is the constraint of coalition that they could say the Conservatives were planning an increase of VAT to 20% in April, but could not say that the Conservatives were planning it all along in June.
Meanwhile, why is a NI increase a jobs tax, but not a VAT increase? It seems the Con/Dems see the private sector filling a space being vacated by a reduction in the public sector. But with less people with wages available to spend and wages to spend not going so far, one wonders how the private sector will win the extra custom.
Canada managed with its cuts we're told and yet we know they were cutting at a time that their main exports market, the USA, was growing. Now, Europe is contracting, and the leadership of Gordon Brown in keeping Europe together to reflate for longer has gone. Only for the Con/Dems to now say they are responding to a recent change in the European circumstance. Go figure.
Meanwhile, Vince Cable was lamentable in his defence of the changes. As Harriet Harman pointed out in her reply to the Budget, transformation to a poodle indeed.
As for turbo-charged, it's probably more swingeing that quick cos a lot of the public spending cuts are not actually defined until a statement in October.
So, as during the General Election, it remains hard to paint a full picture. The Con/Dems have worked hard at narrowing the focus onto the deficit and the debt, with Sky News helpfully producing a rolling graphic on the increase in the debt. No such easy graphic for increased unemployment or lost capacity for work and production. Certainly the Conservatives did not run on a promise of taking out £400 from the annual spend of an average family.
Flint faced indeed.
Komentar