Vince Cable has a budget special piece in yesterday’s Independent:
This is a time for grown-up debate. The deficit is too big and the public is too cynical of politicians to be taken in by vague, unspecific, promises. The only way forward is to identify, explicitly, areas of government activity which will have to be cut right back. My party has already identified several specific cuts – like the ID card scheme; the NHS IT project; “baby bonds”; refusing unlimited taxpayer subsidies for nuclear power. We believe that there now has to be a serious debate about how to scale back the reach of tax credits; ballooning public sector pension commitments, especially to “fat cats” (like MPs); gross military overstretch; the promise of access to universities for half of all young people; and much else.
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3 Comments
“The deficit is too big and the public is too cynical of politicians to be taken in by vague, unspecific, promises.”
This kind of talk would carry more conviction if the Lib Dems could be specific about the source of the 3%/£20bn of savings which they have been trying to identify for the last three years (or five years according to some).
Surely someone is going to comment on Vince Cable’s lack of apparel sooner or later?
The party no longer believes that it can find £20Billion public spending cuts, that policy has been dropped.
They will of course continue to look for cuts, just like everyone else is.
I think the most significant part of the article is where he says;
“The failure is much deeper: that of a model of economic growth which originated a quarter of a century ago in Thatcher’s resurgent Britain which New Labour meekly adopted. And the more successful the Tories are in transforming this crisis into votes, the greater the likelihood of their inheriting a deep, systemic problem which they helped to create and which their modern PR skills are now hopelessly ill-equipped to solve.
”
In other words, the neo-liberal “Washington Concensus” (WC) dreamt up by Thatcher and Reagan is now dead.
The problem we all face today is working out what the alternative should be to take it’s place.
However the legacy of WC ensures that neither New Labour or Barack Obama are getting to grips with the banking sector, as this article by John Gray demonstrates.
http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2009/04/global-crisis-china-banking
Vince Cable has made similar arguments about the government not having enough control of the nationalised banking sector, and that banks or not lending sufficiently as a result.
The problem for all political parties is that the future looks like one of reducing public spending and increasing taxes. Generally politicians need to be optimistic and visionary, but in these circumstances their priority will have to be to manage economic decline. How do you persaude the electorate to support that?
“The party no longer believes that it can find £20Billion public spending cuts, that policy has been dropped.”
I don’t think so!
As I understand it, it was the aspiration to spend some of the £20bn of savings on tax cuts that was dropped. Of course, the savings will still be needed to fund the various additional Lib Dem spending pledges. We were given the first instalment of the proposed savings and additional spending – relating to education – a couple of months ago. But the rest remains “vague and unspecific”.