Today’s news is the extremely welcome announcement by David Cameron of a new Tory economic strategy – of slowing the growth of government, dropping the commitment to Labour’s spending plans and promising tax cuts funded by government efficiency. You can read his excellent speech on the matter on the Conservatives website and his even better op-ed in The Guardian.
That’s all very good, but what I’ve found really interesting is what Labour are up to today. It’s summed up very nicely in this sentence from the Evening Standard:
The Chancellor signalled that he would find bigger than expected efficiency savings in IT costs, procurement deals and sales of its assets and property.
Savings, you say? Savings?
That’s cuts, you’ve got there, mate. Savings isn’t the word you’re looking for, you’re looking for the word cuts. Tory cuts. And we all know, after 10 years of being told so, you can’t make savings on Government efficiency, you can only make damaging cuts that hurt people and cause the sky to fall down.
I’m sure the Tories sums don’t add up though. Never mind whether the Goverment needs to borrow £15bn (and hide mountains of debt off the balance sheet) to make its sums add up. What’s really important is that the Tories sums don’t add up.
Ahem.
No no no! The Tories only want to cut teachers, nurses and coppers. Labour can find inefficient ways of cutting spending without anyone being made unemployed.
Ah yes. We can’t cut coppers. The Tories would probably do something stupid like replace police on the beat with undertrained and powerless Community Support Offices, just i the name of saving money.
We couldn’t be doing with that, could we!
Oh dear god, please don’t fall for the **** spewed by either side. Ultimately, this has nothing to do with saving jobs or justified decision-based spending/not spending. Neither side can get through this without the co-operation of the G20, G99 and flake, whatever.
Gordon is off on one of his fantasies, where whatever he says is ‘right’, and is ‘the right thing to do’, etc. and is praying that the rest fall for it. Without them, he is liver and onions.
There is a difference between efficiency savings and cuts. It isn’t necessary to cut jobs or output but look at streamlining your workload to enable one to take on more, as a simple example.
Not long ago, I asked Tom Harris on his blog why local councils spend a small fortune on tasking PR people to redesign coucil logos when the residents don’t have a choice of authority anyway. No answer.
I’m beginning to agree that elected official should have a minium of five years in a grounded job, not as another lawyer/intern/friend of X.