DC: Reality has caught up with Gordon Brown
David Cameron writes:
On Tuesday, after months of denying it, Gordon Brown finally admitted that spending had to be cut. So at last he is catching up with reality.
The public spending debate can often get bogged down in the language of deficits, forecasts and balance sheets but it really is this simple: Britain's in a debt crisis. We're borrowing far, far too much money. And unless we cut public spending, we're all going to pay the price - with higher taxes, higher interest rates and lower confidence in our economy for the long-term.
So why on earth has it taken the Government so long to realise this? For months, we've been telling them that they need to get a grip on our national finances. And all across the country, families and businesses have been working out how to trim their own costs and live within their means. But the Government seems to have been entirely asleep on the job.
It didn't have to be like this. On Wednesday, the Conservatives were handed leaked documents from the Treasury. These showed that as far back as April, Gordon Brown's officials were drawing up plans to cut public spending by nearly ten per cent. So all the time that Gordon Brown was adamant in public that spending could continue to rise, in private his figures showed otherwise. He was, not for the first but hopefully for the very last time, taking people for fools.
Add that to the election that never was, the bungling over the abolition of the ten pence tax rate, the evasiveness about the release of al-Megrahi, and we have a Prime Minister who can't be straight with people about what he really thinks.
On Tuesday, after months of denying it, Gordon Brown finally admitted that spending had to be cut. So at last he is catching up with reality.
The public spending debate can often get bogged down in the language of deficits, forecasts and balance sheets but it really is this simple: Britain's in a debt crisis. We're borrowing far, far too much money. And unless we cut public spending, we're all going to pay the price - with higher taxes, higher interest rates and lower confidence in our economy for the long-term.
So why on earth has it taken the Government so long to realise this? For months, we've been telling them that they need to get a grip on our national finances. And all across the country, families and businesses have been working out how to trim their own costs and live within their means. But the Government seems to have been entirely asleep on the job.
It didn't have to be like this. On Wednesday, the Conservatives were handed leaked documents from the Treasury. These showed that as far back as April, Gordon Brown's officials were drawing up plans to cut public spending by nearly ten per cent. So all the time that Gordon Brown was adamant in public that spending could continue to rise, in private his figures showed otherwise. He was, not for the first but hopefully for the very last time, taking people for fools.
Add that to the election that never was, the bungling over the abolition of the ten pence tax rate, the evasiveness about the release of al-Megrahi, and we have a Prime Minister who can't be straight with people about what he really thinks.
Comments
Many of them appear to confuse me with Chris White, who is a Lib/Dem county councillor and Euro-candidate in the area where I used to live. Or perhaps these bozos can't handle names with more than five letters.
One person, in a post which I had to remove because it also contained some libellous innuendo, asked why I disagree with everything that Gordon Brown does and agree with everything DAvid Cameron does.
Actually if you read the blog more carefully you will find that on the rare occasions Brown gets something right - as when he delegated control of interest rates to the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England - I have been quite ready to say so.
If you looked at the website of a Democrat candidate for congress, shortly before the last US elections, would you have been surprised to find posts disagreeing with President George W Bush, and supporting Senator (as he then was) Obama?
Would you have been surprised to
discover that a Republican candidate for congress shared plenty of opinions with one or more of President Bush, Senator McCain, and Governor Palin, and was less keen on Senators Obama and Clinton?
So why is it surprising that in Britain a Conservative candidate for Parliament should have strong disagreements with the worst Prime Minister this country has had for a generation, and support the most successful Conservative leader my party has had for a decade?