I will be appearing with Eurfyl ap Gwilym on the Politics Show later this morning and I am sure we will have an interesting discussion. However, what has interested me, as someone on the periphery of politics these days, is the sheer hypocrisy shown by members of the Labour Party during the last few weeks.
You would have thought from all the tweets, facebook entries and press commentary that the Labour Party is completely innocent in all of this and they, of course, would never have envisaged any type of cuts.
Well perhaps it is time to remind the Labour Party, and some of their friends in the press, of what the last Chancellor of the Exchequer said earlier this year after his March budget.
For example, a report from the BBC noted the following:
"Experts say Mr Darling has postponed the major decisions on departmental spending, and what is widely expected to be substantial cuts in many areas, to a spending review expected in the autumn.
The chancellor warned in his Budget speech that this review would be the "toughest in decades".
Asked by the BBC's Political Editor Nick Robinson to accept the Treasury's own figures suggest deeper, tougher cuts than those implemented by the Thatcher government in the 1980s, Mr Darling replied: "They will be deeper and tougher - where we make the precise comparison, I think, is secondary to the fact that there is an acknowledgement that these reductions will be tough".He added: "There may be things that we don't do, that we cut in the future. We will have to decide what precisely we can do within the [spending] envelope I set. What is non-negotiable is that borrowing is coming down by half over a four-year period."
And to reinforce the message, he gave an interview with Channel 4 the same evening in which the spectre of deep reductions in public expenditure was admitted.
We all know that there will need to be reductions in the level of government expenditure to deal with the massive debt that this country has amassed. Osborne knows it, Cable knows it and Darling knew it, which is why he postponed any difficult decisions until the CSR.
Of course, we won't know what areas a re-elected Labour Government would have had to cut but Labour MPs and AMs shouldn't kid themselves, or the public, that there wouldn't have been major cuts in key areas if Alistair Darling had been making the announcement on Wednesday.
Indeed, as an interview with Francis Maude in today's Telegraph suggests, there can be savings made without cutting jobs - an estimated £100 million has been saved since June alone. It is hard to believe previous governments did not come up with any of this sooner but as Maude says "Labour just didn't bother. It can be done but you have to bother".
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