Nice piece. I’d add that nobody was really given an opportunity to comment indepth on cuts anyway, Not a single one of the parties outlined a cuts programme in detail during the election campaign – they actively avoided doing so, except for making the odd wishy-washy commitment to the NHS. If parties had listed out projects and services they proposed to cut, the support numbers (or lack of them) would make more sense.

when I read phrases like “we didn’t vote for cuts” am I supposed to understand that you are opposed to any substantial cuts?

Is there, underlying all these posts “against” cuts on LC, any sort of well thought out picture of what public finance are likely to look like over the next decade? And when people write about how the deficit should be closed by tax increases, is there any idea of how large those tax increase would have to be? Is it appreciated that tax increases will cost jobs in the private sector? Why are left wingers supposed to prefer jobs losses in the private sector to job losses in the state sector?

As far as I can gather, most of those who show some sign of actually appreciating the scale of the problem, yet who are against cuts now, are either arguing for somewhat smaller cuts or are arguing for delayed cuts (Martin Wolf etc.). But those are different positions from being “against cuts” per se, which I get the impression has become the consensus on this website. If that is the “real” left wing position (real, as distinct from those sell-out left wingers) then so much the worse for the real left wing, imho. Or am I mistaken, and if cuts were delayed for a year or two, would the contributors to this website endorse them?

Anyone with a knowledge of history carries a prudent scepticism about the results of polls and plebiscites.

The Nazis gained a huge majority of 92% in a national plebisicte in Germany on 12 November 1933, which legitimised a one-party state, and another huge majority in the plebisicite on 19 August 1934 which approved retrospectively the merging of the functions of the Reich President and Reich Chancellor in the person of the Führer.

With Britain running a fiscal deficit amounting to 11% of Britian’s GDP, the coming budget on 22 June will need to be tough.
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=277

A deficit of that magnitude cannot continue indefinitely regardless. The yield gap between 10-year German government bonds and 10-year UK government bonds is already widening at 2.66% v 3.53%
http://www.economist.com/node/16379995

I’ve no particular regard for Osborne – who behaves like an obstreperous adolescent debater – but the opposition to any cuts is looking increasingly silly, especially with the extensive documented evidence of massive waste and inefficiencies in public spending presented in the thread below here on: Why raising taxes is the only progressive way to tackle the deficit:
https://liberalconspiracy.org/2010/06/18/why-raising-taxes-is-the-only-progressive-way-to-tackles-the-deficit/#comments

I shall be reading carefully the commentary on the forthcoming budget by the IFS, the NIESR and in the Financial Times, where a succession of high-profile columnists has been warning of the risks of another recession from premature steep cuts in public spending.

Do these spending cuts have public legitimacy?

We have a government which represents over 50% of the national vote cast so yes. People elected these MPs rightly or wrongly. What happens next is up to parliament.

Luis

I think its pretty clear that “we didn’t vote for cuts” refers to immediate cuts, considering the Labour and Libdem manifestos and vote shares. Maybe the author is ideologically opposed to cuts in general, but this article was just making a narrower factual point about popular opinion, which is consistent with delayed cuts being a good idea.

As a side issue, left wingers can reasonably back tax increases over public spending cuts, even if they result in private sector job losses. The issue isn’t whether public sector jobs are intrinsically better than private sector ones, but which action will cause less harm, cuts or taxes. Plausibly the answer is taxes.

“Secondly, 48% of respondents say the cuts are already having an impact on their lives – which suggests they may not be very forgiving when the services actually disappear.”

Could anyone explain this? Given that no services have been actually cut yet, in what sense can they have had an impact on people?

Is it that people are anticipating cuts to services so are saving more money to pay for child care (or whatever they believe may not be available post cuts)?. Still the percentage seems very high considering no cuts have yet been made.

People are against cuts for many reasons, whether viewing the potential effects subjectively or objectively, and I appreciate the potential merits of delaying cutbacks, but is the viewpoint of Liberal Conspiracy that cuts should not happen at all or be considerably limited?

I see @2 Luis Enrique has already asked some of the questions I have in mind.

A lot of opinion I have seen on this site and elsewhere on the left of the internet, seems to imply the weight of the deficit should be shouldered by tax. Completely ignoring the detrimental effects on the private sector, as well as the huge scope for cuts in thoroughly inefficient areas of the public sector (it shouldn’t be about cutting services, it should be genuinely about efficiency, though I understand the difficulty therein).

I have worked in the public sector, throughout the private sector and I now work closely with the public sector (cuts could effect me); the differences I have noticed are shocking. There are massive divergences in culture and working practices, not to even mention the matter of the public sector pensions, and even the unqualified eye could identify areas in need of change.

While jobs have been lost in the private sector and pressure significantly increased on the remaining workforce; the public sector, while I know changes have been made in some areas, have largely speaking carried on as normal.

The opinion about the effects of cuts and the alternatives is all conjecture, but the reality of the downturn has been played out for some two years. There’s a fundamental disparity between the public and private sectors and increased taxes would hurt those around the lowest level of the private sector the most; I now often wonder who do the Left represent?

@John Smith

The case for maintaining spending is an economic one, while your piece reads like an embittered conflict between two separate and distinguishable sectors. This is not the case.

The Public Sector will source many of its goods and services out of the private sector, and any retrenchment therefore will impact the private sector as suredly as it does government departments.

Moreover tax rises impact everyone in both sectors (public sector employees pay tax too you know). But an income tax rise can more easily be targetted towards wealthier individuals – those who are more able to pay. Cutting jobs in the public sector on the other hand simply chucks thousands of workers onto an unemployment scraphead with little prospect of being employed gainfully very soon.

And note also that Public Sector pensions are not the most onerous issue on the public purse. The government pays out roughly £4bn per annum to hundreds of thousands of retired civil servants (less than 1pc of all managed expenditure) and very long term forecasts suggest this may rise to £9bn – which given inflation is not much of a real terms rise. The public sector pension kefuffle is not about saving money, its about chucking red meat to the massively embittered Daily Mail reading hoardes.

There’s a fundamental disparity between the public and private sectors

Honestly, so what?

This isn’t a zero sum game. Even if the government “wastes” money, that spending goes somewhere – into the coffers of its supply chain to pay workers there and so on. It gets circulated and keeps the economy churning and gurgling. Your prescription would cut the economy’s throat just to assuage a sense of embitteredness which is entirely misplaced. And dangerous too.

@ BenM
Had a few days off the internet this week but just wanted to respond, even though there wasn’t a lot of interest in this particular article…

As I said I appreciate the merits of delaying cuts, but I think there should be a reduction in public expenditure combined with the inevitable tax increases. (Although on the tax side I’m not yet sure about raising the threshold along with a VAT increase.)

My argument is economic, but I’m also highlighting the situation of a particular section of the workforce and as I mentioned in my comment I currently work in the private sector on public sector contracts, so I am well aware of the important interactions between the two.

The basic positions on taxation and spending are the two sides of the recent economic argument; Brown’s “taking £6 billion out of the economy” as opposed to the Tories against increasing employer NIC. Both viewpoints reasoning that the other has adverse effects on the economy.

If I have a ‘prescription’ then it is more a considered combination of cuts and taxation. My first point being that there is scope for cuts in the public sector. I’m not saying that I have faith that they will be applied fairly and appropriately by this government, but the fact is there is inefficiency and areas that can be cut, without necessarily radically effecting frontline services, or for that matter private contracts. And again that’s not to say the budgets will directed and applied by the Tories, or then internally, for the best possible outcomes.

Secondly the indirect effects of only increasing taxation would be felt most at the lower end of the private sector. Taxes are going to increase in the long term and I think higher earners should pay more, as well as the banks. But unfortunately just as the rich will try to avoid taxation, so to will companies try to shift the burden of tax to maintain their margins. The recession has already led to job losses, pay and recruitment freezes and worsening conditions (from increased workloads to decreased hours) and these circumstances have affected those depending on lower paid private sector jobs (whether in a job or out of work and job seeking).

If there were no cuts at all in the public sector, with no job insecurity and no change to conditions, an increase in taxation would only be an effective pay cut to its employees. It wouldn’t have the same effect as it would on the private sector and its workers, because it is not open to the same forces.

As much as some of it may be channelled back at some point, taxation would still affect the competitiveness of the private sector and therefore growth. There is a valid argument for continuing Keynesian economics, but I’m talking about balancing the burden, to maintain productivity and also to have a fairer system.

What is fair about ‘wasting’ money in the public sector for the private sector to service the debt with the resulting problems of productivity and declining working conditions? To be blunt, not all jobs in the public sector are nursing and teaching, but it seems cuts are ‘unfair’ in the public sector, while you might just get some sympathy when they occur in the private sector, depends on the industry…

This isn’t a basic ideological argument; I’m not a Tory in favour of cuts to fund tax breaks for the rich and it’s not an embittered attack on the public sector. It’s about the reality of the situation in many different industries in this country.

How that reality appears can depend on your perspective of it, which sector and which industry. Conditions vary throughout the private sector, but the fundamental disparity is between the low and moderate earners in the private sector and large sections of the public sector (e.g. pay, conditions, pension provision).

If the question remains ‘so what?’, then maybe that goes some way to answering my previous closing question. I realised during the election that Labour’s ‘Future Fair for All’ would have been fairer for some than it would have for others.

When Labour came to power in 1997, aside from improving the rights of temporary workers, they chose not to meddle fundamentally with the private sector, in fear of affecting its productivity. Instead Gordon Brown used the growth from the private sector to fund public sector expansion and create the current system. The growth was unsustainable; therefore the size of the public sector is unsustainable. The economy needs to be restructured and the system improved for all workers.