I don’t get the feeling that Labour in opposition are grasping the groundswell for no cuts everywhere. Cuts are unpopular: they are popular when backed up up by a cynical barrage of fallacious and vile DWP press releases on ‘scroungers’ but when properly challenged, they are not what people want. Labour are failing to challenge the cuts. Tax increases? What about wage increases? I think Labour could really capitalise on the cuts backlash.

“This would involve every public service being re-examined to get better value for money, meet the new needs of the public, break down departmental silos, engage citizens, and find new ways of measuring value in public services.”
There are so many ways of interpreting that above statement.
The way I see it is that the whole system needs looking at. at the moment it does not appear to be working. Take for instance Welfare and the DWP. The DWP IMO is currently letting the most vulnerable down by not in it’s present state being fit for purpose. There have recently been a number of TV programs about this. In every case they show a system not working properly.
To my mind the system at the moment is throwing a lifeline to people, but missing some and penalizing others because of their situation, where as if it caught things before they needed the lifeline thrown at them and helped stop them getting into difficulties, then there would be a system that worked, was more efficient and in all likelihood cheaper.
Look at banking and the treasury. Where are the controls to stop the abuses of the system. There were some put in place in the 30’s after the great depression, they have been eroded over the years and we now have, as a result an even bigger recession. The Banks have been the main factor in this and the treasury is left with the mess to sort out (the fact that they don’t appear to have a clue what to do is another matter)

These problems go though all levels of government and society from national down to local and every department needs to be examined to make sure that we are all getting the best value for money.

Perhaps I am being way to simplistic in my way of thinking? but good Coop principles applied to national and local government may be a solution?

The policy is fairly sensible – but one should question what Labour plans to do with money saved through the review.

In its efficiency drive under Blair a few years ago the commitment was unambiguous. Savings made through efficiencies in the NHS would remain in the NHS budget.

This means that as an alternative to the Tory line of “more for less” which translated for anyone with brains into at best “the same for less” – Labour would have a much more believable line of “more for the same”.

After all – who would argue the NHS, for example, couldn’t be more efficient – or that the NHS should strive to improve healthcare provision?

@ Rentergirl

Back in the real world, most people understand that the UK, thanks to the previous Labour governments massive spending spree, has a huge budget deficit. We are spending a lot more money than we earn. Ignoring the likes of Richard Murphy, who think that it doesn’t matter, you can either fund that by higher taxes, raising more debt or cutting spending.

Taxes won’t work, as they are already high and even raising taxes a huge amount on the rich – which I know is what you’ll immediately advocate – won’t make enough of a difference. There simply aren’t enough top rate tax payers. To close the deficit, you’d had to raise the 20p tax rate to 40p. That’s before you take into account the effect it has on growth.

Raising more debt and running large deificts works short term, especially if interest rates happen to be low, but only short term. Large amounts of debt have a serious negative effect on long term growth, forcing ever greater spending on interest payments which displace spending on other things, and can eventually trap a country in a debt spiral – even if it can print it’s own currency. Just look at Japan.

At this point, I’m sure you are going to tell me that spending more and growing our way out is the answer. This, without spending cuts or tax rises is also nonsense in real terms. Simply put, debt and the deficit are so large that growth would have to exceed historically extreme levels for that plan to work without without any cuts, and that’s jsut cutting the deficit, without actually starting to reduce the debt/GDP level. So by all means go that route, but you’ll be going for impossibly high levels of growth and not leave any room for that plan to failure – in short, you’re smoking something.

Which leaves cutting spending as the last option. Yes, you can argue that cutting spending too much can depress growth, and leave you in a debt/deflation spiral like Greece, but in real terms, that is unlikely to happen to a country like the UK for extended periods. There is a huge amount of wasted government spending, which would be better off in the hands of the people. This is where another huge fallacy comes in – a lot of lefties argue that government spending offers up some huge growth multiplier. In truth, at best it hasn’t been proven, and at worst, there is a lot of work showing that once you factor the deebt financing of that in the multiplier can easily be negative. Nor does cutting spending automatically mean lower growth – countries have done it and thrived – Canda and New Zealand being great examples. It also insinuates that only government and it’s spending can engineer growth, which is insidious and frankly a dangerous idea.

In truth, you probably have to go for a combination of growth, tax rises and spending cuts to set finances on an even keel and hey presto! That’s what we’ve got. If you think Labour can magically start spending money like water again without hugely damaging side effects, just because their client-state voting populace like the idea of having more money spent on everything, but most importantly, them and their desires.

Does anyone have an answer to question 1 – “How do you answer the ‘will you close my local hospital’ question?

Seems like an obvious & fatal flaw in this idea.

New Labour’s public service reform agenda (now there’s a phrase to deaden the soul) was meant to be all about pooling budgets, involving service users, challenging vested interests, measuring what matters and all these things that this review will seek to address.

Quite,and somehow, no matter the question,problem or area, the answer was always marketisation,out-sourcing and privateers coming in to cherry-pick at exorbitant cost.
The terminology to describe the problems hasn’t changed, nor has the fine-sounding rhetoric, but the answers better had, or else it’s nothing but warmed-over Blairism.

@4 Tyler

Yours is the manifesto for economic suicide.

Note: Economic Growth is the ONLY way to close a deficit.

Cuts? Nope. Will negatively affect growth and therefore tax revenues.

Tax rises? Nope. For same reasons that cuts won’t reduce the deficit.

So the government HAS to borrow to re-start growth.

Nothing else will do the trick.

The hapless Osborne Austerity failure is empirical evidence your way doesn’t work.

@7 Ben M

‘Note: Economic Growth is the ONLY way to close a deficit.’

Well, you could start by not having one that you can’t pay off from your own resources.

And – the Government is borrowing more and more – working well in Spain, Greece etc.

Andy G @ 5

My wife is an expert at winning arguments. She does it by picking on one, single weak point and working on it. If the weak point is emotional so much the better.

Politicians argue in the same way. Pick on one, single, emotional weak point – for the children, hospitals, first responders, vulnerable people, etc – and you can knock down the whole house of cards. Whether the one, single, emotional point is real or imaginary doesn’t matter.

Who says that cuts would involve closing a local hospital? I bet there are plenty of things we could cut given the profligate nature of Sir Humphrey and his pals.

@8 Max

Spain was paying down it’s debt before the crisis. It was running the holy grail of so-called “fiscal conservatives” – the budget surplus. Fat lot of good it has done them.

As for borrowing – yep, if you’ve stuffed up as spectacularly as Osborne has you WILL borrow.

It is as inevitable as that. Better to borrow for growth rather than borrow to stem a crisis that the rush to Austerity has caused.

@10,
Not really …. Spain moved (just) into surplus in 2006, but had been over-spending for many years beforehand. Note that their unemployment rate declined in tandem with their reducing deficit.

However, the issue is that the figures don’t show the whole story. Many jobs were created on the back of a make-believe building binge. This has a double-affect. Firstly, huge amounts had to be written-off once real values replaced the make-believe. Secondly, the market has pretty much disappeared, leading to unemployment etc etc.

See also Ireland.

I can unreservedly declare myself in favour of virtue and resolutely opposed to anything that isn’t virtuous. All that remains is to decide just what is virtuous and what isn’t.

i think labour should go into the next election saying what their priorities are and some clear policies that will win people over.
i read the guardian article there is both good ideas and some good intentions in there.
it’s a big idea(perhaps too big) but “zero-budget” spending review does not sound like a vote winner to me.

who can argue with value for money, unlike the tory cuts which have clearly been designed to impact hardest on the least well off in the country.
the sick, disabled, people with mental health problems, low paid workers and the unemployed etc etc
understandably as they for the most part do not vote tory or do not vote at all.

where i live i can see the harm being done to genuinely sick, disabled and people with mental issues by the atos machine
also the low paid and unemployed by the bedroom tax, while at the top the party goes on.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BonD74vpHuQ

http://i49.tinypic.com/1zvvjwg.jpg

Rentergirl

I don’t get the feeling that Labour in opposition are grasping the groundswell for no cuts everywhere.

This is rather optimistic. People don’t want any more cuts but there isn’t a massive groundswell of opinion against all cuts.

I’m not sure that “The main Tory strategy at the next election is going to be to try to scare people about what will happen if Labour is elected.”.

If they start reassuring people about what won’t be cut, the charge will be ‘Red Ed’, and no doubt will have The Sun’s helps on that one…..

I think Labour should be talking about the cuts as an attack on ambition. We have an opportunity to take back words like ‘enterprise’, ‘opportunity’ and ‘ambition’, and create a message of optimism.

Tuition fee rises are about holding people back because the coalition lacks the ambition to see us as a high skill economy. They don’t want to see people getting an education, because they lack the vision to make us a high skill economy.

Workfare is a way of holding down everyones’ wages, because they lack the ambition to see ways to make the UK a wealthier place, and can only see a future for us in holding wages down to compete with other low wage economies.

Frame the economic debate so that austerity is about holding people back, from their potential, killing off opportunities.

That’s what I think, anyways!

@ BenM

You’ve clearly not read what I wrote.

You make the three amigos of common lefty errors:

You CANNOT realistically grow your way out of a deficit the size of the UK’s. Growth would have to be much higher than long term trends to do so. This is pretty easy to show mathematically, and indeed Chaise and I and a few others came to that rough conclusion a while ago on another similar post. Basically, your deficit keeps racking up debt (and thus interest payments) faster than the tax reciepts from extra GDP growth can cover them.

Cuts can’t spark growth. Not directly, but government spending doesn’t necessarily create it either, especially once you factor in the extra debt or taxes needed to pay for it. Goovernment spending can actually reduce growth as well – the multiplier effect isn’t always greater than 1. Too much government spending can damage grwoth as well, as people lose confidence, taxes reduce growth, not to mention crowding out the private (taxpaying) sector. Spain and Greece have got to the endgame where too much government spending and debt have left the country in such a dire situation where all confidence in the economy is gone and the country is in a debt/deflation trap, but cuts before you get to such a situation can have very positive effects – like the examples I gave of Canada and New Zealand.

Tax rises plug the deficit, though aren’t good for growth. They are undoubtably the worst way to solve the problem, but still often have to be implemented as part of the package. You can’t just hope revenues increase with GDP as tax reciepts are only about 30-40% of GDP……

I’ll tell you for free what would happen if someone like you got into power and decided to spend even more to try and boost growth using growth alone to close the deficit. Growth might be a touch higher, but the markets would immediately add more risk premium on the UK debt, so interest rates would rise. Therefore so would interest payments. The UK would probably see a few ratings downgrades, but even they wouldn’t be too important. Tax reciepts from extra growth wouldn’t cut the deficit fast enough, and the extra interest payments for debt servicing would start to displace other government spending. Interest rates would ahve to be stuck at super low levels long term, so long term pensions industry would start to collapse. Capital would start to leave the country looking for higher returns, driving the currency weaker, and most probably inflation higher. Standards of living would fall, as would real wages. You might be lucky and avert a catastrpohe, but most likely, at some point the government is going to be effectively bankrupt, as most of it’s spending is on debt maintenance – jsut like Japan. Countries can be in this state for a very long time, but it is never good for the coutnry or it’s people.

Deficit hawkery is just so last week.

And anybody who compares the UK and the eurozone obviously doesn’t know what they are talking about.

Labour must come out against any replacement at all for Trident.
This would save at least £25 billion in procurement costs and as much as £100 billion once we take running costs into consideration.

I think that opinion within the Labour Party is shifting on this as indicated by some of the MP’s who have signed EDM 96 on this subject.

People can visit the CND website where a special MP contact facility has been set up for this purpose.

Rentergirl

I don’t get the feeling that Labour in opposition are grasping the groundswell for no cuts everywhere.

This is rather optimistic. People don’t want any more cuts but there isn’t a massive groundswell of opinion against all cuts.

True some disabled are still getting benefits.