Tories accused of thirsting for massive cuts
Oct 21 2010 The Journal
THE Government’s spending plans are a "reckless gamble with people’s livelihoods", Labour said yesterday.
Shadow Chancellor Alan Johnson warned the cuts announced in the Comprehensive Spending Review could end up "stifling" the economic recovery.
During raucous Commons exchanges he accused Tory backbenchers of cheering "the deepest cuts to public spending in living memory" announced by Chancellor George Osborne.
For some on the Government benches it was an "ideological objective," he claimed.
The shadow chancellor acknowledged the "deficit has to be paid down" but said: "Today’s reckless gamble with people’s livelihoods runs the risk of stifling the fragile recovery."
As MPs on the coalition benches roared approval for Mr Osborne’s announcements, Mr Johnson said: "We have seen people cheering the deepest cuts to public spending in living memory.
"For some members opposite, this is their ideological objective. Not all of them, but for many of them, this is what they came in politics for."
With Speaker John Bercow forced to appeal for calm, Mr Johnson said the announcements would affect "people’s futures, people’s jobs, people’s pensions, people’s services, their prospects for the future".
He accused the Government of being "deficit deceivers" who "peddled a whole series of myths to the British public" about the nation’s finances.
"The most incredible myth of all is that the global economic crisis since the Great Depression is the fault of the previous government," he said.
The shadow chancellor said that when the crisis hit Britain’s debt was the second lowest of any G7 country, that debt interest levels were 15% lower than when Labour came to office and the interest rates on UK debt had been falling since the beginning of the year.
At the time of the last review in 2007 Mr Osborne had argued "we were spending too little," Mr Johnson said.
Mr Johnson said it was "ridiculous" to compare Government spending to running up credit card debts.
"If countries around the world hadn’t run up debts – that’s what the fiscal deficit is, by the way – if they hadn’t run up debts to sustain their economies, people would have not lost their credit cards, they’d have lost their jobs, they’d have lost their houses, they would have lost their savings," he said.
The Liberal Democrats had made that point during the election, he added.
Mr Johnson attacked the Lib Dems for having changed their minds on the need for fast and deep cuts, saying they had all campaigned at the general election on the basis that in the context of the deficit "speed kills".
And he hit out at Nick Clegg, saying: "In the period between the ballot box closing and his ministerial car door opening, the Deputy Prime Minister discovered a different approach to this."
