There are times when the
hunt is up and closing for the kill that one half hopes that the fox will
escape.
It is this soft side to
the brain that makes me wonder if somehow Ed Miliband can be saved for the
nation, although what for is uncertain.
According to Damian
McBride, formerly special adviser and spinner to Gordon Brown, see Wikipedia
for the entry on him, there is a huge nasty problem at the centre of the
election campaign.
Damian drew the Return To
Go card after a leaks and smear fuss and now offers advice from the touchlines
in his blog and media forays.
What his blog of a couple of days ago, a long one, does in discussing the
issue, as well as giving a fascinating description of how ministers are
briefed, or sometimes fail to be briefed, is to argue the matter of £25 billion
in cuts to be found at least to make the tax, spend and debt figures work.
He says that if Chancellor
George Osborne admits to this and lets it be known how and where the cuts will
be made then it will be the second longest suicide note in UK political history
(the first being Michael Foot's 1983 Labour Election Manifesto) given that he
cannot avoid hitting a great many sensitive spending areas.
On the other hand if
Miliband denies cuts will be made and spending increased then how is he going
to do it? The Old Labour way was to
beef up taxes. New Labour gave up on
that and allowed tax avoidance to become a human right for the rich and better
off and went for big borrowing.
The result is that now if
an attempt is made to impose more and greater taxes, those able to avoid will,
leaving those unable to having to pay the bills.
Unluckily, this includes
many of those among the Old Labour population, never mind the marginal voters. There are no easy answers and politically the
choice is between wrong and unpopular and wrong and even less popular.
As the election campaign
unfolds there are a number of coalitions possible if no party has a clear
majority. At present it could be that
next May the result will be to have four parties in numbers with a handful of
Liberal Democrat makeweights.
So we could have Labour
with either UKIP or the SNP or both. Or
Conservative with either UKIP or the SNP or both.
Returning to the fox
theory of the chase, foxes can do the unexpected, turn tail and go for the lead
hounds, sometimes it works. Could there
be such an "impossible" happening?
A Con-Lab or a Lab-Con
Coalition? Who might be PM and who
Deputy? Who would be Chancellor?
If the cuts to be made might
need be greater, say up to £50 billion, it might just happen.
Interesting post from McBride, it highlights the problem of making savings via a top-down approach. People on the ground floor know where the waste is, but those higher up often don't.
ReplyDeleteIn my experience the public sector is enormously wasteful and savings should be easy to make, but the people who know how are never asked. In any event politicians on the other side always exaggerate the effect.