George’s speech (fair, stern, in it together) was excellent. I’ve always been a huge fan of George’s political brain. I want a Chancellor to think about his policies in human terms – and that means a political Chancellor, not just one who can read sheets of figures.
I was sitting between two men who you might call of a traditional Tory build for part of the speech. They were very keen on cutting Whitehall by a third. But interestingly their most vocal support after a moment’s thought came for the proposal to protect those public servants earning under £18,000 a year but to freeze the pay of the rest for a year.
All the proposals in the speech add up to around £7 billion. George acknowledges himself that that’s not the end of it. But we know the direction of travel and importantly we know the way that the planning will be done – sharing the burden, protecting the poorest, ensuring that the recovery when it comes is sustainable.
I heard an interesting interpretation though: the media are now complaining of too much detail (that’s a new one!) and more importantly of not enough cuts. Has George managed to flip the media into doing some of the hard slog of instilling the need for deficit reduction?
UPDATE at 6.30pm: ConservativeHome’s kind link suggests that I am criticising George for giving too much detail. This is absolutely not what I’m saying. I mention that I have heard that criticism, but more importantly noting the suggestion that the narrative now seems to be one of not enough cut – in other words, media questioning is now focusing on ‘if the situation is this bad, why aren’t you going further?’ which would seem to me to be a revolution in terms of the national mood…
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