But not the people journalists mean.

Matthew d’Ancona, in his Evening Standard column on Monday, trivialised the important and necessary debates over welfare reform into a soap opera style personal battle. The Coalition does not have the luxury of choosing between cuts and reform.  Labour’s legacy of record debt and “broken society” demands that there must be cuts and reform.

Tensions during the spending review should be celebrated as a sign that the Government is facing up to the difficult choices it must make. Trivialising the debate ignores those in the real world who are impacted by the decisions being made.

Cabinet government is about discussion, argument and then compromise. No single Minister can govern every part of our complex society alone – they are in it together.

Mr d’Ancona underplayed the fact that Iain Duncan Smith argues his case from a place of authority. When David Cameron appointed IDS, he knew exactly how his think-tank, the Centre for Social Justice, wanted to reform the welfare system, so it must be assumed that Cameron wants those reforms to happen.

These arguments are not about the past, they are about the future. Cuts without reform will not resolve the deep-seated problems this country faces, and neither will reform without resolving Britain’s unprecedented financial crisis. Compromise, via frank and – yes, sometimes – heated debate, is the way to achieve the right balance.

Vince Cable and George Osborne are forming an effective tag team in putting pressure on banks to lend to small and medium-sized enterprises. Their argument is that the lack of credit is choking economic growth and small businesses across the country. Unfortunately for our political leaders, companies are deleveraging as an adjustment after the crisis – business has learnt that excessive debt is dangerous. The Coalition’s headline grabbing demand for higher lending masks deeper questions about the nature of British banking.

Retail banking lacks diversity. Due to bank mergers and demutualisations of credit unions, businesses and individuals are reliant on a smaller number of larger banks. Greater competition in retail banking is needed now more than ever more. Competition, by necessity, drives a customer relationship-led view. Some steps to boost competition have already been taken. However, the government has some levers which can be pulled today.

The Government is a major source of income for millions across the country. There is no reason why government cannot channel welfare and salary payments to second and third tier lenders. Banks are aggregators of capital. This solution will provide a temporary but large injection of funds into second and third tier banks. People can redirect this into larger first tier banks but even if only a small percentage keep their deposit account with second and third tier banks, these banks will now have enough of a deposit base to boost lending and provide credit to the SMEs.

The post office is the great underutilised device in British banking. The biggest problem for second and third tier lenders is distribution. Apart from internet banking, a large branch network is required to service a broad customer base. This takes time to build up. The Post Offices can be a great way for second and third tier banks to boost their distribution networks. There is nothing stopping the Post Office providing very “plain vanilla” retail banking services to people who are customers of second and third tier banks (think of the National Savings and Investment services offered but for people who bank with second and third tier lenders). The Post Office will be a distribution network for various banks, a “front office”, where basic banking services can be carried out.

Retail banks have a social contract with society. They are meant to be a safe place for people to deposit their money; a reliable and stable lender; and their operations are ingrained in local community economies. By reminding ourselves of the core purpose of retail banking and re-establishing this social contract, the Coalition can rebuild British banking on more stable foundations.

Sean Garman is on the Committee of Conservative City Future, the under-35 organisation for Conservative supporters in the City of London

Despite claims to the contrary from the Labour party, it is simply not true that the scrapping of Building Schools for the Future was a breaking of a promise made by George Osborne not to cut the totals of capital spending. A casual glance towards the actual budget would make it clear: the Government will make no further cuts to capital spending compared with the plans that it inherited. It did make clear, however, that it would undertake a fundamental review of all capital spending plans to ensure they are affordable and to identify the areas of spending that will achieve the greatest economic returns. Michael Gove made it clear in his statement to the house that he was cancelling the approach of BSF because it was an expensive, long winded and inefficient way of building schools. He did not say he was cancelling all new schools building. According to the actual figures the Coalition government is going to spend as much on new capital projects as the outgoing Labour government, in that case they might end up building more schools than Labour for the same amount of money.

Looking at the cost of the programme in February 2004, the DCSF said that 200 schools would be built by 2008. In fact only 42 (just under a quarter) were ready in that timescale. The National Audit Office estimates that the overall cost of the programme has also increased by 16-23% in real terms, with delays being more and more frequent over the years it has been in place, in 2007, in a memorandum to the Select Committee for Education and Skills, the Government admitted: “There has been significant slippage in BSF projects in waves 1-3, with the majority of projects behind the ideal project timelines, an understatement given the actual number of these schools that have been opened , and recently Nottinghamshire county council spent £5 million on the scheme without a single brick being laid, another report by the Public Accounts Select Committee found that “the Department and PfS has wasted public money by relying on consultants to make up for shortfalls in its own skills and resources.” Has the Labour obsession with stocking up on masses of consultants been the driving factor around high cost and low results? The current approach isn’t good for school buildings, this isn’t good for the public finances, and it isn’t good for the both the children and teachers in any school across the country. Nor is it good for the people in the local area who object to some of the proposals made , a number of schools that local areas wanted to keep open or refurbish have been demolished. The Victorian Society says that a number of fine Victorian schools have either been demolished or taken out of use as a result of the programme. Many local authorities as well as a large number of other senior figures working on BSF have expressed concerns about the role of Partnerships for Schools (PfS) – the quango charged with delivering the BSF programme. One described them as “marching round the country in their jackboots, telling local authorities what to do” One example of which being that schools that were using BSf funds had to use 10% of the sizeable budget for computers and other technology, despite the spurious evidence it improves standards, and not being clearly taught how to use it (A common feature of all my old lessons.)

Why should we persist with an expensive bureaucratic programme which tramples on any concerns that don’t correspond with the wishes of Ed Balls? Some headteachers have said they had feared that their funding might be jeopardised if they were critical publicly of a programme representing such powerful interests, no-one denies that we need to build more schools, no-one denies that some schools need to be refurbished, but we can do this in a much better way, which some Tory MPs should attempt to understand.

As well as stamping out the message that has been blared out in the media that there will be ‘no new schools’ the coalition need to also quash the outlandish claims from the Labour party that BSF improved school standards, BSF is a bit like buying a new TV – the new set looks great when you put in the corner of your sitting room, but it’s the programmes that actually make you want to keep coming back for more – and after a while, you forget that you have even got a new telly! If the programmes haven’t improved in the meantime, everything goes back to how it used to be. The Labour party have repeatedly said that BSF is not just a “bricks and mortar programme” and that the buildings programme should act as a “catalyst” for wider scale “educational transformation”, they’ve attempted to define “educational transformation” many times, yet its definition has always been unclear. One senior advisor and former headteacher felt that the coupling of new buildings with “transformation” meant we might be erecting the 21st century equivalent of Victorian follies, saying: “I think there is a danger that we will build chrome and glass edifices to the egos of certain headteachers.” (Which judging by the treatment given to alocal headteacher that lent a lot of support for the Labour party in exchange for a glass palace may well be true.)

It isn’t just speculation that pours cold water on the claims that BSF drastically improved standards. An exhaustive report for the Design Council found “clear evidence that extremes of environmental elements (for example, poor ventilation or excessive noise) have negative effects on students and teachers and that improving these elements has significant benefits. However, once school environments come up to minimum standards, the evidence of effect is less clearcut. Our evaluation suggests that the nature of the improvements made in schools may have less to do with the specific element chosen for change than with how the process of change is managed.” PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC) for the Government in its first evaluation of BSF in 2007 following a review of the literature in the US and the UK this report concluded that, while there was a clear negative impact of poor design on attainment, the claim that good design brings benefits needed to be tested further in the BSF programme because the causality could not be proved. Other factors affecting attainment are, unsurprisingly, school leadership, pedagogical factors, socio-cultural factors and the curriculum. Its second evaluation, published in January 2009, reinforced this view: “In the statistical analysis of the impact of capital expenditure on pupil attainment, our results mirror the existing literature in not finding a strong correlation between the two. The results as a whole suggest a positive impact of capital on attainment, but the magnitude is likely to be very small. We also found evidence for considerable diminishing returns to capital investment.”

The coalition must stress that pedagogical factors that were mentioned in the PSC review are going to be tackled through the introduction of ‘Free Schools’ and the expansion of the Academy programme which will allow for different styles of teaching to thrive, rather than focus on school buildings like the Labour party will insist on doing as it is the most obvious thing to attack , it’s key to highlight that Ofsted recently failed one of the first schools to be built through the BSF programme, Sandon High, in Stokeon- Trent, to give weight to the idea that other things must be tackled other than buildings, and can achieve emphasis on different style of teaching through holding up examples like Toby Young’s grammar comprehensive, and Lord Young’s technical colleges . We must stress the waste of money and the use of consultants, the crippling of autonomy of teachers, and constantly remind as to what benefits these new schools can bring.

We base our results on what our children learn, not the number of glass palaces we claim (and fail!) to build, and as for Gove’s delivery when he announced the policy? Well, there may well have been some stichup on the way….

Today’s Budget is being hailed as either progressive and fair, or the worst thing to happen to Britain since… umm, well, what the last Conservative government had to do to repair the damage the last Labour government left us, depending on which side you’re on.

There are tweets and stats flying all over the place. So a few good things first of all.

George Osborne has increased the threshold for protected public sector workers – initially the threshold was £18,000 a year, now it’s £21,000 a year AND those earning under that get a pay rise.

He’s also increased the tax-free threshold significantly (as we supported when the Lib Dems first proposed it) on its way to £10,000 a year.

There is extra funding for the most needy – £2 billion in tax credits, increases in state pensions, help to freeze council tax.

He has reduced the rate of tax that businesses pay so that they can invest more and create more jobs and therefore growth.

These are all good things.

There are some more difficult things – obviously any tax rise is most unwelcome; for example, VAT is going up, and clearly capital gains going up will disappoint many.

However, the somersaults that the broadcasters are turning in an attempt to show who will be proportionally worse off are interesting. Pretty much everyone is having to contribute something to Labour’s mess. But those who are at the bottom end are paying the least, while those at the top are paying the most.

While it is hugely unfair on ALL of us that we have to pay still more to clear up the catastrophic state of our finances, we have to do it, so we should do it as soon as we can in order that the interest is kept as low as it can be.

There is, pace ConservativeHome, a limit to how fast you can start cutting spending in any meaningful way. There are also some things that in fact we should maintain spending on, either because a relatively small investment now brings greater returns in the long run, or because they are a service that we all rely on as a final resort.

The main criticisms from Labour (or at least, not from the Parliamentary Party but from the blogosphere) seem to be that it’s not fair to raise VAT. But because of the rise in tax-free allowances, and because George did not – as he could have done – raise the rate on food, children’s clothing or domestic fuel – the people who are most affected by this rise are not the poorest. If you are a basic rate taxpayer, you’ll have an extra £200 a year in your pocket, and to cancel out that tax cut, you would need to spend something like £8,000 a year on VAT-table items – not food, not heating, not books, not children’s clothes…

I don’t know many people who spend that amount on VAT-table items who are particularly poor…

And secondly, in the longer-term, shifting taxes from good things (earning, making your business grow, saving) to bad things (waste, carbon, the so-called health sins) is in and of itself a good thing. It is better to leave people with choices over how they spend their own money.

Finally, isn’t it a change to hear a Budget and not have the next 24 hours full of people discovering little footnotes that make us all worse off?

I know this Budget is not really giving any of us a huge amount of flexibility. But in the longer-term, this one is laying the foundations for the 2015 Budget – by which time the independent Office for Budget Responsibility says we are scheduled to have basically paid off the structural deficit, and have made a good start in reducing the national debt.  That is where the real fairness lies in this Budget – in paying off the binge of borrowing and ensuring that we live within our means again.

Back in March 2010, I argued that the budget delivered by Alistair Darling not only failed to map out a credible plan for Britain to stabilise its national debt but that it had also further contributed to the turning of Britain into a ‘conflict economy’ – meaning slow growth and slower living standards for all. I argued that what Britain needed was a plan to heal our conflict economy, cut our national debt and get our economy moving – I firmly believe that this Budget offers a credible plan to do just that. I also said in my last post that that the Conservative party recognised that in the longer term, competitive tax rates are vital to make Britain a good place to live and do business. Whilst it is true that overall taxes have had to rise as the Chancellor tries to plug the massive hole at the heart of public spending, the proposed reductions to the corporation tax rate show at least that the Coalition Government is committed to Britain being a good place to run a business.

This government has inherited a dire economic legacy

- public spending in Britain has risen to 51.7% of GDP, a level most Warsaw pact countries would have been proud of;

- public sector net borrowing is due to remain (without further action) at 4 per cent. of GDP in five years time; and

- the structural deficit is due to be 2.8 per cent. by 2014-15 and debt payments are set to reach £67 billion in that year.

Britain is running out of money and the markets are nervous. To respond to Labour’s accusations that this government is driven by narrow ideological dogma rather than economics, I just observe that there is nothing progressive or decent about bankrupting the country. The country simply cannot go on spending money it can’t afford and doesn’t have, and if it does so, the vulnerable will be worse hit as spending on essential services is summarily slashed, interest rates rise and the job market collapses.

In the circumstances, Mr Osborne and his team had to balance the desperate need to reduce the deficit together (thus reassuring the markets) crucially with ensuring the steps taken do not hamper the economy and threaten the fragile recovery.

This is why I think the Chancellor’s budget is a progressive success:

1. The Government has explicitly recognised that enterprise is key to rebalancing the economy. I likened the approach of Gordon Brown in government to that of a frenetic signalman in Thomas the Tank Engine – as revenues collapsed the levers of government spending were pulled wildly back and forward in a desperate attempt to keep the economy moving, the term “economy” was assumed to be the “state”. Leaving CGT aside for the moment, this government recognises that growth needs to be based on an expansion in the private sector. With increased private sector growth, tax receipts increase and the government will be able to sustain necessary public spending on services that are relied upon by the most vulnerable in our society.

2. The budget is fair in asking higher earners to bear the lion’s share of the deficit reduction. The British public recognise by and large that taxes simply have to go up in the short to medium term to pay for Labour’s profligacy and waste. It is right that higher earners bear the brunt of the pain, whilst at the same time it is important that the government’s measures do not drive our wealth creators away. High earners in the main recognise that. The increase in the personal tax allowance is a step in the right direction to the best Lib Dem policy of the campaign (that the first £10,000 of income should be tax free), the CGT increases do not hit the lower rate taxpayers and the government has committed to the VAT exemptions on essential items. Despite the crowing of the Labour party therefore, the wealthy and purchasers of luxury goods will bear the brunt of the regrettable but necessary VAT rise.

3. Public sector cuts are to be phased and benefit reforms protect the vulnerable. As John Bird, founder of the Big Issue has observed, there is nothing kind or decent about encouraging a culture of welfare dependency. It may have suited Labour to have created a client state but it is clear to almost everyone that the benefits system needs radical reform and this government is taking the first steps. Pay restraint in the public sector will ultimately protect jobs whilst lower paid public workers will receive additional help. The restoration of the link between the state pension and earnings has to be right, as does the increase in the age of the state pension in a society where people are living longer than ever before. Finally, and most importantly, the entirety of the necessary cuts will be spread over a period of four years – the Chancellor is not cutting too quickly and too deeply – it is a responsible programme that should not threaten the fragile recovery.

There is much work to be done and the public sector cuts that lie ahead are going to be very painful. As the government embarks on the difficult journey that lies ahead a core commitment to reform our public services whilst protecting the vulnerable must remain at the heart of the Coalition’s philosophy – tackling waste whilst protecting key services is a progressive policy.

No one sector should be spared from the difficult decisions that need to be made and from being forced to embrace new efficiencies but this government has shown a clarity of purpose in its first budget and George and his strong team are clearly ready for the challenge. A brave progressive start has been made, laying the foundations for healing our conflict economy and a return to economic growth.

Marcus Booth is Chairman of Conservative City Future