The Coalition and women...

Women make up the majority of public sector workers. They are also the largest recipients of welfare and represent the main users of public services in this country. And yes, there is certainly a glass ceiling evident in the upper echelons of big business. But Labour supporters suggesting that Coalition cuts are aimed specifically at women is not only disingenuous, but actually offensive.

Because more than 50% of public sector workers are women - where government spending cuts occur - we are told that the Coalition is specifically targeting women. What rubbish. Everyone knows that whoever was in power, the government would be making savings in the public sector. It can hardly cut the private sector. Womens jobs will therefore be hit disproportionately as a result.

This whole narrative about how the government is being anti-women is a Labour-led theme that is deeply dishonest. Child benefit for instance should be a gender non-specific issue. The truth is that family's are suffering with the cuts forced on us by Labour's overspending, and will continue to do so until public spending once again returns to a manageable 41% of GDP in three years time. A level at which it was maintained by governments of all political persuasions throughout the 80's, 90's and naughties. Sure Start - another 'female issue' according to Labour, as if children and their fathers do not belong together - are also being cut by the Coalition we are told. This is not true. It depends on local authorities as to how they spend their money. Conservative Nottingham county council for instance, have actually increased the number of Sure Start centres in their area.

It's about time the debate over how the public spending cuts forced on us by Labour's overspending took place at an honest level.

Retail bloodbath continues...

Yesterday Jane Norman, today TJ Hughes, and Thornton's shutting 120 stores...retail bloodbath continues... tweets Allister Heath of City AM. We should now be very worried at the lack of demand management in the economy by the Coalition. Retailers provide an advanced warning of problems coming down the line and this blog has consistently called for more demand and greater growth in the economy, preferably through raising the tax threashold to £10,000 - something which should have been done at the time of the last Budget in April - with the ultimate aim of achieving parity, through legally syncing the two in statute, with the level of the minimum wage - aroung £11,400. 

What Nick can do next...

I contributed recently to a forum on LibDem Voice on what the party should be doing to secure its future. Depressingly - after arguing the success of achieving 70% of Lib Dem manifesto commitments - I was told that my views were unrealistic. Indeed, all the threads from activists were for dropping any hint of supporting a Tory policy and grabbing the nearest thing to a Labour one that could be found in order to bolster a hemorrhaging voting base - currently plumbing the depths at around 10%.

Now I can perfectly understand that Lib Dems should be worried about such figures. What I cannot understand is a party that wants to go in exactly the direction that is hell bent on destroying it. The Lib Dems are being crucified by the Left, not the Right. There is never so much anger as those who think they have been 'betrayed'. But we need to remember that to betray you must first belong, and Lib Dems need to ask themselves - whether its academy's, welfare reform, free schools, elected police commissioners, the NHS or constitutional reforms - Labour now fights on the side of producer interests and against the interests of the people with every major reform being proposed. Despite the fact that most provide an evolutionary fit with New Labour's Blairite agenda, as the man himself has recently pointed out.

Why would the left have such a pull for Lib Dem's? Partly because it's ideology is based on the principles of equality and social justice - concepts so powerful that all parties now subscribe to them - although welfare dependence, poor educational achievement, the lack of opportunity and deeply problematic social structures are now firmly the province of the Liberal centre of British politics and not the old left.  And partly because, for more than a century of great political struggle throughout the world, it offers the promise of a radical alternative to the dominant capitalist model in which we live.

The problem for the left is that when those principles are based not on people, but on building the state and its bureaucratic institutions as the solution to each social problem, then Lib Dems should be leading the criticism - not endorsing it. As Blair says in an interview with Prospect magazine today; caution against the ‘natural inclination of the party to say "we created the state ... we created its institutions, we should be ... defending the way public services are". This position may be a comfortable one, but it is also a losing one'. He should know. He won three consecutive elections. And he is hated by the left for 'betraying' them.

The truth is that the left continue, under Ed Miliband, to offer only a bigger, more centrist and bureaucratic state - where the essentially personal has been lost. We need to start exactly where we have always been - firmly rooted on the centre ground of British politics, putting people and their aspirations first. Start with the brilliant piece by Julian Astle, a director of CentreForum an independent, liberal thinktank, in Monday's Guardian. He points out that the left has always owned the values of equality and social justice, and the right of liberty and aspiration, the modernisers have sought to blend the two - taking base metals from left and right and turning them into political gold. The first point in the discussion 'what Nick can do next' is to stay firmly rooted on the centre ground giving nothing to both the far left and right in the battle for ideas and policy.

Second - and more importantly because this centre ground is also inhabited by a relatively small but intensely bright coterie of both Blairite and Cameron supporters, each some way from the mainstream of their party - Lib Dems must continue to be at the radical edge of this Liberal centrist Coalition. Not the dour, road block which Gordon Brown represented to Blair's swift foil. As Tim Montgomerie - among the most succinct Conservative commentators - noted in a recent article, over the past year, Clegg had appeared to reject the politics of the lowest common denominator, and backed bold reforms. Iain Duncan Smith regarded the Deputy Prime Minister as a decisive ally in his battle with the Treasury in overhauling welfare. The Lib Dems were also radical in switching the balance of educational funding from university to a child's first few years, when investment can make the biggest difference. On other issues, too – such as pensions, local government or lifting the poorest out of the income tax system – there was something exciting about the Coalition, and their contribution to it.

This is exactly the ground that the Lib Dems should be occupying. Indeed it should go a lot further. Come 2015, the electorate need to understand that the Lib Dems not only delivered the Coalition Agreement including more than 70% of their manifesto, but that they drove the Coalition on some of the most important and radical issues of the day, but which enhanced the lives of the British people - a comprehensive package of penal reform turning prisons into adult education centres and giving re-habilitated prisoners a stake in society, a new deal on the two largest areas of criminal activity which blight our society - drugs and prostitution - bringing them into society, re-writing our privacy laws in answer to outdated super-injunctions, the first comprehensive bill of rights setting out responsibilities of the state and its citizens and incorporating a new UK human rights act, Parliamentary reform including obligatory open primaries for the one third of seats that have a safe majority, expulsion for any members convicted of a serious crime, openly elected parliamentary committee's with the power to set and scrutinise the annual budgets for every quango. Lords reform and, yes, the committment to hold a referendum on PR if a further Liberal centrist Coalition were necessary after the next election.

The answer to the question 'what Nick can do next' is stay radical, stay Liberal and stay at the centre. I really don't think it unrealistic to believe this Coalition is capable of a great deal more. As Julian Astle points out, a majority of the British people are moderate voters unconvinced by the partial solutions traditionally on offer.

Janet Daly on Coalition reforms...

...the only way the Opposition can re-enter the arena as a serious contender is to accept the basic premises of the Right-of-centre prospectus – even if the official Right is busy backing away from them. Among these axioms are: welfare systems which reward people for choosing not to work are socially destructive and morally pernicious; market mechanisms which encourage competition increase the quality and variety of services available to the public; and, arguably most important, tax cuts are the most effective way to stimulate economic growth. Janet Daly on Coalition reforms...

People First for the Coalition

Or Labour can carry on being what it is now: risk-averse, ill-defined, dull and complacent in its assumption that the failings of the other side will coast them to power. Well, that worked a treat in Scotland, didn't it? suggests Andrew Rawnsley in the Observer, less than seven months after Ed Miliband became Labour's bright new leader.

Meanwhile, a salutary piece from Tim Luckhurst in the Mail as Labour's top-down, producer-interested elite prepare to take on the bottom-up reforms of the Coalition designed to put ordinary people at the heart of public services. As Lord Hutton - once at the centre of the New Labour cabinet that led similar reforms under Tony Blair - answers to the question what was New Labour's great achievement in public service reform?

The important achievement we had across a range of public services was to get through this very fundamental idea that introducing new providers (the private sector), zero tolerance for failure to deliver, for failure to perform, for poor outcomes, that we weren't just going to focus on who provides, we were going to represent first and foremost not the providers but the consumers of public services - that's the platform now which I hope the present government can build and can start really proper reforms of the public services.

Whether its academy's, welfare dependency, free schools, elected police commissioners or the NHS, Labour now finds itself on the side of producer interests and against the interests of the people with every major reform being proposed - despite the fact that most provide an evolutionary fit with New Labour's Blairite agenda. And with Clegg's big idea since super Thursday seemingly to oppose any reforms in the name of 'muscular liberalism', the LibDems, whose localism agenda provided the glue on which this Coalition's reforms were created, look perilously close to following suit.

As Tim Montgomery points out in an excellent piece in today's Telegraph over the past year, Clegg had appeared to reject the politics of the lowest common denominator, and backed bold reforms. Iain Duncan Smith regarded the Deputy Prime Minister as a decisive ally in his battle with the Treasury in overhauling welfare. The Lib Dems were also radical in switching the balance of educational funding from university to a child's first few years, when investment can make the biggest difference. On other issues, too – such as pensions, local government or lifting the poorest out of the income tax system – there was something exciting about the Coalition, and their contribution to it.

He concludes: Spending the next few years sniping at colleagues, navel-gazing about poll ratings and blocking vital reforms won't impress voters. Moreover, it will harm that other great hope of the Liberal Democrats: that experiencing the benefits of hung parliaments and coalition government will at last end the public's reluctance to vote for Britain's troublesome third party.
 
 

A quiet triumph for the Coalition...

Labour told us nobody wanted it - not the parents, the pupils or the teachers. They told us the Unions would not wear it. They told us it would destroy our state education system.

Today, Michael Gove announced that more than 1000 secondary schools have applied to become academies - 240 in the last month alone. 647 have been approved. 384 have already converted. In the few short months since the Coalition's legislation was passed through the commons, a third of all secondary schools are either now academies, or in the process of becoming an academy. Schools are becoming academies at a rate of two every school day.

It seems that the education system has voted emphatically for the new reforms. What a triumph for Michael Gove and the Coalition government.

The power of Primaries...

Among the more questionable arguments used by the Yes2AV campaign was that the system would make MP's work harder - having to appeal to an electorate beyond their core supporters. They would also have us believe that AV does away with MP's whose majorities are of such a size that they have a job for life. AV of course, does neither of these things. But although the arguments may be false, the intention to achieve both these outcomes would enhance our democratic system beyond recognition.

With The AV voting system now passed into history and with it any opportunity for major electoral reform anytime soon, the Coalition should be looking very carefully at open Primaries being held in each constituency at the mid-term point. Primaries are an election in which party members or voters select candidates for a subsequent election. These would have the effect of legitimising MP's with their local electorates, whilst ensuring that new candidates are able to put themselves forward through the open nature of such events. I am told that if primaries are tagged onto the back of other local votes - local authority, mayoral or even parish councils - the cost to each constituency of a postal vote is around £24,000 - around £15 million pounds across 650 constituencies nationally. A small cost to ensure MP's are popular, accountable and directly mandated by their electorate.

GP commissioning reforms were always at the heart of the Coalition

Huge criticism this week of the Coalition's plans for GP commissioning, principally on the grounds that there is no mandate for such reform because it was never mentioned during the election campaign. This is quite wrong.

Caroline Spelman told the BBC Question Time audience on Thursday that page 46 of the Conservative manifesto outlines the plans and I'm greatful to @sjbaker for his tweet this morning pointing out that the Conservative Draft Health Manifesto published just over a year ago on Jan 18 2010 also says the party will give GP's the power to hold patients' budgets and commission care on their behalf. Seems pretty straight forward to me. It adds incidentally, that they will also link GP's pay to the quality of the results they deliver something we have not yet heard much about...

Well I think it's a nice idea says Polly Toynbee in this weeks Politics Weekly podcast from the Guardian. Surprisingly, she really is talking about GP commissioning of healthcare as proposed by the Coalition and continues in some ways (it is) quite rational that GP's should control the budget because GP's - these are the ones who really spend it - if so in the end their decision to refer someone to X or Y , if someone really needs this treatment, decides what the NHS spends, so it does make some sense. So why so much opposition to the reform? Because its from the Coalition of course. Pure tribalism as usual. 

It is right at the heart of this Coalition government that the people's interest should be put before those of vested interests - the producers. In every area of policy and under various different titles - big society, free schools, bottom-up politics, voting reform, localism - the people are being put first.

Increasingly Labour are finding themselves on the wrong side of this argument defending the producer interest in each case. As Janet Daly points out in a well argued article for today's Telegraph entitled Reform must be rushed, or it won't happen at all, the argument we weren't given enough warning really means we need time to organise obstruction to anything that interferes with our habitual ways of doing things. How very Labour. 

Riddell, delusion and hypocrisy

You really could not credibly make up the hypocrisy of it. Take a look at the comments below David Laws' article in the Guardian supporting the Coalition's economic policies. Six of the first twenty five comments have had to be removed by the moderator. This is visceral hatred driven by pure ideological malice. The type that

ends with the words 'ethnic cleansing' and 'final solution' being written by so-called serious commentators who really should know better. It is blind prejudice. Just the sort of language Democrats in America suggest engenders political violence.

Meanwhile over at the Telegraph Mary Riddell - long an apologist for Gordon Brown's disastrous government and after eight months of attacking the LibDems, week in week out, for forming a radical Coalition government - suggests Nick Clegg and his LibDem colleagues should now be cosying up to Ed Miliband as his natural ally to form a 'progressive alliance'. An alliance of hatred no doubt. She concludes any political courtship between Mr Clegg and Mr Miliband may prove, for the Prime Minister, to be a very dangerous liaison. I am just staggered by the sheer delusion of it; the deep hypocrisy.

Pupil premium

Pathetic says Chris Dillow of the £430 pupil premium suggesting the correlation between school spending and attainment is weak (pdf), and from that he extrapolates that around £100,000 per poorer pupil would need to be spent to equalise opportunities to the levels achieved by Nick Clegg and his privately educated Coalition partners: remember that public schoolboys have the advantages of high expectations, social contacts and good role models, whilst many of the poor have family circumstances not conducive to learning.

But the combination of higher expectations and good role models is exactly what educationalists should be responsible for. Teachers may not be able to provide social contacts, but since when did these enable students to understand calculus? And as to family circumstances not conducive to learning, that is why pupils spend seven hours a day away from their family, in an environment that is designed to be conducive to learning.

Perhaps that pupil premium could be used to further that all-important environment through homework clubs, personal tutors or 1-2-1 tuition? Now that's what I call a premium education on the level of Westminster School. It is also all about teachers, not buildings and expensive resources, where Labour spent our money. And it certainly wouldn't cost £100,000 per pupil per year.

Opposition & Labour

Even with incredulous-looking poll ratings Ed Miliband's position seems tenuous. Labour blusters furiously for a couple of hundred million ring-fenced for school sport whilst its MP's practise the new sport - bullying the Liberal Democrats. Meanwhile, the most radical government for a century takes apart - brick by brick - the old centralised, bureaucratic state that built Labour. 

The opposition have yet to realise just how radical this Coalition really is. The largely spent and thinly typecast cries of 'Thatcher's children' betray the irrelevance of Ed Miliband's position - testament only to his continuing politics of the twentieth century. A futile clinging to the nakedness of old labour's tax & spend that brought us to near destruction. A leader of vision is needed to move Labour on, engage and begin to contribute to the new political settlement.

The glue that binds this Coalition is a smart, de-centralised, bottom-up agenda that unifies the Cameron/Liberal tradition across the full spectrum of government. Even the Thatcherite right - so hated in Labour's caricature of laissez-affair and social stigma - remains mercifully irrelevant.

Ed Miliband increasingly finds himself on the wrong side of each radical reform - the latest being tuition fees, without which universities have no long term future (thanks to Labour's deficit) whilst the settlement is both progressive and enhances fairness - despite the obviously selfish arguments of the 'kettled generation'. What is more interesting is how vociferously students reject debt when it belongs to them. In the public sphere, only Labour it seems, so dismissively believes in debt.

This Coalition is effectively beginning to question the reason behind Labour's existence. The central tenet of the Coalition's agenda - progressive fairness - coupled with putting people at the heart of government, will become increasingly and deeply compelling, the further it progresses. Labour needs to be there.

The LibDems need to take the argument to the people, not abstain from it

LibDem talk of abstaining or voting against increased tuition fees is just wrong. If you believe in something, then you need to take it to the people and argue why it is right. And this proposal for university funding is right in so many ways.

Firstly it puts the funding of our universities on a stable and sustainable basis for their long-term future, something which successive governments - unwilling to make courageous decisions that require robust and intelligent arguments - have ducked over many years. This proposal allows us to build and sustain world class, research-based universities which are essential to the country's future.

Secondly, it is not about tripling the cost of higher education as so many naive freshers seem to think. The cost of university education is not changing. We are simply deciding how that education should be funded. Whether it should be from general taxation by all taxpayers irrespective of means, or increasingly by students, who are substantial and lifelong beneficiaries of a university education, not least in their earning abilities.

This proposal goes to the heart of a fair society. It is about students accepting greater responsibility for their good fortune by shouldering a higher proportion of the funding from their enhanced earnings. Starting above £21,000 per year. Well above the pay of dinner ladies who currently pay for the university education of our largely middle class children.

Both students and the Labour opposition are on the wrong side of this argument. Not only are these proposals fairer - ensuring that those 'with the broadest shoulders' provide proportionately more funding - they are also progressive. Far more progressive than the current arrangements introduced by Labour. They enhance the participation of poorer students, cover part-time courses and ensure that as tuition fee's move towards their highest permitted levels, wider engagement is actively sought. 

Like so much else that is now being re-evaluated of Labour's thirteen years of expensive, centralised, statist orthodoxy, the most we can say is that they may have had the right intentions. But lazy, self-righteous hysteria against anything proposed by this Liberal-Conservative Coalition who represent 59% of the electorate, is worth fighting. Not abstaining from.

Janet Daly on Coalition reforms & Big Society

Two truly radical initiatives were announced by the Government last week argues Janet Daly in a convincing piece for today's Sunday Telegraph.

The first, an attempt to widen educational excellence - 'best practice' in the jargon - by Michael Gove in allowing poorly performing schools to link with highly rated ones in order to gain Academy status. And the second an announcement by Francis Maude - fast becoming the Coalition's minister for the Big Society - that public sector workers can set up co-operatives (the John Lewis option) to run their own areas of expertise as independent enterprises, giving them a real stake in their own future.

She concludes the article with the words, From its welfare and education reforms to a revolution in the running of public services, the Government has a Big Idea which involves personal freedom within the bounds of community responsibility.

Now the personal freedom part may well be a Big Idea, but the concomitant community responsibility side sounds remarkably like Big Society to me.

PostScript: Gove appearing on Andrew Marr's show this morning, explained that school funds specifically allocated for sport, about which the Guardian (and Ed Balls of course) is predictably outraged, will now no longer be silo'd but available for spending as educationalists want. That's government trusting teachers. What a breathe of fresh air.

Simon Jenkins gets it

Coalition means not getting what you want, let alone what in a rash moment you promised. It means finding a line of least resistance through the mess of an indecisive assembly. It means making the alliances all centre parties must make if they are to enjoy power says Simon Jenkins in an excellent article in today's Guardian.

And if you wade through the reams of comment beneath, you quickly realise that the left just don't get it.

Compromise shouldn't mean selling out and appearing more tory than the tories being a typical example. Oh dear. Lets try again. Compromise means the settlement of differences in which each side makes concessions...

Happy half-birthday to the Coalition

It is now six months since the Coalition was formed and came to power. So what have they achieved in that time?

Dependably, the economy - and specifically a yawning budget deficit inherited from Labour - has been the Coalition's first priority. Indeed it has widely handicapped - as they knew it would - the Coalition's hopes and abilities to develop policies requiring spending in other areas. But George Osborne's emergency Budget back in July and the Comprehensive Spending Review in October have greatly strengthened market confidence in the Coalition's ability to reduce the deficit, keeping medium and long-term lending rates low for the foreseable future. Many will see this as a rather unremarkable achievement based as it is deep in the bowels of the economy. But it provides the very foundation of an efficient and properly functioning economy saving both businesses and families countless billions of pounds in increased prices, currencies and costs that would otherwise have been a huge - and perhaps unbearable - burden. The notable exception to this - and it has to be said, an increasingly isolated one - is the Ballsian view that any lowering of public spending for the next year or more (the timescale appears to be flexibly long) will produce a double-dip recession and a  'lost decade' like the 1930's. How Labour's glee club would love that.

In truth the Coalition's economic narrative has effectively - and rather cleverly - neutralised the economy as an issue after the disaster it became under Labour. The Brown view, that nothing could be touched for fear of depression or worse - Portugal, Ireland and Greece - has now receded. Going forward, there are still major issues over growth and the opposition will continue to land pyrrhic victories by reference to totemic issues like Sheffield Forgemasters - as if an £80m loan would ruin the economy. But an aura of quiet calm and professional dignity has enveloped the Coalition government. Its economic management is now undoubted - remember those Mandelsonian taunts of 'boy George sailing too close to the wind'? - indeed it is widely admired across global financial institutions. And it is George Osborne and his team - including Danny Alexander and even David Laws who prepared the ground - that have played a crucial role here. This will be the Coalition's greatest - though I suspect largely forgotten - legacy.

A cascade of revolutions have also been launched right across government as the pent-up frustration of five lost years under Labour's sclerotically-centralised Brownian bureaucracy which stifled communities, people and business is desperately unwound.

Labour's characterisation of this Coalition as an narrow, arrogantly-entitled ideological elite imposing social engineering on an unwilling country fits only their own record of thirteen years in government. We will still be paying off Labour's legacy of tax and spend for the next thirty years. And what choice did we get as to how our hard earned money was spent? Absolutely none. Labour always knew best. And that is why the largest budget deficit in our peacetime history will remain quite clearly Labour's legacy.

The Coalition by contrast, launches supply-side, bottom-up revolution right across government - putting people at its heart. They call it the 'big society'. I can think of better names, but it really is not an excercise in cutting public services and having them run by volunteers as the Labour election adverts suggested. Its about giving control - and with it responsibility - to us. Ordinary people like you and me. Able to decide and make a real choice about our health, education, welfare or policing. Not being imposed by an arrogant elite who know better then us how we should live our lives. That path leads to an open immigration policy 'just to rub the right's nose in it' which so damaged decent working people; the falacy of multiculturalism that provided the ethnic ghettoes from which the 7/7 bombers emerged; the deeply unfair culture of welfare dependency that continues to blight the lives of over 8 million of our most vulnerable people or the political ideology that led to 42 days detention without trial and a whole host of illiberal and repressive legislation in the name of battling terror.

What a shameful legacy.

The revolution has only just begun. In education - both compulsory and higher - health, welfare, local government and the way our electoral system works it is already underway. In policing, the house of lords, prisons and the great reform bill, the revolution will take a while longer. It will almost certainly require two terms of government, perhaps more. The democratic and accountable reform of the EU for instance, may take longer still. But if the Big Society means anything, it surely will happen.

Happy half-birthday to the Coalition.

Progressive fees

I didn't quite see who the questioner was at PMQ's (Paul Uppal? according to my Twitter feed) but a graduate earning £25,000 would pay just £30 per month in repaying student fees under the Coalition's proposals. That really is extraordinarily progressive, putting enormous emphasis on higher earning graduates to repay the most substantial rates.

I had not realised just how progressive these measures were designed to be.

Rebel Coalition

Interesting graph from the New Statesman blog recording government rebellions in each post war parliament.

The 2010'ers certainly look like a rebel Coalition to me.

Julian Glover on coalition government

Interesting piece in today's Guardian from Julian Glover who is a great supporter of the coalition...

Turn Labour's hate on itself. No one expects the opposition to approve of doing deals with Tories. But the majority of voters understand why it happened. Labour has misjudged the tone. Sneering at Clegg's party will not destroy it. Labour comes over as angry and isolated. Every time a Labour MP calls for the Lib Dems to be destroyed, Clegg's decision to join forces with the Tories in the national interest appears more legitimate.

Tribalism, hatred & Labour

'George Osborne has just gambled your future on an extreme economic theory that has failed whenever and wherever it has been tried' writes Johann Hari in today's Independent. 'The Bullingdon boys want to finish what Thatcher began' is Seumas Milne's verdict while Polly Toynbee rages yet again 'The glee club on the government benches could hardly contain their delight'. Next we'll have the 'don't dare to be old, don't dare to be ill' speech and all the other ideologically driven false rhetoric that the left has pedalled for years, as if schools, hospitals and welfare did not exist before 1997, and all we need is perpetual Labour government.

I think we all understand that Labour committed itself to delivering £83bn of public expenditure cuts over the next four years - the largest program of cuts since the 1920's. Having left office in May bequeathing the largest budget deficit in our history, Labour additionally committed us to a doubling of the national debt - the total of all borrowings owed by this country - to over £1.4 trillion by the end of this parliament in 2015. That's what 'halving the deficit' - not eliminating it - actually means. The other half continues to grow. What a legacy for 13 years of Labour government.

Now you could be forgiven for thinking that such cuts will produce the greatest social catastrophe in our history. The truth however, is just not so. Total government expenditure as a percentage of GDP will fall. But only back to levels last seen in ...2007. Just three years ago.

I have to say that back in the day - the 'colder and crueller country' of 2007 as Johann Hari might call it - I didn't notice the civil war now being forecast on our streets as our welfare state had been 'dismantled' (as Seumas Milne says). I didn't notice the massed rallies of trade union protesters as Blair, Brown and Labour 'slashed and burned' (as Ed's Miliband and Balls put it) the welfare state to a level that was unacceptable for a decent and compassionate society.

The truth is that even with the reductions in public expenditure bequeathed by Labour, valued front line services - hospitals, schools etc - are being protected, whilst the essential reforms to public service delivery that Brown and Labour ducked, are now being undertaken by the most radical government of the last 100 years.

Like any government they will get things wrong. They will make mistakes. The last Labour government certainly did. But they deserve better than this torrent of 'emotion and prejudice' that is tribal hatred. The nasty party is still alive and well. It is called Labour.

Managing expectations

What a truly extraordinary performance in managing expectations from the Coalition government.

Labour completely wrong-footed after months of dire warnings of the greatest cuts for a century. Alan Johnson looking as if he delivered the wrong script. Ed Balls and Douglas Alexander desperately defending - yes defending Labour's toxic legacy - not attacking the cuts of more than £80bn in addition to those already announced in the Coalition's emergency budget in July.

And having done so, able to claim that at an overall reduction of 19%, is even less than Labour proposed cutting front line services in their election manifesto. Quite extraordinary.

And to think they called him 'boy George' for his naivety. How times change.