Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Alistair Darling ducks the public spending cuts question with more weasel answers

Another morning, another Labour minister trying to mislead the public. This morning's turn was Alistair Darling.

He was asked about cuts to education but answered with the weasel's formula of "What I'm saying to you is ...." and then went on to speak about something else.

He also tried the misleading line that spending will go up. This might be true, but after inflation, rising social security payments, higher demand on the NHS, and vastly higher debt repayments are taken into account the amount for departmental spending will go down by about 7%.

This is of course what most of Today's audience think of as government spending, a fact that Darling shamelessly exploits.

The interviewer whilst trying the odd half hearted trap failed to nail him for this attempt at deceit.

But one thing is sure - the markets won't be fooled. And I think they underestimate the voters also....

4 comments:

Letters From A Tory said...

I think the voters are latching on this utter nonsense, after Gordon Brown tried to attack Cameron over spending cuts. All the newspapers have basically told Brown to stop peddling these lies.

James Higham said...

It would be nice to see American style debates over here on any major issue. They'd then have to defend themselves publicly.

Unknown said...

I'm getting frightened at the rate our debts are climbing - especially if they succeed in wrecking the currency. We won't be able to roll over our debts at anything other than a punitive rate and the debt repayments will be a crippling proportion of sky-high tax rates.

Man in a Shed said...

@Wildgoose: I think we could be heading into the equivalent of the coffin corner that may have destroyed that unfortunate Air France flight.

the problem is we need to stop digging our debt hole and stop now.

Everyone assumes government must keep spending - but I've seen evidence that this makes things far worse. In the early 1920's the US had a near depression ( before the more famous version ) but did nothing - it recovered far faster and with less damage. You never hear of it on the radio or TV of course ... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czcUmnsprQI

Now the truth is I'm not a qualified economist or even close. But I can't help but wonder if the government isn't making things worse.