- Sarah McDermott
- Fri 22 Oct 10, 03:52 PM
Here's what is coming up on the programme tonight at 2230 on BBC Two:
Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg has launched a direct attack on a leading think tank over its analysis of the government's Spending Review.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies has said poorer families with children will be the "biggest losers" of the cuts. But Mr Clegg told the Guardian that the IFS's definition of fairness was "complete nonsense".
Tonight Gavin Esler will be joined by Cabinet minister Francis Maude and a studio audience comprised of a cross section of voters of all ages, and from across the country.
We'll be asking them if they think the great spending squeeze is fair and how the cuts will affect their families, their jobs and the services they use.
Do join us at 10.30pm on BBC Two.
- Mark Urban
- Thu 21 Oct 10, 05:35 PM
The National Security Strategy, published on Monday, placed great emphasis on conflict prevention, intervening less often militarily, and greater intelligence gathering to spot emerging crises earlier.
It all fits with a fashionable approach that is sometimes called "smart" or "soft" power.
Yet how should one interpret these on-trend messages in the light of Wednesday's Comprehensive Spending Review? The Foreign Office faces a 24% cut, the British Council one of 25%, and there will be a 7.3% real fall in the intelligence services' account.
The Foreign Office intends to offload much of the pain on the BBC - by getting the corporation to fund the government's £240m share of the World Service budget from the licence fee.
Once the World Service is taken out of the picture, the cut to the diplomatic service looks more like 10%.
Even so, people at the FCO concede that some diplomatic posts overseas are likely to close as a result of the cuts. Typically, they say, consular offices in some countries may be consolidated. In one or two minor states, the embassy itself will face closure.
So what about the World Service, regarded by many as one of Britain's most powerful "soft power" assets, and hence largely funded up to now by a Foreign Office Grant In Aid to the BBC?
In the past, decisions about increasing the hours of one foreign language broadcast or cutting those of another have been regarded as an important instrument of foreign policy. Ministers have hinted that they still expect call the tune, even though they will no longer be paying the BBC piper.
For the BBC though, trying to maintain these overseas broadcasts (and the BBC Monitoring Service, which will also no longer receive Foreign Office money) in addition to its other services, with a frozen licence fee, will be challenging to say the least.
Cuts are inevitable, and the Foreign Office, I hear, is relieved that it will be pressing the responsibility for wielding the axe on the BBC.
As for forecasting problems through better intelligence collection and analysis, both the agencies (mainly MI6 and GCHQ in this case) and the machinery used to process that information (the Joint Intelligence Committee and Defence Intelligence Staff) are expecting cuts.
The mandarins who deal with these services are sanguine about the reductions, both because they have just had a few years of real growth, and because there will be £600m of new money to be spent on the latest priority - cyber security.
We can expect a good old-fashioned Whitehall knife fight about where this cash will flow.
Although GCHQ can expect a central role, officials caution that the money is expected to be used across the whole of government to increase the security of computer systems.
The MoD announced the formation of its Cyber Operations Group this week, and other agencies, such as MI6, are sure to stake their claim too.
Much of it will no doubt go on equipment, as the government attempts to erect more effective firewalls around its departments, and only a small amount of it on offensive efforts that might help this country's decision makers be better informed.
Some might argue that there is one bright star on the soft power horizon in the increase in funding to the Department for International Development. It is planning to double to around £3.8bn a year the amount it spends in crisis areas or failing states.
Although welcome, the question about how this money might make the world safer or Britain more popular will be very hard to answer. Indeed the department is not meant to pursue British foreign policy objectives by the distribution of aid, and today the prime minister, David Cameron, defended the increase in DfID's funding in terms of a "moral duty" to help the poor rather than advance the UK national interest.
In summary then, the agencies most concerned with wielding soft power emerge unevenly from the events of this week.
It is true they have not been cut as heavily as some departments, but also that it is difficult to reconcile the government's avowed interest in soft power with the cuts to the British Council, withdrawal of its direct support to the World Service, and reduction of its diplomatic presence overseas.
- Sarah McDermott
- Thu 21 Oct 10, 12:13 PM
The Prime Minister David Cameron and his deputy Nick Clegg today rejected claims that the Spending Review cuts were "unfair".
The leading independent economic analysts, the Institute for Fiscal Studies, said George Osborne's measures were the deepest cuts since World War II and would hit the poorest harder than the better off.
Tonight Paul Mason will explain how the IFS reached its conclusion.
Matt Prodger is in Blaenau Gwent, one of the most deprived areas of Wales, to speak to people there about their reaction to the Spending Review.
Gavin Esler has been talking to Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith about the job and welfare cuts and how he expects people to cope.
Mr Duncan Smith insists it isn't an "on your bus" moment, but his message for those without work is that "the jobs always don't come to you, sometimes you need to go to the jobs". Watch a clip here.
Also tonight - what will the impact of the Spending Review be on law and order? Police spending has been cut by 20%, there'll be reduction in the prison population and cuts to courts.
David Grossman has been in the West Midlands examining the implications and we'll be debating the issues raised with the policing minister and a former Attorney General.
Our Political Editor Michael Crick will consider the impact of the cuts to local government - and hears about the "real concerns" of one Tory Council Leader.
And later in the programme Gavin will be joined by Dame Joan Bakewell and Stanley Johnson to discuss why the chancellor decided to retain universal benefits for the elderly including free eye tests, free prescription charges, free bus passes, winter fuel payments and free TV licences for the over 75s.
What does this say about the ideology of the chancellor's review and the Coalition more widely?
Join us at 10.30pm on BBC Two.
- Paul Mason
- Thu 21 Oct 10, 09:24 AM
It's been a while since I've seen so many journalists stumped by a major event. So many newspaper front pages with differing lines, interpretations and concerns. Politicians too: stumped, lost for words, having to " wait and see" and read a bit more. And so many faces composed into rictus non-betrayal of their real feelings.
For the problem with the Spending Review was that there was no clear narrative. Both sides struggled to express one - and some struggled to suppress one.
If these were "The Biggest Cuts Since World War II" (and the Institute of Fiscal Studies managed to brief that they both were and weren't) then the plotline of that movie was hard to follow.
On the Coalition side the action was clear. No flinching from the £83bn cuts outlined in June. £81bn delivered (with two shaved off by previous action). £11bn of pain switched from Departmental Spending to Annual Managed Expenditure (AME), mainly through welfare and pension cuts. And the theory re-iterated that the shrinkage of the state will lead to a rapid rebalancing of the UK economy into an industrial export dynamo.
But there were problems with the story. Since they had flinched from further eroding universal benefits, the graph showing the impact of yesterday's measures on different social groups showed clearly: the poorest tenth get hammered and the richest tenth get hammered even more. Strip away Labour's redistributive tax increases and the Coalition contribution to that graph falls hardest on the poorest.
There was some attempt to explain that these poorest may include the "temporarily poor" - perhaps like the person who lost their £113m lottery ticket - but this narrative fizzled out mid-afternoon. As a result you had the Guardian going on "Axe falls on the poor" and the Telegraph going on "Cuts leave middle class £10,000 worse off".
Here's the explanation. After being shaken by the response of middle Britain to the removal of Child Benefit for those in the 40% tax bracket, the Coalition backed off from its planned extension of that cut to 16-19 year olds. In fact it backed off any attempt to erode universal benefits further - or "middle class benefits" as they were called throughout the Conservative conference.
They could have, quite logically, come out with the narrative "we have listened, we know the middle class values universality as a principle, and the cash in practice". But it would have been hard to do since the conference fringes of the Tory, Liberal and Labour conferences were one big revving up session for an attack on middle class benefits. (The Institute for Public Policy Research was outraged yesterday by the non-attack on universality).
As a result I think the combined spin machines of the Coalition were not really firing yesterday.
Likewise with Labour. Today's Spectator asserts: "In his response to the spending review statement, Alan Johnson unwittingly demonstrated that Labour no longer has a message on the economy". On the Labour backbenches there has been some out-loud wondering what Ed Balls might have made of that prime-time opportunity. Since Labour cannot do a shadow CSR, and supports about 5/8ths of the cuts in principle (having proposed them) it is hard for them to decide which of the specifics to oppose.
Labour-aligned economists are batting hard against rapid deficit reduction, on the grounds that it could cause a double-dip recession, but the view of people like Joe Stiglitz, Ha-Joon Chang and David Blanchflower are actually aligned with the Ed Balls position, not that of the current Labour leader.
So we move on today to the dissection phase, in which the IFS discovers various slights of hand, the spinmeisters get to dissing individual cuts etc.
What I take away from yesterday is that it is a giant experiment. Or as HSBC's Stuart Green puts it in a note this morning:
"Real-terms annual declines in current expenditure are pencilled in for 2012/13, 2013/14 and 2014/15, despite only four such declines having been registered since the data were first collated in 1967, emphasising both the unprecedented nature of the upcoming fiscal consolidation and the hugely uncertain implications for growth."
Basically there is no proof that slashing back the state will promote private sector growth in a country like Britain amid an economic crisis like this. The FT's Martin Wolf, no friend of hand-wringing state-ism, mobilised the evidence of the IMF to argue this earlier this week. That does not mean deficit reduction is wrong, nor does it dictate which of the two deficit reduction paths (Labour's "halve it" and the Coalition's "eradicate the structural part") is better. It just means we are engaged in an experiment.
If it goes right then, as the Spectator cannily predicts today, then in 2015 "the Tory election campaign will write itself. It will be morning in Britain - and why would we want to go back..."
If it goes wrong, then, conversely you would expect Labour to benefit. For the Libdems either scenario will be tricky (their manifesto, all those months ago in April 2010, actually proposed a "one year stimulus" which, had they won, we would have been in the middle of right now).
Because Conservative strategists cannot guarantee it will go right, nor that the essential benefit reforms will work, nor that the new private sector jobs created will go to UK citizens, nor that an army of volunteers will come forward to provide services in lieu of the state, they are wary of launching a metanarrative.
In fact what is striking is that the metanarrative that pervades every page of the Speccy cannot really be embraced by the Conservative front bench: chief whip Patrick McLoughlin has been enforcing the line that the Tories "don't want to do these cuts". However there is a perfectly good argument that they should want to do them: that if the British state is a millstone around our necks it should be lighter.
Labour meanwhile has two narratives. Nobody with any experience of the Balls/Cooper philosophy and modus operandi can be in any doubt that this part of the Labour clan would have handled yesterday very differently. Indeed, in the bowels of Parliament this week Labour's no-show leadership contender, Jon Cruddas, offered the opinion that the party was in an even deeper existential crisis than it was before the election:
"There is a pervasive sense of loss around our Party," Cruddas said, in the Nye Bevan memorial lecture. "It is a loss of identity. We do not possess some kind of historical right to exist."
So basically there's a struggle for narrative going on in British politics - and that's what explains the confused storylines of the British press this morning.
- Susan Watts
- Wed 20 Oct 10, 04:23 PM
Scientists were obviously relieved after Chancellor George Osborne's announcement in the Spending Review that the science budget is not going to be slashed, but frozen in cash terms for the next four years.
Rumours had suggested cuts of around 20%, which leading figures had said would mean "game over", not just for science in this country, but for future growth of the economy as well.
And at face value, it's a powerful vote of confidence in the contribution that science can make.
"Astonishing" was how particle physicist and television science presenter, Professor Brian Cox, described the outcome today, as he received an OBE for services to science.
He said the success was a clear signal for scientists like him that it is vital they stand up and speak out for their subject:
"For the first time I think we've made the political point as well as the economic point that supporting science is invaluable," he said.
He added that science is clearly part of the future of the country: "So it needs to be seen as something that kids want to do, it needs to be seen as a career that you can attain...you don't have to be a Hawking or an Einstein or a Newton to make a contribution.
"But for me, the main thing to say to school kids is, if you want to be a scientist, it doesn't matter if it's medical research, or chemistry or whatever it is, then you can choose to do it."
Without wishing to spoil the fun, the freeze in the annual science budget (of £4.6bn billion) still means that, in real terms, science faces a cut - and a significant one - of just under 10% over the next four years. And that is a huge challenge.
Most importantly, the freeze must be seen in an international context in which countries from Asia to Europe to the US are pumping extra money into science.
Evan Harris, the former Liberal Democrat Science spokesman, conceded the point:
"The science community will be relieved by this settlement, but we know that even 10% real terms cuts will be painful, (and) will need reversing as soon as the fiscal position improves."
But Mr Osborne does seem to have listened to what scientists have been saying in recent weeks.
In his speech today he said: "Britain is a world leader in scientific research, and that is vital to our economic success."
Addressing the Commons he said that he will protect the £220m UK Centre for Medical Research and Innovation at St Pancras, the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, the Institute for Animal Health in Pirbright and the Diamond Synchrotron facility in Oxford.
Questions remain then over the UK's continued role in international projects in fields such as particle physics and astronomy, as well as the impact of cuts in university funding and R&D budgets across Government departments, which could still have a damaging effect on overall science spend in the UK.
More will be asked of the charities which currently support science. Professor Peter Weissberg, medical director of the British Heart Foundation, said "even at about 10% down, we'll be playing catch-up in an international field which could see UK science left behind".
Martin Rees, president of the Royal Society, again cited the international context: "The government has recognised the importance of sustaining the international standing of UK science in a context where other nations are forging ahead."
And that's the point, science in the UK may be breathing more than a sigh of relief today, but elsewhere they're investing, fast and furious, not just keeping funding level.
- Paul Mason
- Wed 20 Oct 10, 12:29 PM
The gist of George Osborne's speech was clear. The projected welfare budget from June 2010 is cut, using cuts to tax credits, to council tax benefits, and several other benefit threshholds. In addition by raising the state pension age, with the female retirement age contributing to the savings in the short term.
The macro picture from the SR2010 document is as follows.
The old welfare budget was set to rise from 295bn this year to 355bn in 2014/15.
I will insert the new figures here as soon as the Treasury's PDF downloads. For now the claim is that the DEL cut is lower than the one projected in Alistair Darling's budget, ie 19% not 20%.
The figures in Table 1.1 say that by 2014/15 the departments will be spending 12bn more in cash terms than they would have under Osborne's June 2010 Budget, and in return the welfare budget is 11bn less.
- Paul Mason
- Wed 20 Oct 10, 11:44 AM
Benedict Brogan of the Telegraph has the first concrete tip-off that the government's "get out of jail" card is to be a cut in future welfare spending. The blog is here.
The gist is that the OBR is about to pronounce that the welfare budget allocated in the Emergency Budget of June 2010 is too high, and will not be needed. Some centre-right think tanks also pointed out at the time that it seemed high - and provided wriggle room to ease the cuts on Departmental spending.
Just for clarity, there are two lines in the Budget - DEL (Departmental Expenditure Limit) and AME (Annually Managed Expenditure). You can't technically set that in a Spending Review, but you can predict it.
If you look at the last budget, Social Security plus Tax Credits rises from 186bn to 213bn by 2014/15 (hat tip to Neil O'Brien of Policy Exchange for this): if Robert Chote has discovered that they will not need to spend this much at all, that is one heck of a bunch of billions (nominally) to contribute towards the expected 83bn cut - on top of any specific reduction in entitlements like Child Benefit.
Watch this space. Am tweeting as we go.
- Verity Murphy
- Wed 20 Oct 10, 11:42 AM
Here is what is coming up on tonight's programme:
Chancellor George Osborne has unveiled the biggest UK spending cuts in decades - with welfare, councils and police budgets all hit.
The pension age will rise sooner than expected, some incapacity benefits will be time limited and other money clawed back through changes to tax credits and housing benefit.
Tonight Jeremy Paxman presents an hour-long Newsnight special assessing the details and the impact of plan.
We will be hearing from one of the architects of the Spending Review, Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander.
Our Economics editor Paul Mason and our Political editor Michael Crick will be giving us their view of what has been announced.
Stephen Smith has donned the mantle of Motorway Man once more, returning to his general election home, the Donnington Park services, to get reaction from the people there.
We will be discussing whether Britain will feel culturally different in the wake of the swingeing cuts with artist Grayson Perry, historian and author Amanda Foreman, and businessman Sir Martin Sorrell.
And we will be getting the views of some leading newspaper editors.
Do join us at 10.30pm on BBC Two.
- Michael Crick
- Wed 20 Oct 10, 10:56 AM
As I reported yesterday, in future the cost of the BBC World Service - currently £272m a year - will have to come from the BBC licence fee rather than the Foreign Office budget, and the licence fee has been frozen for six years.
Here is some background to how the story and the deal unfolded.
I'm sure he won't mind me saying so, but it Chris Bryant MP who first mentioned the possible wheeze to me.
It was late one night during the Labour conference, that the he suggested this government might try to make savings in the Foreign Office budget by transfering the £272m annual budget of the BBC World Service directly to the BBC, to paid out of income from the licence fee.
When a Newsnight colleague tested this idea with a senior minister several days later - ie. less than two weeks ago - he was surprised to be told that the BBC itself had actually proposed the idea, but it had subsequently been rejected.
Why should the BBC suggest an idea which would only add a huge extra burden to BBC budgets? Quite simple, BBC managers realised they were in bad odour with many leading Conservatives, what with all the talk of high BBC salaries, inefficiency, waste and so on.
Far better for the BBC to come up with a way for the corporation to contribute its bit to the Spending Review process than have something far worse imposed from above.
Then suddenly, on Monday of last week, the World Service idea was back on the agenda, as negotiations started between the Culture, Media and Sport Department (DCMS) and BBC big-wigs.
The idea was to agree the World Service budget transfer as part of a bigger deal which would freeze and secure the licence fee until 2017. The move also made logical sense in that World Service journalists will soon be housed in the same "West One" building as other BBC journalists.
But the new urgency on the government's part seemed to stem from the realisation last week that cuts in both defence and the schools budget would not be as great as the Treasury had hoped. The hunt was on for more economies. (Indeed the Justice Department, having "settled" with the Treasury many weeks ago, was among a few departments asked to cough up more cuts.)
Then on Monday, as first reported on this blog, BBC bosses were hit by the bombshell that the Treasury now instead planned something far more burdensome to the BBC - transfering the £556m cost of providing free TV licences for over-75s from the books of the Department of Work and Pensions to the BBC.
Indeed, I'm told that for several hours on Monday BBC bosses thought this decision had actually been made by the Treasury and was about to be imposed on them. As I reported here, they planned to fight it "tooth and nail".
Several government sources have said this was a genuine plan, though others suggest the free TV licence transfer idea was merely a negotiating ploy.
On Monday evening BBC bosses suddenly sensed the free licences for the elderly option had gone away. Instead they were invited for more talks at the DCMS, and the BBC Director-General Mark Thompson had to be summoned back from the train he was taking home to Oxford.
Talks went on late into the night and resumed early on Tuesday morning, with negotiators getting very little sleep. And the deal was struck - a complicated package which normally would have taken months to settle.
What's odd is that Downing Street was insisting on Monday afternoon that all the departmental settlements were "complete", and the CSR documents were about to go to the printers. And yet this huge saving to the Foreign Office budget from having lost responsibility for the World Service wasn't agreed for almost another 24 hours.
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- Mark Urban
- Tue 19 Oct 10, 08:46 PM
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The Conservatives have a great history of cutting the armed forces - from Duncan Sandys' review in 1957, to John Nott in 1981, Tom King in 1990, and Malcolm Rifkind in 1994.
It's true of course that in the intervening years, the Tories were often cheerleaders for defence, and that Labour made its own cuts - most famously Dennis Healey's review in 1967. But the point remains that the Conservatives have never hesitated to wield the knife, and that it generally has not caused them any great political difficulty.
A notable exception to this was Mr Nott's White Paper of 29 years ago which caused fury in the Royal Navy, and led to the resignation of his Navy Minister. The plan in 1981 involved scrapping a carrier programme, selling the first off the production line, HMS Invincible, and stopping construction of the other two. Less than one year later, the Falklands were invaded, and the carriers reprieved.
Today the government announced the pensioning off of HMS Ark Royal (sister ship of the Invincible) and the last of the three, Illustrious, faces an uncertain future. From now until the expected the anticipated commissioning of the Prince of Wales and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter - at least 10 years - the UK will lose the ability to launch jets at sea.
The decision resulted from a tangle of legal and financial considerations whereby the ships must be built because of punitive cancellation charges, the forces must retire the Harrier as soon as possible and the F-35 will not appear for at least a decade. It's a mess that even those close to the decision agree could never be justified on pure policy or strategic grounds.
If the country thinks it is important to be able to launch attacks from its own floating airbases then why lose the capability for the next decade? And if we are able to make do with shore-based aviation in the meantime won't that sink HMS Prince of Wales sooner or later? What chance is today's assessment that such a capability won't be needed for 10 years, likely to survive, when John Nott's didn't even hold good for one?
The carrier issue is just one of the myriad problems facing the MoD in carrying out the Strategic Defence and Security Review. So many other issues have had to be tackled, not least dealing with a £38bn gap between what the ministry had committed itself to, what it can actually afford, and the transformation of the armed forces to meet future threats.
When viewed through the conventional prism - of avoiding cuts - the services have not done as badly as some feared they would. The Army will lose around 7,000 soldiers over and one brigade the next 10 years, coming down to a strength of 94,000. The Royal Navy and RAF will take a proportionately greater cut of 5,000 each and the MoD civil service 25,000.
Hopes though that the review might bring some bold re-deployment of resources towards developing areas of warfare have barely been met. True, there will be an MoD element (as well as a GCHQ one) to the government's new commitment to cyber warfare, and true also that Special Forces will get more money for communications and surveillance.
However the type of bold blueprint called for, for example by Lieutenant General Sir Graeme Lamb and Lt Col Richard Williams (two recently departed officers with enormous operational experience) has not been met. They wanted a wholesale change to the structure of the forces, creation of a new communications architecture, and transformation of the role of the reserve forces.
The future of the reserves, like several other important issues, has not been resolved by today's paper. There is more work to be done - the government's aim of producing a multi-departmental review so soon after its election has in that sense proven too ambitious.
Prime Minister David Cameron signalled today that he had both a greater reluctance to deploy forces operationally than has been the case in recent years, and a desire to restore real increases to the defence budget, assuming an economic upturn from 2015.
What the government needs now is good luck - an absence of events that might expose their judgements to the same scorn as those of John Nott's team in 1981.
18:50BST WED 20 OCT 2010 - ADDITION FROM MARK URBAN RESPONDING TO SOME OF YOUR COMMENTS:
Jaunty - your point about the difficulties of ensuring cyber security given the ownership of various telecomms companies and ISPs is very interesting. As we cover this field we will be sure to ask questions about this.
Clusterbombunit - like you, I find the plan to retire the Sentinel surveillance aircraft - bought recently at such great cost - hard to understand. These aircraft fit well with all the current thinking about increasing Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconaissance capabilities. At the Whitehall briefing yesterday many questions were asked (about many important and valid issues) but nobody had the chance to ask about the Sentinel decision. Perhaps they don't work as well as was hoped...
- Michael Crick
- Tue 19 Oct 10, 05:27 PM
Two senior sources - in Downing Street and the Foreign Office - have told me that a deal has now been done where in future the cost of the BBC World Service - currently £272m a year - will have to come from the licence fee rather than the Foreign Office budget.
This will come into effect with the next licence fee settlement due in 2012.
This seems to replace previous plans - reported here yesterday - to make the BBC pay the £556m cost of the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) paying for free TV licences for the over-75s.
I understand the new deal, brokered between the BBC and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport is likely to involve a new figure for the licence fee.
A BBC source tells me the corporation recognised they had to contribute to the Spending Review process, and bringing the World Service within the overall BBC budget was a logical move given the fact that BBC and World Service journalists will soon share the same building.
I am told today's deal was not linked to last night's story about free TV licences.
As a result of my blog last night there were furious hastily-arranged talks at the Department of Culture Media and Sport (DCMS) involving the BBC Director-General Mark Thompson and DCMS ministers and officials.
These went on very late and were resumed this morning.
Two deals were on the table - the BBC paying for the over-75s and paying for the World Service.
They concluded with a deal today which freezes the BBC licence fee at £145.50 for the next six years.
- Paul Mason
- Tue 19 Oct 10, 04:22 PM
Danny Alexander has fallen foul of the Nikkor 400mm lens problem in Whitehall, leaving his briefing notes open for the snappers to snap.
For me the most interesting part of the note is the issue of public sector pay. The notes are briefing notes, not a list of measures: so they contain arguments for ministers to use.
One is: "Action on pay will minimise the job losses..."
The Guardian takes this to be the existing action on pay - namely a pay freeze, saving £3.3bn.
But it prompts in my mind a further question. Is the government planning further "action" on public sector pay in the form of an actual pay cut? This would be par for the course compared to other European governments. Ireland, Spain and Greece have all imposed actual pay cuts in the public sector, using a similar argument to the one in the line above on Alexander's document - namely that pay had risen above that of the private sector.
We'll find out tomorrow, but in excess of 490,000 job losses will bring a heavy toll of redundancy payments. One way around this would be to propose an across the board pay cut to mitigate the job losses.
If only Mr Alexander had left the correct page open for the snappers we would not have to wait until tomorrow.
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