6th March 2010
The next two weeks will probably be the last of the current Parliament, and as the clock ticks down the pace of the informal election campaign is stepping up.
This week I will be taking part in an Education Debate on Newsnight with Schools Secretary, Ed Balls MP and Conservative Spokesman, Michael Gove MP.
On Friday, I will be on the BBC Radio 4 “Any Questions” panel, and on Saturday I will be at the Liberal Democrat Conference in Birmingham.
Next Monday I will be taking part in a “Times Educational Supplement” schools and colleges debate in London….and so it goes on. Indeed, on Easter Sunday I will speaking at one of the teachers union conferences!
With all these national commitments, I am enjoying the time I am able to carve out for constituency responsibilities. And this often highlights issues of real concern to people, which are not always the issues on the national “radar screen”. For example, I am getting a lot of complaints about the state of road surfaces, and as I am driving around I am coming across vast potholes in both urban and rural areas alike. This is obviously a matter for the County Council rather than the Government, but I am more than happy to take up these issues on behalf of local residents.
Later this week I will also be celebrating the construction of a new bus shelter right outside Windermere Close in Yeovil. Every time I have called in at Windermere Close, the residents have been asking for a proper bus shelter – for at least five years! I think both they and I were wondering if the shelter would ever go up, but at last it has – and I am grateful to the Town and District Councils for their support on this.
It is good to see capital spending in our area on projects such as South Petherton Hospital and the new Oaklands Primary School in West Yeovil, because it is going to become increasingly difficult to secure such finance in the years to come.
Public spending growth is continuing until the end of the current financial year in March 2011, but it seems like one of those cartoons where a character runs very fast over the edge of a cliff, and continues for a while before glancing below, and plunging to the ground!
Public spending is carrying on as if nothing has happened, but the public finances have gone over the cliff, and government borrowing is running at record levels, and at some stage very soon gravity will re-assert itself and public spending will be under an awful lot of pressure.
The moment of reckoning has been postponed for a while, not least so that spending cuts do not topple the economy back over into recession again. But spending discipline cannot be long delayed.
After the General Election in early May, a new Government is likely to have to “look at the books”, and if the economy is by then recovering – still a big if – then I would expect public spending cuts in many areas to be announced from 2011 onwards.
What is really crucial is that we should take some hard decisions to cut out lower priority spending, so we can protect the spending that is highest priority – including on areas such as schools, colleges, the NHS and policing. Cutting out “waste” will help, but that will not be nearly enough to cut a £178bn deficit – it will also be necessary to take a hard look at some programmes. Without these tough choices we will be faced either with real problems in funding our debts, or with the need to put taxes up instead – not a happy prospect.
So the public sector will soon have to face some of the tough decisions that the private sector and private individuals have already had to face. Westminster needs to set its own example of prudence, by making big cuts to the cost of Government, and reducing the number of both MPs and Government Ministers.
These are the hard choices which will face any Government after the coming General Election,
Ever,
David.