Brown, Darling, and public spending cuts

There will be more tomorrow from Alistair Darling on the government’s plans to outline cuts in public services, in the James Callaghan lecture in Cardiff.

The Chancellor wanted to go further on balancing the books than No. 10 allowed him to at the Pre-Budget Report last autumn.

Now he feels – after some lengthy conversations with Gordon Brown over the summer – he has got his way. In the next Pre-Budget Report in the coming weeks and in the months after that, there will be detailed plans for going beyond the £35bn in “efficiency savings” which was as far as No.10 wanted to go originally.

Gordon Brown has not been enjoying the coverage of this U-turn thus far – one headline (in the print edition of The Independent on 25 August 2009 – Prime Minister bows to Cabinet pressure) had him “railing” against the Chancellor’s Treasury team at No. 11, according to an eyewitness.

Saturday’s Times front page story won’t have cheered him up much either – Alistair Darling saying “you don’t fight the next election the way you fought the 2005 and the 2001 and the 1997 election” (i.e. by repeating the mantra “cuts versus investment”).

Well, that was Gordon Brown’s mantra until the beginning of the summer so you can see why he might be hurting!