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The time bomb ticking beneath this coalition
The Mole: If Osborne's cuts misfire, tens of thousands will be out of work for no reason
Is the trickle - becoming a flood over the weekend - of leaks and claims and counter-claims about Wednesday's public spending review just the norm when the axe is about to come down? Or has this been one of the best stage-managed horror shows in government history?
One cynic who bent the Mole's ear yesterday believes even the controversial defence cuts have been choreographed for the sake of the Phew. As in 'Phew, it's only an eight per cent cut, not the 10 per cent they were threatening'.
The same with tuition fees. First it was mooted that they might rise so high that only the sons and daughters of millionaires could ever contemplate tertiary education in future. Now it'll still be bad, but not as horrible as we first thought. Phew again.
Was my friendly cynic being fanciful? Perhaps. But one thing's for sure in the Mole's view - the leaking of the decision to scrap child benefit for higher-rate taxpayers was stage-managed to the hilt.
Why? Because after Black Wednesday it's finally going to become apparent just how damaging these cuts will be for ordinary, non higher-tax-paying voters.
For some, it could be months before the cuts filter through to pay cuts and job losses.
But whenever the penny drops, the government will be able to tell the lower-paid: "Look, We're all in this together - even the better-off have been hit! We took their child benefit away!"
It appears inevitable now that the lower-paid are going to be hit mercilessly by the coalition government's decision to cut £83bn over four years.
On the welfare front, it has been leaked over the weekend that the really big child benefit cut - saving £3bn a year as opposed to the mere £1.2bn saved by stopping child benefit for the higher-paid - will be made by lowering the current age limit of 19 to 16.
Then there's the revelation that almost the entire £8bn social housing budget is to be cut.
Both of these are a kick in the teeth for lower-paid families. But it's the upcoming jobs crunch that is really going to hurt this sector.
The media have tended to present Wednesday's expected cuts in cash terms - 12 per cent off police budgets, for instance, or £2bn off the Ministry of Justice spend. But almost invariably each of these cuts means lost jobs.
The Police Federation believe as many as 40,000 police officers will lose their jobs. In the prison service, 15,000 jobs are at risk.
And so it goes on. One hundred magistrates courts will close. Great - less chance of that speeding charge ever coming to court. Yes, but how many clerks of the court and ushers will be out of work as a result?
The budget for the Arts Council is to be drastically cut. About time too, you might say. Yes, but 100 of the 820 organisations currently receiving funding will lose their grants. Curators, receptionists, librarians - many of them in their first jobs out of university - will be thrown out of work.
Scores of quangos are to be cut - excellent news, was the Mole's first reaction. Yes, but quangos employ secretaries and researchers as well as fat cats.
It is at local council that the biggest cuts are expected, with vast reductions in funds from central government. Thousands of low-paid council workers - many of them of them women - will be asked to take reduced pay or face redundancy. Others won't get the choice.
The Office for Budget Responsibility has estimated that 600,000 public sector jobs will be gone between now and 2015, when this government faces re-election.
And then there's the private sector, where jobs will be lost because the government is not ordering so many office supplies, let alone strike aircraft. Accountants (yes, there'll be fewer of those needed, too) estimate that almost as many jobs again will go in the private sector as a result.
No wonder the coalition spin doctors have been managing expectations, desperate to create an impression that we're all in this together.
If Cameron and Osborne can pull this off, bully for them. But at the first hint that their measures are harming economic growth, Labour, currently taking a cautious line on the cuts, will pounce. 'I told you so' will never have been sung so loud.
More important for the Tories and Lib Dems' electoral hopes, the narrative will change.
When each of them broke campaign promises - the Lib Dems on tuition fees, the Tories on child benefit - they set off a time bomb. Labour will be able to say that not only did they mismanage the economy, they lied too. ·
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Interesting isn't it? The British bump their gums on news comment sites like this, and the French take to the streets and do something that gets noticed. Not surprising that MP now stands for Millionaire Politician...
At least two of the people who have posted comments on this article ought to have some basic understanding of economics before they make fools of themselves by sounding off like lounge-bar pundits
Labour got plenty of things wrong. That's no justification for Osborne's return to Norman Lamont's model of 'If it's not hurting, it's not working'. A year from now, the focus will be on what the Conservatives have got wrong. It will be a long list and there will be a lot of embittered voters out there who won't be interested in what the previous government did. Most ordinary people - especially those raising families - live on a financial knife edge from month to month, with no spare in the budget. Many of them are going to be facing severe hardship and they will credit the present government with that.
Conservative politicians reluctantly supported quantitative easing as the only option during the blistering meltdown in the autumn of 2008. The many billions which that actually cost the UK should be taken into account when assessing the origins of this deficit, so the 80/20% spending cuts/taxes raised ratio seems unwise as well as unfair.
Gordon Brown and his pals created the crisis. He sold the gold reserves at silly prices, he raped the pension funds, wrecking the best system in Europe, he wasted the massive amount of money he got from selling G3. He overspent and overborrowed with wild abandon. He completely ignored the problems he built up with public sector pensions. He over-mortgaged the future with PFI schemes. The banking sector did not cause this problem - it just made it more difficult to cope with because Labour had already been totally profligate.
I thought it was the banks that created the crisis. Most people trusted them, including the labour government
Certainly Clegg (who will never be forgiven) and Cameron (of whom it was expected) lied to the electorate.
Labour have always overspent, Tories have always looked after their own, watch income tax cuts for the well off, and interest rate rises for their unearned income.
What is the debate about ??
Why don't they keep these potential 'unemployed' in their jobs? If we have over 600,000 + people out of work then surely the benefits they draw will negate the benefit from their sacking? Or am I missing a trick here?
The money has to be repaid today, or repaid tomorrow with interest - perhaps with the twelve bore of the IMF at our heads.
Blame belongs to Brown and Labour for digging this hole in the first place. In time we must ensure that no government is *ever* allowed to borrow so much money again without a manifesto commitment endorsed in a general election.
Great piece, at last someone's saying how many people's lives are at risk of having their lives ruined by these ideological nutjobs.
The Mole is such a blinkered Labour supporter that he fails to acknowledge that it was his party that got us in to this awful mess. Never again will Labour be able to accuse another party of "mismanaging the economy" - they themselves have, yet again, proved to be the world leaders.