George Osborne’s Difficulty

Summed-up by the Economist in a single chart. When you consider that many people support spending cuts in principle but tend to oppose them when they target particular favourite programmes you may appreciate that the government faces a fairly acute political problem. That’s before you consider the practical difficulties of really cutting spending. In its way, all this is also a bleak testament to the consequences of a dozen years of Labour rule and, one might add, to the Tories’ belated conversion to restraining government spending.