Politics | 9 May 2009

Some secrets are too vulgar to be disclosed by any political party. Gordon Brown’s radical cuts agenda, encoded in the small print of the Budget, is one such secret. The Prime Minister doesn’t want to admit to it, as it contradicts his pious claim that ‘you can’t cut your way out of recession’. David Cameron doesn’t want to call attention to the question of cuts either, as he would be asked where, precisely, the Tory axe would fall. The Liberal Democrats, meanwhile, are against cuts, but also against more debt — a conundrum as yet unresolved. So it suits everyone in Westminster to keep quiet.

The pain is scheduled to start in April 2011, to last for three years and utterly to transform British politics. The unannounced blueprint, which the Institute of Fiscal Studies painstakingly reconstructed from the fragments scattered across the Budget, is for cuts of 7 per cent over these years — the sharpest, most sustained budgetary retraction attempted by any postwar government.