The View from 22 — Cuts, what cuts?, the rise of individualism and the green shoots of economic recovery

Is George Osborne cutting enough into public sector spending? In this week’s Spectator cover feature, Ross Clark examines how the Chancellor isn’t making much of a dent at all into government waste and how he is wasting numerous opportunities for being austere. On the latest View from 22 podcast, Matthew Sinclair of the Taxpayers’ Alliance goes head-to-head with Charlie Elphicke MP on some of the cuts Clark argues aren’t being made. Is it a political problem, that the British public are unwilling to accept deeper cuts? Or does the Cabinet lack the courage to take on the Whitehall machine more aggressively?

But it’s not all bad for Osborne. As James Forsyth explains in his political column this week, the first green shoots of recovery are appearing and the Chancellor appears to have won the intellectual battle against Labour and Ed Balls. David Cameron, the Treasury and now Tory MPs all now believe that strong and steady growth is on the way.