Those *Painful* Spending Cuts

I've not commented on the spending cuts announced earlier this week, partly because they felt so inevitable - a bit like the warm weather giving away to the rain. And let's be honest, those cuts were inevitable - and if you don't realise that, then you probably need to go away and find a website more suited to your level of intellect. Like the CBeebies one.

But the response to these cuts seems to have been dull and predictable - with Labour (who, lest we forget, were also committed to making spending cuts) MPs and members treating the cuts as a cross between the plague and limited nuclear warfare. Everyone else seems to be at odds to point out how painful these cuts are.

Yes, these cuts may well be painful, particularly if you are affected by them. However, they are also inevitable and necessary - which seems to be a message that is muted at best, and not even being communicated at all at worst. Let's examine one of these cuts in detail - a reduction on the spending for university places*:

And extra university places and schools services in England are to be cut - Labour had promised an extra 20,000 university places but this has been cut to 10,000.

First things first, it sounds like what is being cut here is extra places - so places on top of the university places already in existence. Which means that there will still be a net increase in the number of people going to university. Making this a cut in additional spending, rather than an overall reduction in spending. I don't know, maybe I'm reading this wrong, but it sounds like this isn't as scary as it first might sounds.

But even if the number of university places is being reduced then this may well prove not to be such a problem. One of the most stupid things that Nu Labour did was to set an arbitrary level of what percentage of people at a certain age should be attending university - 50%, if memory serves (and it does). It was predicated on two largely false assumptions - that 50% of people are capable of attending university, and that 50% of people will actually find their lives and their career prospects enhanced by attending university. And, of course, this all came out at exactly the time when student loans were introduced. So what we've ended up with is a large number of people attending university to study esoteric topics with remarkably little connection to the real world and saddling themselves with massive debt in the process. Whereas they might have been better served getting a vocational qualification or work experience - which would also eliminate the debt angle.

I'm not saying that certain types of people shouldn't attend university, or that the experience isn't worth the expenditure. What I am saying is that a cut in the number of extra university places created in order to chase an arbitrary and stupid Nu Labour target is not that great a sacrifice. What the Con-Dem's need to do is make this case, and explain to the people not only that the cut is happening, but why it is happening. And just to sweeten the deal for them, they could also throw in a little explanation of what it is Nu Labour's fault that the cut is being made.

At the end of the day, all of these cuts had to happen. If you earn £1,000 a month and spend the money on essentials, and then spend another £500 a month that you don't have on going out and getting wasted, then at some point you're going to hit crisis point and you're going to have to cut back on the money you spend partying. It may be a painful sacrifice, but it is also a necessary and inevitable one. All that is happening on the national level is this process - cutting back after overspending.

Because - and make no mistake about this - Nu Labour have spent money like a drunken sailor on shore leave. And now it is down to others to clean up the mess they left behind. If we as a nation should learn anything from these "painful" cuts, then it is that the government cannot overspend indefinitely any more than individual can. And consequently, we should never, ever fall for something like the Nu Labour confidence trick again. All that talk about the black hole in Nu Labour's spending plans was 100% correct and right now, as jobs, spending and schemes are all consumed by that black hole, it may be too late to heed the warning this time, but it can stand as a warning for the future.

*And before anyone belly-aches that I don't understand the implications of cutting the spending on universities, let me assure you that I do and that it is actively impacting negatively on my life right here, right now. On a personal level, I want the government to throw as much money as possible at Universities, so some of it gets to me. On a national level, I can see that the government needs to make cuts, and than some academic funding can (and possibly should) be trimmed. I guess it's called perspective.