THE SUNDAY TIMES: Public spending cuts have been made imperative by the crisis in the eurozone, Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, said today as the new coalition Government prepared to start chipping away at Britain’s record £156 billion deficit.
Years of Labour “throwing money around like there was no tomorrow” had left a “black hole” in the country’s finances, he said.
Mr Clegg’s scathing assessment of the outgoing regime came as George Osborne, the Chancellor, prepared to announce tomorrow where the axe will fall for his first £6bn of cuts — most of which will be ploughed straight into paying off the deficit.
Having backed Labour’s assertion during the election campaign that cuts this year would jeopardise the fragile economic recovery, Mr Clegg told BBC1’s Andrew Marr Show that turbulence in the eurozone had lent a greater urgency to balancing Britain’s books.
“I don’t think anybody could have anticipated then quite how sharply the economic conditions in the eurozone would have deteriorated and that the need to show that we are trying to get to grips with this suddenly became much greater,” the Liberal Democrat leader said.
“That is why we need to show at a more accelerated timetable than I had initially thought that we are going to get to grips with this great black hole in our public finances.
“The outgoing Labour Government was just throwing around money like there was no tomorrow, probably knowing that they were going to lose the election, making extraordinary commitments left, right and centre, many of which they knew they couldn't honour.
“So not only are we going to have to deal with cuts, we are also going to have to actually deal with some of the pledges that the Government made in the past which they didn’t even provide budgets for.
“The age of plenty where money could be thrown around in almost carelessness, which is what the outgoing Labour Government has done for some time, now is over.” Read on and comment >>> Sadie Gray | Sunday, May 23, 2010
