Italy’s Rude Awakening: Perhaps la Vita Isn’t Always So Dolce After All!
THE TELEGRAPH: Italy is the latest eurozone nation to be threatened by finacial woe - after Silvio Berlusconi assured his compatriots for months that they had weathered the crisis.

They were the advance guard of an army of Italians whose anger is rising as their country joins the rest of the continent struggling with the worst economic crisis of recent times.

Waving banners, blowing whistles and chanting "Shame!", hundreds of public service workers rallied outside Italy's parliament in Rome to protest against the austerity package announced by the centre-Right government of Silvio Berlusconi.

The measures aim to shave 24 billion euros off government spending in the next two years.

They include a crackdown on tax evasion and welfare fraud, a three year salary freeze for Italy's 3.4 million civil servants and substantial cuts to regional government which will almost certainly result in less money for hospitals and schools.

In pushing through the package with an emergency parliamentary decree, Italy joined Portugal and Spain in trying to fend off contagion from the crisis which has brought deadly riots to Greece and shaken confidence in the euro. The cuts are greater in scale than the £6 billion of immediate savings recently announced by Britain's new coalition government, but are comparable with what the UK may face over the next 12 months.

The protesters, mostly women, who had gathered outside Italy's lower house of parliament in Piazza di Montecitorio, a cobbled square lined with expensive hotels and boutiques, were stung by the announcement and fearful for the future.

For months Mr Berlusconi had been assuring his countrymen that Italy has weathered the global economic crisis much better than the rest of Europe.

The government's overnight switch from breezy optimism to dire warnings of "very tough sacrifices" in order to spare Italy from a Greek-style bailout, and associated international ignominy attached, made the announcement of the austerity package all the more shocking to those with most to lose. Advance guard of angry women lead Italians into European protests over austerity cuts >>> Nick Squires in Rome | Saturday, May 29, 2010

Vision Offered by the Coalition Government in the Queen's Speech Will Offer Little to Help Victims of the Cuts
THE TELEGRAPH: It's a new nation under the coaltion government – but be warned: the newly poor will need a voice, says Mary Riddell.

Tomorrow, with all due pomp and pageantry, the Queen will tell Parliament that her Government will exercise "freedom, fairness and responsibility". Her speech, rooted in 500 years of tradition, will herald the birth of a modern nation.

The legislative programme outlined by Her Majesty is the gateway to a Britain in which children play in streets uncluttered by CCTV cameras and superfluous immigrants. These pupils, heading to sumptuous schools set up by (non-working?) parents, may walk past JobCentre Plus branches packed with benefit scroungers being shoehorned into gainful employment. Any anti-social elements disturbing the civic calm will be swiftly dealt with by our newly-politicised police. What happy days.

I do not mean to parody the Con-Lib agenda. Scrapping ID cards, curbing the excesses of the surveillance state and electoral reform are welcome and overdue. Even so, the upbeat pitch of today's proceedings stands in stark contrast to yesterday's.

The £6.25 billion cuts outlined by George Osborne sounded modest and, in some cases, positive. We can all sign up to a bit of quangocide and an end to first-class travel by civil servants. But these are the surface grazes before tax cuts kick in and the axe falls on the 300,000 public sector jobs threatened by efforts to cut the £157 billion budget deficit.

As the age of austerity dawns, the government is unfurling two contradictory visions of Britain. One is of a settled country reclaiming equality and freedom. The other shows a future so divisive that its strictures may rupture our tacit social contract and threaten civic peace. Obviously, cuts are essential, and Labour profligacy has made them more so. But the Coalition, still in its honeymoon, is being allowed to draw a veil over the pain to come. >>> Mary Riddell | Monday, May 24, 2010

EU Crisis Makes Cuts Imperative Says Clegg As Queen's Speech Is Leaked
Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg on the Andrew Marr show. Photograph: The Sunday Times
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

Coalition Government: National Health Service Faces Cuts, Says Andrew Lansley
THE TELEGRAPH: The National Health Service will not be spared the efficiency savings which the Government will impose on the entire public sector, Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary, has warned.

Overall spending on the NHS will rise in real terms, he said, but the “substantial increase” in health spending over the past decade under Labour was “not sustainable for the future”.

The Government would have to go beyond the annual efficiency savings for the NHS set out by Labour, Mr Lansley said. Labour said its plans had implied savings of up to £20 billion by 2013-14 and warned that the coalition’s plans to do more would mean “real pain for the NHS”. >>> Rosa Prince and James Kirkup | Friday, May 14, 2010

Spain Unveils Billions in Deficit Cuts to Halt Eurozone Crisis Fears
THE TELEGRAPH: Spain will slash public spending by €6bn and cut civil servants' by 5pc salaries [sic] this year as part of a plan to ease fears the country could slide into a debt crisis like that of Greece.

Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, the prime minister, on Wednesday outlined a series of measures that will include a suspension in automatic increases to retirement pensions, a drop in overseas aid and a reduction in government investment.

He said 13,000 civil service jobs would be cut in 2010, with public sector wages frozen in 2011.

Mr Zapatero was fleshing out the details of a €15bn plan announced on Sunday for deeper spending cuts to reduce Spain's deficit from 11.2pc of GDP last year to 9.3pc in 2010, and eventually to 3pc in 2013. >>> | Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Mandy Tells Unions: We'll Fight You on Spending Cuts after TUC Chief Predicts 4m Jobless and Riots in the Streets
MAIL ONLINE: Lord Mandelson will today face down union threats of strikes and rioting if there are public spending cuts.

In the most hawkish statement yet from a senior minister on the need for restraint he will say Gordon Brown has decided to stop 'throwing money' at state services.

The Business Secretary, in a major speech, will also insist that the Tories are 'ideologues', hellbent on wrecking the public services.

His intervention comes as union barons raised the spectre of 1980s-style riots if public spending is slashed.

TUC general secretary Brendan Barber said taking an axe to public services would spark a 'double quick, double dip' recession and push unemployment over four million.

Unemployment could hit 40 per cent in major cities in the North, triggering massive social unrest, he said.

Speaking on the eve of the TUC conference in Liverpool, Mr Barber said: 'Cut the stimulus off and the economy would go into decline again.

'It would take many years before there was any chance of returning to anything like full employment. That would scar for life a whole generation of young people.'

He warned: 'Last time we suffered slash and burn economics we had riots in the streets here.

'I make no prediction that this would happen again, but it would take us back to the days of a deep north-south divide and once again hollow out whole areas of the economy.' >>> Tim Shipman and Kirsty Walker | Monday, September 14, 2009