Ed gets a pasting

Wookster

Just listening to Today right now (am late for work) and hearing Evan Davis give Ed Milliband a pasting on the deficit.

What a lightweight Ed is. The boy is clueless.

"There is an alternative to spending cuts but I don't know what it is"

julieq

The problem is that at least half the population seem to want to believe there's an alternative to the cuts. The Labour party have done an extremely effective PR job and there's a big media focus on the "shutting down the kiddie's heart hospitals" sort of result of the cut. Which is depressing really, but that's mass media democracy for you.

Rochdale_Pioneers

Course there's an alterative. Even phasing the same cuts over 4 years instead of loading them all into FY11-12 would make a massive difference in protecting jobs and services. The additional employment and the additional confidence drives growth which drives tax revenues which reduces the deficit.

Why are people only focusing on the spend side of the balance sheet and ignoring the income side?

Wookster

julieq wrote: »

The problem is that at least half the population seem to want to believe there's an alternative to the cuts. The Labour party have done an extremely effective PR job and there's a big media focus on the "shutting down the kiddie's heart hospitals" sort of result of the cut. Which is depressing really, but that's mass media democracy for you.

+1

What we really need is another Labour term, followed by a gilt strike. that'll be enough for another 20 years of Tory rule!

Wookster

Rochdale_Pioneers wrote: »

Course there's an alterative. Even phasing the same cuts over 4 years instead of loading them all into FY11-12 would make a massive difference in protecting jobs and services. The additional employment and the additional confidence drives growth which drives tax revenues which reduces the deficit.

Why are people only focusing on the spend side of the balance sheet and ignoring the income side?

:rotfl::rotfl::rotfl::rotfl:

What alternative? What would you cut?

setmefree2

Labour's lead in the Polls has been falling over the last week or two. There has been a shift back to the Tories and Lib/Dems.

This might have something to do with Libya? Surely it can't have been the 1p off petrol?

Jennifer_Jane

Rochdale - Labour would be cutting £4 out of every £5 that the Coalition are cutting. That would lengthen the time that the interest payments would have to be repaid. Do you prefer that rich bankers overseas receive all that additional interest rather than keeping that money in the Country?

Graham_Devon

Wookster wrote: »

"There is an alternative to spending cuts but I don't know what it is"

He can't even tell anyone what spending cuts there are. All he can tell you are they are too fast and too deep.

Jennifer_Jane

Everything that Ed Milliband is doing at the moment is cynical and shameful. Comparing the cuts to the fight of the Suffragettes and worse, 40 years of the Anti-Apartheid movement where people were killed/beaten/imprisoned, or even just intimidated by the laws of the day, for their views, is an immense own-goal.

Follow this up with the sudden marriage on 27th May.

He's on the back foot, he knows it, his party knows it, and Ed Balls is sitting smugly in Parliament waiting for the ax to fall.

ILW

I heard the interview, and Miliband was incapable of coming up with a single alternative to what the current government are doing with the exception of saying "we would go for growth" which he could not substantiate. It was getting embarrasing, and Evan Davis is I believe, a labour supporter.

Heyman_2

Graham_Devon wrote: »

He can't even tell anyone what spending cuts there are. All he can tell you are they are too fast and too deep.

Yeah, it's all about the votes though isn't it - generalise as much as you possibly can in order to appeal to the widest possible audience. The reality is there aren't too many options in the current climate.

Cameron basically did the same thing before the election though, quite a lot of huffing and puffing without much in the way of substance as to what they actually proposed to do once they got into power. And a good thing too, given all the U-turns they've been having to do recently!