Nice Con, Nasty Con

Speaking through an orange muffler, Daveybloke today had a bit of a waffle to inject some balancing cuddliness into the Chopper Coalition's hitherto more or less undisguised slicey-dicey glee. At one point, Daveybloke and his orange muffler strayed close to the more demented outposts of Patsy Hackitt territory, claiming that the removal of a quarter of the public sector should be mostly a matter of reorganising a few timetables rather than abolishing public watchdogs or cancelling school buildings, as Labour would undoubtedly have done. The message appears to be that the public has no cause for alarm because the cuts planned by George the Progressively Regressive are not dramatically different from those which were planned by Labour and which Daveybloke and his orange muffler denounced during the election campaign as pitifully lacking in testosterone. Labour's cuts would have been twenty per cent over four years, while the Conservatives' cuts are twenty-five per cent over four to five years; the crucial difference being that cutting over four to five years "takes place over time", while cutting over four years does not. Also, although Daveybloke and his orange muffler are anxious to quell public anxiety over the cuts, there are plenty of reasons for people to be anxious, because although no frontline services will be excessively devastated, there are some rather naughty "parts of the country that are very dependent on the public sector"; the private sector, for instance. It's all jolly reassuring, I can tell you.