David Cameron has rejected Audit Commission boss Steve Bundred’s suggestion that a public sector pay freeze would go some way towards making badly needed public spending cuts. Instead he’s proposing to save money by cutting back on quangos.
The Tories have been attacking Labour for not being honest about public spending and not being prepared to make the necessary difficult choices. No-one can accuse David Cameron of that though can they?
Not for him the easy option of telling millions of public sector workers they can’t have a pay rise. That would be a wimp’s way out. Instead, David Cameron has set his face against the wildly popular quangos. He knows that an assault on these revered bodies could well lead to a backlash from the voters but, hey, that’s what leadership is all about, isn’t it? Sometimes you’ve just got to make those hard decisions and tell it like it is.
Now we know what he meant when he talked about honesty and tough choices on spending cuts. And why Steve Bell draws him as a translucent jellyfish.
Update: A number of people have spotted the Tory promise to set up a super-quango; the NHS Board.
I saw his speech today. It was very good actually; he taqlked about using principles to inform regulation, rather than starting with cuts and working out where to go from there.
The media hated it becuase he had no figures to give away. On public sector pay he said there may be a freeze, there maybe small rises for key services like police and soldiers and there may be cuts for politicians and quangocrats.
All good stuff; much better than the current offering of pure lies from Mandelson.
Alas, I’m old enough to remember politicians banging on about quangos in the 70s and 80s. Everyone and his dog has promised to get rid of them yet, somehow, they’re still with us.
Well, Cameron was not promising to get rid of them, just to slim them down. Perhaps that is why everyone is disappointed with him, they wanted the bonfire.