Playing politics

Alistair Darling will admit today that Britain faces an era of deep spending cuts as he pledges to halve the £180 billion budget deficit while protecting hospital, school and police services.
In a surprise move he will disclose a Treasury “assessment” that has been conducted in recent weeks to determine the sums needed to safeguard the front line in health, schools and the Home Office.
In an attempt to win credibility for his four-year “deficit reduction plan”, he will acknowledge that other government departments will have to meet the cost with “real cuts”, including the scaling back or cancellation of some high-profile projects.
The Chancellor will put a figure on the sums that he has decided schools, hospitals and the police will need to avoid damaging their performance. Treasury sources admitted that the figure would imply that substantial cuts would be suffered elsewhere.
Although Mr Darling will claim that growth, efficiency savings and some new taxes — including a supertax on bankers’ bonuses — will soften some of the impact, he will begin axing future budgets.
“We are not fixing departmental budgets now but people have the right to know which services we will prioritise and how we intend to pay for them,” a Treasury source said. “We are under no illusion that that will mean some tough choices — cutting unnecessary programmes and lower priority budgets.”
Today’s Pre-Budget Report is intended to supply Labour with ammunition for the coming general election. The Conservatives will be challenged to match specific guarantess, such as a two-week maximum wait to see a cancer specialist. But in putting figures on pledges to protect “frontline services” Mr Darling is confronting voters with the scale of the coming cutbacks in other areas.
The Tory leadership launched a pre-emptive attack on the Chancellor’s credibility, claiming that Britain faced the “disaster” of losing its top credit rating.
George Osborne, the Shadow Chancellor, seized on an international agency’s warning that plunging tax receipts in future years meant an “inexorable deterioration” of the affordability of Britain’s record debts.
He claimed that the latest warning from Moody’s was “further evidence that Britain faces the disaster of having its international credit rating downgraded unless we get on top of our debts”.
But the Treasury accused him of “playing politics” with the country’s standing in the money markets. “To selectively quote is irresponsible and deliberately misleading. All three credit rating agencies have reaffirmed the Government’s AAA rating this year, including Moody’s in October and again today.”