george osborne is taking my advice

 

Back in June, after the emergency budget, I wrote a post for Prospect suggesting that the most rational strategy for George Osborne would be to signal to the world that he is making huge cuts whilst actually making modest ones:

(A)t its heart, this is a question of communication...The optimal strategy for our government, and for all European governments, is to manipulate perceptions while inflicting minimum real-world pain. Governments ought to pursue fake austerity programmes; to talk big about slashing costs and shrinking the state while, in reality, only making the most superficial of cuts. This would restore confidence amongst market-makers and consumers that the problem is being dealt with, while saving millions of people from the misery of unemployment. If we’re going to administer medicine, it should be a placebo.

Now here's the Spectator editor Fraser Nelson responding to today's announcements:

The phrase “3 percent cut over four years” puts into perspective phrases like “bloodiest cuts since the war/the 20s/since man discovered fire”. Strikingly, in cash terms, the cuts are £23.3bn by 2014-15. I kept hearing this figure of £83bn cuts, which the Treasury refers to, and couldn’t see it anywhere in the CSR.  Turns out the sum is produced by quadruple-counting: the cuts in 2011-12 added to the cuts of 2012-13 added to 2013-14 etc. Brown used this disingenuous tactic to exaggerate spending. Just why the government would want to exaggerate the scale of its cuts I don’t know.

Well, now you do.

The scale of my influence is extraordinary.

Comments

[david bain]

I am sure they will feel modest to the recently unemployed

[Hal]

Can't bond investors add and subtract? How is this supposed to work?

[Scott]

That's a great pic. Danny Alexander just can't believe how things have turned out for him, can he?

I hear he corpses his way through PMQs.