LONDON: The junior partner in Britain’s two-party coalition government, the Liberal Democrats, yesterday accused Prime Minister David Cameron of planning “devastating” spending cuts, their latest attempt to differentiate themselves before next year’s election.
Vince Cable, an outspoken Liberal Democrat minister for business, said Cameron’s Conservatives, if re-elected alone, would push through spending cuts to reduce the country’s deficit that would drastically reduce the police budget and mean Britain’s armed forces would become “largely ceremonial”.
“We would be almost halving the spending of local government in areas such as social care,” said Cable. “It would be devastating and it would be ideologically driven and I would be very strongly opposed to it,” Cable told the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show.
Official forecasts show state spending could fall to its lowest level since the 1930s under Conservative plans to eliminate the budget deficit by 2018/19 by cutting spending without raising taxes. The Liberal Democrats back tax rises too.
Cable’s broadside is part of a strategy to disassociate the centre-left party from the Conservatives before a national election in May next year to try to assuage supporters who feel the party betrayed its principles by going into government with the right-leaning Conservatives.
Although the strategy appears to be stepping up a gear there is no suggestion that the two parties, in coalition since 2010, will split before the election.
Cable, a possible contender for his party’s leadership if it became vacant, cast the Liberal Democrats as a restraining influence on the Conservatives in government who had successfully curbed their more extreme plans.
“We’ve kept the Tories (Conservatives) on quite a tight leash,” he said. “But now they’re being let off the leash and confronting the possibility of majority government, we’re getting into all kind of extremes.” Reuters
