Cameron flip flops again

David Cameron has backtracked on Tory "policy" once again by saying that a government under his leadership will not make "swingeing cuts" in their first year of office sparking rumours of a rift between Cameron and the Shadow Chancellor, Boy George Osborne.

To be honest, it doesn't surprise me that Cameron has flip flopped once again as the man does not appear to have any strong convictions on anything with the exception of his divine right to be the national leader - and if there is one thing that is certain in politics it is that a man who believes himself to be born to govern the country will say and do just about anything to make that belief a reality.

It's not completely surprising to me that Cameron flip flops around like this - after all, he's been that way since he first became leader of the Tory Party - but what does surprise me is that he has bought into the socialist idea that government spending means more national growth. It doesn't - unless you include growth in welfarism, benefits spending, single motherhood, crime and violence as "national growth".

There is no doubt that targeted spending on income generating areas can produce an increase in national growth and prosperity, but that means spending money on making something that your people want or that you can sell abroad. In other words, manufacturing. It also needs to be money that is spent internally and goes to your own people and businesses - it's no good spending billions of pounds to support the car industry in Japan or Germany! The other thing that government spending needs to do in circumstances like this is to have an impact on the short term - although it is always a good idea to invest in the future when you have the money to do so, when times are hard you have to do what is necessary for the here and now.

But by declaring that his government will not make "swingeing cuts" in their first year of office, Cameron is saying that he accepts (once again) that all that this current government spends money on is necessary when it quite clearly isn't. Once again, Cameron is saying that he will stick to Labour spending plans as he did when he first became leader of the Conservative Party - a "commitment" he then backtracked on a year or so ago.

I know I've said this before, but I'll keep saying it until someone does it. There is an obvious and easy way to make significant spending cuts in the first month let alone the first year - you tell all the quangos and agencies currently running Britain that they must cut their budget by 20%. How they do this you leave up to them - but you tell them they must do it.

Quangos were responsible for £130 billion of spending two or three years ago - it's quite likely that they are spending anything upwards of £150 billion today, but let's assume they are still spending £130 billion.

A 20% cut in that budget next year will save the country £26 billion.

You can save more in that one simple measure than all the tinkering around the edges proposed by the Tories and Lib Dems manage with their ideas for saving £100 million here and £80 million there. You don't have to make changes to the taxation system, you don't have to decide what quangos and agencies to get rid of altogether (although, in future years, there is plenty of scope for a massive quango cull) and what you do will have virtually no effect on "front line" services. And you can do it on the day you take office.

But Cameron has revealed once more his true colours. He IS a socialist.