British Prime Minister David Cameron on Sunday warned that the country faces years of “pain” as the spending cuts are implemented. However, in sharp contrast, his deputy and coalition partner Nick Clegg promised to protect poor and distanced himself and his party from the Tory economic policies of the 1980s “under Margaret Thatcher.”
The coalition government, which last month announced measures to save £6.2 billion, is facing a £156 billion budget deficit and has to plug this hole in finances soon.
Mr Cameron and Mr Clegg, in separate interviews to two newspapers, barely a fortnight before the emergency budget reiterated that sharp and deep spending cuts were inevitable.
“There is a huge amount of debt that has got to be dealt with. Crossing our fingers, waiting for growth and hoping it will go away is simply not an answer,” Mr Cameron told the Sunday Times. “The country has got an overdraft. The interest on that overdraft is swallowing up things that the nation should otherwise be spending money on. We have got to take people with us on this difficult journey.”
Mr Clegg too defended the spending cuts. “It is a huge mistake to think that tackling the fiscal crisis is somehow an unprogressive thing to do. Not tackling it would be a greater betrayal of our progressive ideals,” he told the Observer newspaper. However, he was quick to pledge a “no return to 1980s,” the time when Baroness Thatcher was the PM. “It is important that people understand that fiscal retrenchment does not mean a repeat of the 1980s. We’re going to do this differently. We’re not going to do it the way we did in the 80s,” he said.
He also pledged to ensure that “we are sensitive particularly to those parts of the country – like my own part, south Yorkshire – which are very dependent on the public sector, so you don’t just have a sink or swim approach to the north.”