All the cuts being proposed at the moment are crazy. If you want to reduce a budget deficit, there are lots of different wasy of doing it – making sure major corporations don’t tax dodge as much as they do now should be the main focus (see http://www.taxjustice.net), and the rich are still very much under-taxed compared to many European countries. Also, as I beleive Will Hutton pointed out, the budget deficit is smaller now than in the glory year’s of the british empire.

This is an ideological move, an act of class war – the neoliberals are using the crisis as a chance to attack the public sector and using the budget deficit to justify it.

A very, very similar thing happened in most third world contries in the 1980s under the structural adjustment programs, and it led to decades of economic stagnation, but a massive boost for transnational corporations and wealthy national elites.

We’ll see how this one pans out…