Hunt's gaffe

Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt has apologised for saying that fan violence played a part in the Hillsborough disaster.

Politicians are fallible, and heard in context it is obvious that the comment was a thoughtless aside.

However, it does highlight a general ignorance and lack of interest in the North of England on the part of some Tory MPs, and echoes Boris Johnson's Liverpool gaffe of a few years ago.

The comments will do little to persuade regions in the North - which were not convinced by the Conservatives at the general election - that the party represents them or understands their concerns.

Vote for Christmas!

The coalition government is to write to public sector workers asking for ways to save public money. Here's a suggestion to get us started: Why not write a handful of letters to their elected representatives in the trade unions, instead of six million letters to each individual member?

The government is borrowing a tactic from public sector managers. Consulting directly with staff can be justified as a means to really engage with workers - it just so happens to exclude the trade unions, who are nominated by public sector staff to represent them in discussions.

Why do some people find the concept of collective bargaining so difficult to understand? In law, and in parliamentary democracy, we have no difficulty in understanding the idea that people can nominate another to speak on their behalf. When it comes to industrial relations, however, public sector managers – and now the government – reserve the right to speak to whoever is convenient.

And consulting staff directly will be very convenient indeed for the coalition government. It will allow them to pick and choose anecdotal examples to justify their strategy of cuts, using different views scattered across the workforce to validate a massive programme of cuts and redundancies. It is very similar to the strategy they are already using in welfare, where they are using the complaints of working families about unfairness in the benefit system to justify cutting their entitlements.

They will try to avoid consulting the unions about cuts because they know they will get a response they don’t want to hear: Why don’t you address the deficit with a greater emphasis on taxation, and why are you gambling with the economy and our members’ lives by cutting so quickly and deeply?

I suspect this is what the majority of public sector workers will really think. So if it is genuinely interested in consultation, the government can save itself a lot of time - and money.

New politics

So the big headline from the Tory "emergency budget" is that VAT is to rise, and it's time for the Lib Dems to look very sheepish indeed. They campaigned against a Tory VAT rise, and now they are facilitating it.

As anticipated, it appears savings will be made almost entirely through public spending cuts. This is in spite of Osborne's very rare admission during the budget speech that this crisis was created in the banking sector.

Conservatives don't know any better. But many Lib Dems will be asking how a budget can be called fair when poor people who are dependent on public services appear to be paying for a crisis caused by irresponsibility in the banking sector.

Nick Clegg promised us a new politics. I suspect many of his supporters will now be wishing for a return to the old.

Nick Clegg's welfare safety net

The Tories say that spending on public services for people who don't depend on them is unsustainable, and that we need to change our expectations of what the State is supposed to do.

Now the Conservatives and Lib Dems are shackled together in coalition, how will this Tory philosophy square with the Liberal Democrats' stated commitment to public services for all? Here are a few extracts from the preamble to the Lib Dem Federal Constitution:

"We promote human rights and open government, a sustainable economy which serves genuine need, public services of the highest quality."

"We support the widest possible distribution of wealth and promote the rights of all citizens to social provision."

"We seek to make public services responsive to the people they serve, to encourage variety and innovation within them and to make them available on equal terms to all."

It is difficult to see how grassroots Lib Dems will swallow public service cuts in the longer term, and party activists should question whether they entered politics to assist the Tories in permanently reducing the size and function of the welfare state.

Some party grandees are rumoured to be very unhappy with today's announcements, including former leader Charles Kennedy. Kennedy remains very popular with party members, and his unease will be echoed by the Lib Dem grassroots.

They are not in denial about the need for cuts. Nor are they frightened of making difficult decisions. What concerns them is the suspicion that they are aiding and abetting a Tory assault on the long-term prospects for social democracy in the United Kingdom.

Excuses, excuses...

In the last fortnight it's become obvious that the Lib-Con coalition, led by the Tories, are using the deficit as an excuse to radically re-balance the economy. For this they have no mandate, and in doing so they are flying in the face of the settled public will for an interventionist state and well-funded public services.

The election result was a public expression of dissatisfaction with a stale 13-year-old Labour government. It was not in any sense a mandate for the Tories - who failed to secure a majority - to dismantle the welfare state.

To successfully blame this economic crisis on public service spending has been an act of breathtaking political sleight-of-hand on the part of Cameron's PR team - led by the controversial Andy Coulson, who makes Alistair Campbell look like some kind of moral sage.

Furthermore, we are not "in this together" if the deficit is being tackled almost entirely through public service cuts, which disproportionately target the poor and regions outside of the South East.

To summarise: the economic situation was caused by irresponsibility in the city, not profligacy in public spending; this government has no mandate to re-balance the economy; and David Cameron looks like the comedy theatre mask.