(i) The natural reading of “deficit hawk” is somebody who wants a deeper and faster reduction in the deficit, as with the LibDems post-election shift from a Darling equivalent position to an Osborne one.

This is a doubling the scale/pace debate in a hawkish direction. (It is mainly between deficit hawks and semi-hawks; you can claim it is between deficit hawks and doves if you really think the sovereign risk default risk to the Darling strategy. Anybody calling that position deficit denial is just being deliberately misleading).

(ii) Secondly, whether the strategy is Darling, Cable(1), or Osborne-Clegg, there is the question of the measures to achieve the necessary tightening of the deficit. These will need to be a combination of tax rises and spending cuts, calculated after any differential positive/reduced impact on receipts through growth, increased/reduced spending on consequences of other choices (eg tax receipts, unemployment impacts of higher/lower GDP in the short-term, which the OBR projections seek to set out). So Guido is (erroneously) labelling pre-election Cable a “deficit hawk” [implicitly pro-Osborne] for setting out some of the possible routes to meeting his Darling/Cable semi-hawk/more doveish position in his Reform pamphlet.

These plans may also be needed to address the impact of any discretionary extra spending or tax commitments the parties make (such as marriage tax allowances or income tax cuts on one side; or whatever is proposed by different parties on bank levies, mansion taxes, NI rises, etc to raise revenue on the other).

The LibDems’ main election pledge was a £17 billion tax cut, by raising income tax thresholds. That means that Cable also had to propose a range of other tax raising and spending reduction measures to get back to a Darling position. If he felt that he needed to consider his Reform pamphlet proposals to help him to do that (and/or reduce the need for public service cuts), then he does not become a “deficit hawk” if adopting those policies doesn’t mean a tighter approach to the deficit

Ed Balls decries everything as everyone else’s mistakes. Quite how anyone at the Treasury from 97 to 10 can pretend they patronise John Maynard Keynes is a conversion to rank with the mythical ones in the fairy story book I was force fed at school. Ed Balls The man who was not there. The other Ed you know the one who is now into liberty but who supported enthusiastically endorsed 90 day detention. A lot of people have undergone dramatic conversions in the last few months bar David Miliband and I am not not sure it’s his best feature!

Even leaders compromise on manifestos and they certainly do with coalitions. To be taken seriously merely being a Labour rhetoric pumping machine is ridiculous. To try to play silly games about he said then he says now may be great for morons but is the nature of politics.

We know all parties move with the real politik, vested interests and public opinion to a degree.

This is small beer.

http://www.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/5344546/cable-separates-his-own-brand-from-the-lib-dems.thtml

So are Vince Cable’s public spending cuts his own, or are they Lib Dem policy? In his Straight Talk interview with the Lib Dem treasury spokesman this weekend, Andrew Neil tries to get to the bottom of it all. The result? Well, according to Cable, Nick Clegg “approved” his pamphlet for the think tank Reform, and some of its contents could find their way into the party’s manifesto:

“A lot of it is already Lib Dem policy, a lot of it already is, the rest of it will have to be considered and we’ll go into an election with a manifesto, we have a due process. Maybe because of who I am a lot of it will be there, but some of it may not be, it has to be agreed with my colleagues of course.”

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There were several ideas in the pamphlet (such as means-testing child benefit) which were explicitly repudiated ahead of and in the campaign
http://www.nextleft.org/2010/04/how-nick-and-vince-both-changed-their.html

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However, it does add credence to the theory that Clegg wanted to shift the party.

Perhaps he and David Laws did not particularly favour their own election argument. But on that point, he could not have carried the party or kept his shadow Chancellor, as Cable was in favour of their scale/speed of the deficit reduction argument even if Clegg’s real position is quite cloudy. Clegg was more interested in the public politics of the debate than the economics, I think it is fair to say.

One quarter of this, £4billion, is the interest on the debt alone.

It is a gamble to impose these cuts this quickly but without taking a risk the interest alone would / could amount to £70billion so to me it’s a no brainer.

Take the risk – if it works everything is great…