TENS OF thousands of public sector jobs will disappear in post-general election spending cuts under the Conservative Party’s plan to cut an extra £12 billion (€13.7 billion) in the coming year, though the party insists that sackings can be avoided.
Declaring the savings, which could see up to 40,000 jobs go, to be “doable and deliverable” this year, party leader David Cameron said: “It’s not talking about people losing their jobs, it’s talking about not filling vacancies as they arise.”
The cutbacks – many of which Labour argues are already underway in changes that it has ordered – could be made in back-office operations, and so avoid cuts to frontline services, Mr Cameron insisted, adding that this “is not a plan to fire people”.
One of the UK’s biggest unions, Unite, which claimed 25,000 local authority jobs in the south of England were already under threat, said the Conservatives were offering the public “a deflated soufflé of despair”.
Up to two-thirds of jobs in poorer areas are public ones, it said: “What the Conservatives fail to realise is that local government in particular, and the public sector generally, are economic generators in their own right.”
Meanwhile, the chancellor of the exchequer Alistair Darling and the Conservative shadow chancellor George Osborne, who have locked horns all week over national insurance charges, traded blows by letter over their respective economic plans.
“Your entire economic strategy is now clearly in disarray and confusion. You need to set out today the full detail of the cuts that fund your £30 billion promise and let the British people judge for themselves whether it is a price worth paying,” Mr Darling wrote to Mr Osborne.
Earlier, Mr Darling accepted the Conservatives had had the better of the argument about national insurance, where the latter’s plan not to go ahead with part of the increase proposed by Labour from next April has been supported by leading businessmen.
“You really do have to ask whether these people have credible plans, or is it another example of where they may have got the political tactics right for the first day or so, but their overall judgment is just plain wrong,” said Mr Darling.
In his letter, Mr Osborne once again demanded sight of treasury papers examining the impact of an insurance rise, which, he said, would support his belief that the extra charges will cost jobs.
“It is an open secret that treasury officials did not recommend the national insurance rise, and nor did you. As chancellor, you had it imposed on you by Gordon Brown and [schools secretary] Ed Balls.
“Both men made the cynical political calculation that the public and the business community would not understand the implications of a national insurance rise, but they have been found out – just as they were on the 10p tax rise [row in 2007],” Mr Osborne wrote.
Backing for the Conservatives’ position has now come from 2,400 small and medium business owners, who have joined an online petition and the British Chambers of Commerce said it expects that thousands more will sign up in coming days.
Meanwhile, a 24-year-old Labour candidate in Scotland has been dropped after a foul-mouthed tirade on Twitter, the social networking site, against political opponents and fellow Labour figures, including London MP, Diane Abbott, better known, perhaps, for her appearances on the BBC TV's late-night political programme, This Week.
However, it emerged Labour had failed to discipline Stuart MacLennan before his behaviour was reported by the Scottish edition of the Sun, even though a number of cabinet and ex-cabinet ministers track his messages on the site.