Ten days ago, Britain’s Conservative-Liberal coalition government was sailing calmly toward its landmark 100 days in office when it hit a small iceberg. Its Minister of State for Universities and Science, David Willetts, was on television defending (among other potential cuts in spending) a proposal to withdraw free milk for children under 5 when Prime Minister David Cameron changed the policy.
While on the air, the hapless minister was told by the interviewer that Downing Street had announced free milk would no longer be on the list of potential cuts. Mr. Willetts batted away this embarrassment pretty well – not for nothing is he known as Two Brains – but he was the victim of an obvious political calculation. A similar recommendation 40 years ago had given its proposer, Margaret Thatcher, her first hostile sobriquet: Milk Snatcher. Mr. Cameron had decided to avoid charges of Dave the Dairy Thief.
The problem is that free milk is not a small iceberg but the tip of a very large one. Bold spending cuts are the glue that holds the coalition together. Both Mr. Cameron and his Deputy Prime Minister, Liberal Democrat Leader Nick Clegg, argue that only a coalition government can push through the cuts needed to restore Britain’s budgetary and financial stability. They offer Tories and Lib Dems both balm and justification for accepting policy concessions to the other party. And they soothe the markets.
Journalists debate how deep the proposed cuts will really go economically. Some maintain they amount only to a spending freeze. But there’s no doubt they go very deep politically. According to the June budget statement, ministries not protected by special “ring fencing” (such as the health and overseas aid departments) will see their projected spending cut by 25 per cent over five years. On Oct. 22, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, is due to present the final list of cuts in practical detail. It will contain scores, if not hundreds, of “free milk” embarrassments.
Or will it? The televised abandonment of David Willetts has now raised uncertainty over whether the cuts will actually materialize when the going gets tough. Michael Brown, a former Tory MP who’s now a columnist, knows the ways of government. “Across Whitehall,” he wrote in The Independent, “under-secretaries and ministers of state may now be less brave as they try to second-guess Downing Street’s likely reaction to any bold proposal they might instruct officials to prepare. ‘Minister, I’m not sure this will go down too well if No. 10 gets to hear about this’ will be the menacing default position of civil servants.”
Once doubts arise about the coalition’s determination to proceed with its full program, MPs on all sides will begin to lobby for the preservation of their favourite items of spending. Tories and Lib Dems tend to differ over what’s vital and what’s dispensable. Bold spending cuts, instead of holding the coalition together, may begin to be a source of division between (and within) the parties.
Indeed, this is already happening. Mr. Clegg has questioned the need to build the next stage of Britain’s Trident nuclear weapon, which Tories such as Defence Secretary Liam Fox consider essential in a world where Iran, Pakistan and North Korea are going nuclear. A vigorous war of leaks to the media is raging in Whitehall over Trident. Still, most battles over spending cuts – along with likely public unpopularity over them – lie in the future.
