No new politics yet - just an old Con trick.

So David Cameron is warning that the cuts in the forthcoming budget will be the most drastic in a generation, so severe that they'll change our whole way of life, and it's all the fault of the previous administration who've left an even bigger financial mess than anticipated.

There's nothing "new-politics" about this. Blaming the last lot is the oldest political cliché in the book, rivaled only by a softening-up processes so that the cuts, when announced, don't seem too bad after all. I'm quite sure that most people who take only a casual interest in politics will see this as just "the mixture as before." The coalition has a honeymoon period of goodwill and it is rapidly wasting it by using these tired tactics.

It is even even more alarming that no-one in any party is making the Keynesian argument, supported by such distinguished economists as David Blanchflower, Martin Wolf, Hugo Radice and others (see previous posts) that cuts of any sort are a potentially disastrous policy in the middle of a recession, and quite unnecessary as the UK's public borrowing is well in line with both history and that of other major developed economies. We act as though he 1930s had never happened and Keynes had never written.

In spite of the debacle produced by the pursuit of monetarist policies and allowing free rein to market forces, a neocon consensus still prevails and the Tories are using it to justify their penchant for cutting back those parts of the state on which the vulnerable depend. If Liberal Democrats, as the junior partners in the coalition, are unable to oppose, we should at least remain silent.