Michael Meacher MP

So the new Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) is daily earning accolades as the Government’s arms-length battering ram to hammer away at the targets the Tories have long had in their sights for shrinking the State.   Yesterday it was their announcement that the structural deficit (the part of the overall budget deficit that still remains even when the economy has returned to its trend economic growth rate of about 2.5%) was in their view much larger than previously estimated, namely about three-quarters of the current deficit or about £120bn.   That conveniently allowed Osborne to ‘justify’ much deeper spending cuts in order to eradicate it in the course of this Parliament.   If he is serious about this, and he appears to be, the cuts will be the deepest since the Second World War, deeper even than Thatcher’s.   And now it’s public pensions next in the firing line. (more…)