LONDON — Prime Minister David Cameron said Monday that Britain’s financial situation was “even worse than we thought” and that the country would have to make savage spending cuts to bring its swelling deficit under control. Prime Minister David Cameron spoke at The Open University accompanied by Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander, right, in Milton Keynes, England on Monday.
Stern and grim-faced in a speech in Milton Keynes, just north of London, Mr. Cameron said, “How we deal with these things will affect our economy, our society — indeed our whole way of life.” “The decisions we make will affect every single person in our country,” he said. “And the effects of those decisions will stay with us for years, perhaps decades, to come.”
Mr. Cameron said that at more than 11 percent, Britain’s budget deficit was the largest ever faced by the country in peacetime. But he warned that the structural deficit was more worrisome. Britain currently owes a total of more than $1.12 trillion , he said, and in five years will owe nearly double that if nothing is done now. The country already spends more on interest payments on its debt than it does running its schools, he said, adding that how to reduce the deficit and cut down on borrowing was “the most urgent issue facing Britain today”…
At the same time, the government risks alienating Britons, particularly workers in the state sector, which Mr. Cameron singled out as an example of a public spending run amok. Mr. Cameron tried to soften the blow by saying that the cuts would not disproportionately affect the vulnerable. Mr. Clegg told The Observer newspaper over the weekend that Britain would not face “a repeat of the 1980s” and the budget cuts of the Margaret Thatcher years…
The prime minister laid the blame for the situation squarely on what he called “reckless” spending by the Labour government, which was in power for 13 years before being defeated in last month’s election. He said that as the financial crisis was “Labour’s legacy,” so, too, would be the spending cuts. “Nothing illustrates better the total irresponsibility of the last government’s approach than the fact that they kept ratcheting up unaffordable government spending even when the economy was shrinking,” he said…
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