Trevor Kavanagh was the Sun’s political editor and the most respected such editor in Fleet Street. He has not lost his sure touch with the one exception here of the populist but crazy idea of a windfall tax on energy! “Cuts” is his message - not more taxes, especially silly ones! Christina Speight, aka Cassandra ==================== THE SUN 25.8.08 “Four-letter word I want to hear from Cameron ... cuts” By TREVOR KAVANAGH IF you are waiting for a cut in stamp duty to kick-start the flagging property market, forget it. It’s not going to happen. Nor will there be a windfall tax on energy companies to finance a giveaway for hard-up families who cannot afford to turn on the heating. [A windfall tax would just make things not only worse in the short term, but much worse in the long term, for it would mean that the oil and gas under British waters would stay right there - under British waters - while the oil companies went off somewhere more friendly! -cs ] Gordon Brown may be plotting all sorts of handouts to refloat his boat. But he is no longer Chancellor. Alistair Darling is running the Treasury now and he won’t spend money he doesn’t have. The heady 16 years of unbroken economic growth are over. After a decade of irresponsible extravagance, the cupboard is bare. Savings that might have been set aside for the lean years have been devoured by Brown’s rapacious spending and borrowing. We are all, like Lib-Dem leader Nick Clegg, “up to the gills” in debt and trawling around cheap supermarkets for bargains. Big chains report steep drops in trade around this time every month as cash-strapped customers wait for the next pay day. So Asda, among others, are today offering cheap “specials” to lure customers torn between putting food on the table or fuel in their tanks. Brown vows any recession would be short-lived. But every major economist and central banker warns the world faces the worst and longest battering in decades. Of course, we must remember this [Brown -cs] was the Chancellor who promised “no more boom and bust”. It was he who insisted our economy would keep growing robustly — right up to the moment last week when it crashed to zero. You know things are bad when thousands of hard-working and valued migrants start deserting Britain because life is so tough now. Coup Sadly, they will leave behind too many migrants who are neither hardworking nor valuable to the economy. So what will Brown do about it? Or, more to the point, what will the Tories do about it? Voters have given up on Brown. Labour supporting readers tell me they will never vote for him. Pledge ... David Cameron MPs, back from their summer break this weekend, have started plotting again. We will know within the next fortnight whether they have the stomach for a coup. Whether they do or not, Labour faces a thrashing at the next election. So it’s time for the Tories to start telling us their plans. Their incoherent promise to “share the proceeds of growth” looks even more ridiculous with no growth to share. Why on earth does David Cameron stick to his pledge to match Labour’s discredited spending promises? There is no money for these wasteful and frequently misguided ideas. You don’t have to be “nasty” to say that Brown’s socialist experiment has been tested to destruction. Honest Labour MPs admit the Government has made a hash of every big spending department — health, education, welfare, transport. Billions have been squandered on projects which failed the people who paid for them — the taxpayer. Even those intended to benefit most, poor children and the elderly, have lost out. The gainers, at the expense of future generations — are the freshly-bloated army of Government workers on big pay and gold-plated pensions. A proper audit would swiftly reveal huge potential savings. “Cuts” is no longer a dirty word, whether pruning worthless spending or putting more money back into taxpayers’ pockets. Almost anyone — even Brown — could have kept Britain prosperous in the last 16 “fat years” of growth and low inflation. It will be a long time before we see sunny days like those again — without some tough decisions. These are tough times. We need realistic politicians who are prepared to say so AND spell out what they are going to do about it. And, for the first time in a generation, voters may be ready to support a party that tells them the harsh facts of life.