The great cuts lie: The march by state sector workers will fuel hysteria that there's a spending massacre. Nothing could be further from the truth

Daily Mail
"With bitter irony, the TUC has billed today’s event as The March for the Alternative. Yet neither the unions, nor the BBC, nor Mr Miliband ever put forward any realistic ‘alternative’ to the cuts, save for demanding a tax raid on the bankers (a step the Coalition itself took this week).

Nor do Labour acknowledge that, had they been re-elected, they would themselves be implementing sharp cuts.The fact is, with this week’s Budget projecting that Britain will soon be more than £1.2trillion in debt, there really is no option but to reduce our terrifying reliance upon ever-greater borrowing. ....The cuts are not about sending Britain back to the Dark Ages. They are about restoring sanity to our nation’s finances so future generations are not burdened with a crippling, ambition-sapping debt.

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"No one, or almost no one, will point out the amazing truth, which is that these cuts — variously described as ‘savage’ or ‘draconian’ or, by the TUC, as a ‘massacre’ — are actually comparatively mild. Far from being ‘slashed’, public expenditure at the end of the process in 2014-15 will be a mere three per cent lower in real terms than it was in 2009-10 before the cuts began.

That wasn’t a misprint. Three per cent lower. In 2009-10, government spending was £669 billion. In 2014-15 it is projected to be £647 billion, if you strip out the effects of inflation, or an estimated £764 billion if it is included. Expenditure will be £710 billion in 2011-2012, so in money terms it has already gone up."