Tory cuts will put public services and NHS at risk

We are less than ten weeks away until the general election when the country will give their views on five years of Coalition Government and the policies of austerity.

Despite promising to balance the budget in a single parliament, the Prime Minister and Chancellor have missed their target on the deficit by £83 billion. It means they will go into the next election promising more spending cuts and five more years of austerity.

Even the Lib Dems, who have sanctioned every Tory spending cut in this parliament, called the Tories spending plans “utterly irresponsible” and “grotesquely unfair” that would shrink the state to a point where public services would be unable to cope.

I am pleased they have finally seen the light. Unfortunately it is four and a half years too late. Their support for the Tories has led to the NHS sell off, they removed support for young people abolishing EMA and tripling tuition fees, they cut taxes for millionaires while raising VAT which hits the poorest disproportionately, they promised to make work pay but have cut tax credits and support for working parents, they backed the bedroom tax, and have decimated local government finance with Durham County Council losing a quarter of a billion pound.

The Tory spending plans after the next election will mean a further £70 billion of cuts to public spending, that will lead to unprecedented cuts to vital public services such as policing, defence and social care.

The cuts would be so extreme that they would lead to the smallest police force since comparable records began, the smallest army since Cromwell and over a third of older people receiving social care losing their support.

However, even when they promise to protect services such as education, it comes with conditions. Despite the failure of David Cameron’s Free School programme, the most recent being Durham Free School, he has promised to press on regardless planning to open 500 new free schools by 2020. This would lead to a £4 billion hole in the government’s school building budget with schools in East Durham left plugging the gaps.

The Tories cuts are unprecedented, extreme and close to impossible to deliver. As a result there is a real risk that the Chancellor will be forced to break his promise to ring-fence the NHS, as all other countries that have implemented spending reductions on this scale have cut health spending.

David Cameron is planning bigger spending cuts over the next four years than the last five years. This would cause huge damage to our public services and put our NHS at risk. There is only one way to stop these cuts, and we must ensure David Cameron does not return to Downing Street after May 7.