Cutting the UK's deficit - not so hard after all

There's a spiffy interactive graphic on the FT's site giving you the opportunity to act as chancellor of the exchequer and decide which bits of the UK's budget you'd cut so as to balance the books.

One of the things that strikes me after playing around with this is that, considering these issues are all "third rail" ones for British politicians (ie, as with train tracks' third rail, "you touch it, you die"), I didn't find it very difficult to make the necessary cuts. I realise that no politician likes to go out during an election campaign and say unpopular things, but given the level of doom and gloom about the impossibility of Britain ever balancing its budget I was quite shocked how easy it was to win at the game. (That may be because it's only asking you to save £44bn, rather than the £100bn-odd you'd need to eliminate the medium-term UK deficit without faster-than-expected growth or higher-than-expected taxes).

Anyway, it's a fun thing to play around with. The choices are, I guess, a lot easier for me because I'm just some schmo sitting at his computer playing prime minister, rather than a party leader with fellow MPs and advisers and interest groups and voters to worry about. But here's what I went for:

• Ringfence schools and hospitals spending (quite a big handicap, given how much of the budget they eat up)


• 2.5% levy on public sector pensions (yes, there will be angst, but they're absurdly generous compared to what the rest of us will ever get. This long-term liability alone risks toppling the whole budget - and if you can't bite that bullet now in this rather limited way, when can you?)


• Cut public sector jobs to reduce pay bill by 7% (Not an easy one, but this would come mostly from a hiring freeze. Again, everyone is having to freeze new hiring at the moment, and it's not like you couldn't raise it again in future. The police, to name one area of the public sector, are absurdly overstaffed in my experience with them)


• Means test child benefit and disability living allowance (As someone who could in theory be drawing child benefits in about four months time, I still think it's a waste of money. I understand the hallowed principles behind social insurance and non-means-testing, but I think all benefits really ought to be safety nets for the poor, not handouts to the middle class. I can't see why a childless person on £10,000 a year should be subsidising a with-child couple on a combined £100,000 a year)


• Cut police and prison population back to 1997 levels (the police are, like I said above, ridiculously overstaffed and the prison population is a social problem in its own right that should be cut even if it didn't save us money. We shouldn't be putting so many people away. This probably is a bit of a third-rail issue - imagine the gyrations of the Daily Mail during a police strike - but I've got some backup plans, see below)


• Cancel building two aircraft carriers (why do we need these? I mean, seriously?)


• Cut armed forces personnel by 25,000 (ditto. We should drop all this nonsense about being a second-tier power. What are they for? Defending the Turks and Caicos islands?)


• Stop school building for three years (I used to cover construction, and the contractors are making a mint out of the schools building programme. What matters is teachers, not buildings, and if it's only a question of delaying a programme in the grip of a fiscal crisis then I think we can handle it)


• Cut spending to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland by 10% (I presume this refers to the transfers under the Barnett formula, by which some of the UK's poorest boroughs in England subsidise richer ones elsewhere. I'd probably keep the spending in Northern Ireland for the sake of both peace and general deprivation, but if it hastens the push for independence by Scotland and Wales - seriously, Wales? - bring it on)


• Withdraw concessionary fares for pensioners (as with other benefits, this should be means-tested)


• Delay Crossrail for 3 years (no one expects it to be built on time anyway)


• Halve spending on road maintenance and upgrades (if it makes driving less attractive that's no bad thing)

I realise there's some politically risky stuff in all that, but there's really nothing that I could see making life much harder for the worst-off in society. If anything, most of the cuts rebalance spending by cutting elements of rich welfare and the law 'n' order 'n' military side of the budget. All that said, there's not such a huge amount of fat there that I'd find it easy to cut much deeper.