The new government has been unveiling some of its policies, but largely remained coy about revealing information about spending plans, as Nick Robinson says here. An interesting revelation about health-care policy from Andrew Lansley the new Health Secretary of State in a recent speech; essentially the new government will be scrapping some of the new Labour targets (specifically the 4-hour waiting-time target at A&E, which is supposed to have some severe negative impacts).
Useful for anyone contemplating some of the key differences between new Labour and the Lib-Con government.
When there is something more concrete about the measures to cut the deficit, I'll post, but suffice to say this piece by Robert Peston about the international lessons for the UK, and this one by Stephanie Flanders about how bad news on the economy has played into the government's hands have much for us to ponder upon. Whether any party has done enough in the run up to the election to spell out how severe the cuts will have to be, is anybody's guess. Does the coalition government have enough of a mandate to pursue its policy in this area? We'll see. Check out my previous post about the deficit-mandate-manifesto issue and George Osborne here.
In addition to the above, the Labour Party leadership battle rumbles on. I'm not convinced that there has been enough debate to enable the Labour party to move on after the Blair-Brown years, or that enough profound lessons have been learned. Is the next leader of the Labour party the next William Hague or Michael Foot? Let's watch out for those debates.
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