Johnson mocks Lenihan in speech

LABOUR REACTION:LABOUR'S SHADOW chancellor, Alan Johnson mocked Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan's declaration last year that Ireland had "turned the corner" during sharp exchanges in the House of Commons yesterday over George Osborne's plans to cut more than £80 billion off the UK's government's spending over four years.

Accusing the Conservative /Liberal Democrats of making “the deepest cuts to public spending in living memory”, Mr Johnson said it risked following Ireland’s example. “That was the Irish Minister of Finance last autumn, when he told the Irish parliament that his austerity plan means that they have turned the corner and four months later they slid back into recession.”

M Johnson sharply criticised the chancellor and prime minister David Cameron: “The [Conservatives and Liberal Democrats] opposite are deficit deceivers who have peddled a series of myths to the British public. [The] plans are a reckless gamble with people’s livelihoods.”

The cuts were driven, he said, by the Conservatives’ ideological determination to shrink the size of the state, but their actions threatened “people’s future, people’s pensions and people’s services” between now and 2015. “For many of them this is what they came into politics for,” he said.

Labour MPs loudly cheered Mr Johnson, though that was partly to cover the embarrassment felt by many of them after the party’s newly elected leader Ed Miliband was badly mauled yesterday by Mr Cameron, who derided him when questions failed to strike home.

Former Labour chancellor Alistair Darling said Mr Osborne’s actions went too far and threatened to drive the UK back into recession. His claims that he had cut departmental spending by less than Labour intended made no sense, Mr Darling said. “You can’t say at one and the same time he’s taking action tougher than what we would have taken and then say he is cutting less.”