Region faces painful reality

As the Institute for Fiscal Studies made plain during the election campaign, no party has come clean about the extent of spending cuts and tax rises needed to meet their timetables for reducing the public-sector deficit. Now that two of those parties are in Government, however, the time for dissembling is over.

On the campaign trail, David Cameron was at least candid enough to admit that certain regions of the country, where public spending has been at its highest, would suffer most from the cuts to come.

Unfortunately, this means that the implications for Yorkshire are dismal indeed. A Yorkshire Post investigation suggests that tens of thousands of jobs could be lost in the region over the next five years as a result of reductions in public spending.

Latest figures indicate that the public sector takes up almost a quarter of Yorkshire's economy, yet job losses here would also have a big effect on private-sector companies that have grown dependent on public wealth.

That this situation has arisen is, of course, a damning indictment of New Labour.

In using public spending as an agent of economic growth, Gordon Brown was able to boast of investment and job creation on a massive scale in Labour heartlands such as Yorkshire and Humber and the North-East. Yet public spending at this level was always going to be unsustainable and the type of bust which Mr Brown claimed to have abolished has now exposed his idea of a continuous boom as a chimera.

As a result, public spending is far from being the agent of growth. In the short term, therefore, perhaps the best that can be hoped is that the inevitable pain is spread fairly and that Mr Cameron ensures that no region of the UK suffers disproportionately. For the reality is that the only way Britain can recover – and those who find themselves out of work gain new employment relatively quickly – is by a painful period of public austerity.