To cut or not to cut

Our obsession with Tory spending plans continues to grow. Latest evidence: a fascinating Daniel Finkelstein comment piece riffing on Fraser Nelson's Coffee House post which argues that George Osborne should simply drop his pledge to match Labour spending plans:

Cameron is doing nothing original in aping Brown’s spending plans. This pledge was made by Portillo in 2001 and Letwin in 2004. If the electorate didn't want it then, why should they this time? Or, to borrow a Cameroon analogy, if voters didnt want ham and cheese in the last two elections why would they go for more ham and more cheese now?

Finkelstein responds that Portillo and Letwin promised no such thing - they only promised to match spending on hospitals and schools - and that Osborne shouldn't be forced into making early commitments:

Osborne doesn't need to make another pledge about the spending path of a Tory government for quite a while. It is ridiculous to ask him not to match Labour in future when we don't know what their spending path will be.

Meanwhile Sarkozy is talking about a five-year spending freeze and almost every other developed country is adapting for the 21st century by “expenditure reform” (see this pdf primer from the ECB, of all people). Britain, once a pioneer of spending reform, has become a museum where the virtues of big state spending remains an orthodoxy. In Osborne’s defence, Brown’s current spending plan is his most modest since SR00 – it would (marginally) lower spending as ratio of GDP. But Osborne's call for a “triple lock on stability” and reducing the tax burden “over the cycle” doesn’t set the heather alight, as they say in Kirkcaldy.