PM Cameron warns Britons of decades of austerity

Prime Minister David Cameron said Monday that Britains financial situation was even worse than we thought...

Prime Minister David Cameron said Monday that Britains financial situation was even worse than we thought and that the country would have to make savage spending cuts to bring its swelling deficit under control.

Stern and grim-faced in a speech in Milton Keynes,just north of London,Cameron said,How we deal with these things will affect our economy,our society indeed our whole way of life.

The decisions we make will affect every single person in our country, he said. And the effects of those decisions will stay with us for years,perhaps decades,to come. Cameron said that at more than 11 percent,Britains budget deficit was the largest ever faced by the country in peacetime. But he warned that the structural deficit was more worrisome. Britain currently owes a total of more than $1.12 trillion ,he said,and in five years will owe nearly double that if nothing is done now.

The country already spends more on interest payments on its debt than it does running its schools,he said,adding that how to reduce the deficit and cut down on borrowing was the most urgent issue facing Britain today.

Camerons government,a coalition of Conservatives from his party and Liberal Democrats led by Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg,faces a difficult political road. With its grip on power untested,it will have to contend with critics on the right and left of both parties to get its spending plans through Parliament.

At the same time,the government risks alienating Britons,particularly workers in the state sector,which Cameron singled out as an example of a public spending run amok.

Cameron tried to soften the blow by saying that the cuts would not disproportionately affect the vulnerable. Clegg told The Observer newspaper over the weekend that Britain would not face a repeat of the 1980s and the budget cuts of the Margaret Thatcher years. Dave Prentis,the general secretary of Unison,a union that represents many public service workers,nonetheless said that Camerons speech was a chilling attack on the public sector,public sector workers,the poor,the sick and the vulnerable,and a warning that their way of life will change.

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The prime minister laid the blame for the situation squarely on what he called reckless spending by the Labour government,which was in power for 13 years before being defeated in last months election. He said that as the financial crisis was Labours legacy, so,too,would be the spending cuts.