WHATEVER else you may think of it, the House of Commons does political theatre as well as any parliament in the world, and the announcement of the government's spending review did not disappoint. The benches were crammed for the defining speech of the year—possibly the defining event of the coalition's entire time in office. As George Osborne, the chancellor of the exchequer, stood at the dispatch box and outlined the sharpest cuts in public spending for decades (£81 billion over the coming four years), the house murmured and rumbled. Mr Osborne talked grimly of the injustice of burdening future generations with debt, and said he would bring Britain "back from the brink". The opposition benches struggled to contain themselves. More than once, Mr Osborne had to break off his speech whilst John Bercow, the Speaker, shushed shouting MPs.



The choreography was perfect. The chancellor was flanked by David Cameron and Nick Clegg, both wearing ostentatious party-coloured ties, in an attempt to reassure mutinous party members (on the Tory right and the Lib Dem left) that neither had given too much away to the other. The play of the light made the face of Ed Miliband, the newly elected Labour leader, look appropriately thunderous, while Messrs Cameron and Clegg tried to maintain their best statesmanlike faces for the duration of the hour-long speech.



Gordon Brown, in his tenure as chancellor, used to get plenty of stick for evasive language and euphemisms (most famously refusing ever to speak of "spending", but only of "investment"). Mr Osborne seems just as adept with words: he spoke only rarely of "cuts" (except when referring to unpopular things like bureaucracy and back-office costs), and frequently of "savings"; in everything from the benefits bill to the budget of the BBC to a visitor's centre at Stonehenge (see the word cloud below, culled from Mr Osborne's speech). Announcements of cuts were preceded by good news—a bit more money here, an efficiency saving there, in an attempt to sweeten the pill. Job losses were not referred to at all, except at the start, when Mr Osborne acknowledged that nearly 500,000 public-sector jobs would go, confirming a figure gleaned yesterday from an official document by a sharp-eyed photographer.

Much of the content had leaked out in the days before the announcement, and Mr Osborne announced few big surprises. Departmental spending will be cut by an average of 19% over the lifetime of this parliament, less than the 25% that many people had been forecasting (some cynics are already accusing the government of deliberately high-balling the original figure). The welfare budget will be cut by an extra £7 billion, on top of the £11 billion already announced in the emergency budget in June. That will cause real pain. Education, by contrast, got off relatively lightly, with the budget for schools to rise every year until 2015, although funding for humanities and social-science subjects at universities will fall. That does not mean that the surprises are not there: many of the specific cuts were left for later announcements, and journalists will no doubt unearth plenty of interesting nuggets once they have had time to digest properly the mountain of documents supplied by the Treasury.Yet the scale of the cuts is still breathtaking. The police budget will fall by 20%. Spending on social housing will fall by three-fifths, with the difference to be made up from higher rents charged to tenants. Local council funding from central government will drop by 28%, a classic strategy in which ministers hope that voters will take their anger out on town halls instead of Whitehall. Spending on the arts will fall by a third. Nor will the damage be confined to the public sector. The government is a significant buyer of goods and services from private firms, after all. PwC, a consultancy, said the other day that it thinks that another half a million private jobs could go over the coming five years as a direct consequence of public-sector austerity, although the chancellor insists that his medicine will be good for the country in the long run.There will be a full analysis of the details of the spending review in this week's paper. But it is one thing to announce spending cuts, and quite another to carry them out. The left likes to characterise the modern Conservative party as a group of unreconstructed Thatcherites, but the scale of the coalition's spending cuts is bigger than anything that Mrs Thatcher ever attempted. Mrs T's policies provoked riots, protests and running battles with the police. We may not see a repeat of the social unrest of the 1980s. But I wouldn't be surprised if some of the "debate" took place on the streets. The government is going to need a lot of nerve to stick to the plans it has laid out, and four years is an awfully long time in politics.