We are all cutters now. The sinner repenteth. Labour’s economics guru has joined the consensus. The Prime Minister has admitted that even a government run by him has to try to get spending more in line with revenues. Let’s enjoy the moment.

The Prime Minister wants to “cut costs, cut inefficiencies, cut unnecessary programmes and cut lower priority budgets”. He wants to sell off “unproductive assets”. He seeks “realistic pay settlements”. It is almost as if he has been reading my blog and articles over the last two years!

Let’s leave aside the rhetoric of the false distinctions – Conservatives are not in the business of cutting crucial front line services, and they are not wanting to stop the recovery. The truth is Mr Brown has signed up to spending reduction, as some of us have been urging for a long time.

The media should now be asking some more questions about what all this means. Let’s see if we can help them ask the right things:

What is a realistic pay settlement, when RPI inflation is negative, and CPI inflation below 2%? Would the public sector be willing, as many in the private sector are, to take low or no pay increase in order to keep more jobs? The PM should offer a lead on this now, today. He needs to get expectations down, to make the public sector more affordable, whilst protecting the lowest paid and the most important front line workers.

What is an unproductive asset? Surely we need to be selling productive assets as well, starting with all those banking assets. How big a programme of disposals can he come up with? Isn’t now a good time to sell, as the Bank is pumping up asset values like crazy with its quantitative easing programme.

Which costs does he think he can cut? Why doesn’t he start with a freeze on new advertising, new consultancy contracts, new glossy brochures and bogus consultations, and follow it up with a destock of paper clips, computer consumables, stationery and other office equipment?

Which inefficiencies has he suddenly discovered which he has tolerated up til now? Will he start to raise labour productivity by imposing a complete staff freeze on all posts, exempting front line service providers in core services like education and health?

Which unnecessary programmes is he running? Would he include in that all the panoply of unelected regional government, which wastes millions and would be best swept aside? Local people had the chance to see for themselves the farce of the Regional Grand Committee, where the views of majority had to be suppressed by undemocratic rules to keep the Labour show on the road. If the government can’t even stop the waste on unelected regional government, what are they going to stop?

Which does he think are the lower priority budgets? Could they include the budgets of the Surveillance society, which Conservatives have identified recently as ones to eliminate? If not those, then what does he have in mind?

We should expect a lot of nonsense about the Opposition wanting to stop the recovery in its tracks, and wanting to make deep cuts in core services. No mainstream political party wants to do either of those things. What we need now is a more level headed discussion, line by line, of what can be taken out of the public spending figures, before the debt gets completely out of control.