David Smith has already argued that perhaps spending cuts won't damage an economic recovery as much as feared -  I took this on briefly elsewhere- but the debate is, if anything,  going to get more heated as we head into conference season. 

Somehow, Daniel Hannan has stolen from John Redwood the mantle of "Most Scary Tory". That means "scary for David Cameron" as much as anything.  But I think the old champ is fighting back: here he is on splendidly lunatic form blaming most of the credit crunch on monetary policy errors as if everything that went nuts in £4trn banking might have been fixed with a tweak or two of the interest rate charged by the £20bn Bank.

And now he's got his pre-1930 views out there on spending cuts:

John Redwood, a former Tory cabinet minister, believes the public wants a “quick 20 per cent off public spending” and that the first 10 per cent would be “painless for the public and popular”. But his leader is not so sure.

 This from an analysis in the FT of the shifting political mood on this topic. Chris Giles' piece within the article makes it clear just how ambitious plans for spending cuts need to be just to get us near balance. Much of the increase in spending in cash terms is non-negotiable, being debt-interest and social security.  Vince, in the article, is cited as arguing that 20pc VAT is inevitable. He is right.  Those commenting on LibDemVoice about how this should not happen because it is regressive somehow expect to be solving the problems of 2003, not 2013.

Brendan Barber, on the other hand, thinks spending cuts will have the effect of turning 3m unemployment into 4m unemployment. But his historical memory of "the last time we had slash and burn economics" in 1981 is a bit off: Maggie put up taxes, she didn't slash spending, not at least until the mid 1980s. Whatever caused those riots was more complex than just lower government spending.

I don't have a dogmatic view here - this is really the message of "A balancing act", you can't just decide "I'm a small state monetarist/public spending Keynesian" and apply that remedy to every economic question, regardless of the circumstances.  Redwood and Barber are either (a) too dim to face the complicated task of taking each economic situation as it stands, checking the variables, the capacity-utilisation, the money markets, the level of debt, the credit-mechanism, etc or (b) so blinded by the clamourings of their own special interests that they deliberate stick their fingers in their ears whenever contradictory evidence presents itself. 

Both are probably wrong, Barber in the long term, Redwood in the short term. If JR thinks that Cameron can take 10% off the real value of public spending without economic knock-ons, he is in cloud-cuckoo land - we do not have the private sector capacity to absorb the slack, not with the banks so undercapitalised and households so indebted.   But Barber needs to recognise that private-public rebalancing will have to happen over the medium term, and the job of avoiding riots and misery is partly his to manage.