The Conservative party has been warned to expect a backlash of unpopularity when the spending cuts begin to affect public services.
Health Secretary Andrew Lansley expects Chancellor George Osborne’s spending review to generate anger among voters, when most Whitehall departments are expecting to be told to make cuts of around 25%.
Mr Lansley was speaking at a fringe event at the Conservative Party conference, when he said the Government will be judged on public service reform making a “real difference”.
He also lavished praise on David Cameron for leading the changing attitudes of the Conservative party and explained that Tory popularity also fluctuated between 1979 because they have had to make tough decisions.
“What we were aiming to do was to do the things that needed to be done so that at the subsequent election people would recognise that a Conservative government had succeeded and a Conservative government should be re-elected,” he said.
“I think, frankly, that is the position we are in. We will not be popular. We must expect not to be popular because, much as we know that the nature of the difficult decisions that we have to do are in that sense of our making, we didn’t create the debt crisis.”
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“Lansley: you are already unpopular” – H Janus, Leatherhead
