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Political bloggers react to the Spending Review.

how pre-election promises skewed the review:

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"The Westminster village has become so used to the Tory concept of ring-fencing NHS and Overseas Aid that its implications and consequences are rarely considered anymore. Ring-fencing was a 'clever' Osborne/Cameron idea to get their party safely through an election, after a previous idea of 'sharing the proceeds of growth' foundered. It eventually became clear there wouldn't be much growth to share. But married to the other guarantees that Cameron gave under pressure to protect various universal benefits, ring-fencing has boxed them in terribly. It means they have had to make deep cuts in areas they might not otherwise have chosen to target so severely, all because of what they were pledged to protect from even a small cut. To make the numbers add up the welfare budget had to be raided in a hurry."

The George Osborne to Gordon Brown, this time while analysing the words used in the 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 ±«Óãtv to a visitor's centre at Stonehenge. 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."

similarities between George Osborne and Gordon Brown's tactics:

"What was very Brownesque was the way Osborne finished - claiming that what they were doing involved cutting less than what the last Labour chancellor, Alistair Darling, had been planning. This certainly wrong-footed the shadow Chancellor, Alan Johnson who looked uncomfortable when he made his response."

Former Tory candidate and political blogger George Osborne scored a point against the shadow chancellor:

"[T]he fact that at the end George Osborne was able to announce that instead of the 20% average cuts Labour announced in their budget his cuts amounted to an average of 19% rather shot Labour's fox. We all know that if Labour had been in power now, they would have had to announce similar cuts in spending. We know that. They know that. So their attacks on 19% cuts will ring rather hollow."

George Osborne's assertion that coalition cuts are less than those proposed by the opposition is misleading:

"Osborne could have argued the Labour plans are flaky, unclear, wrongheaded, dangerous or whatever insult you like, but he knows the Opposition has moved a long way since Alistair Darling's final budget. To hold up the Coalition position of October 2010 to the previous Labour government's in March is not to compare like with like."

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