Britain Details Radical Cuts in Spending, Citing Debt

LONDON (By SARAH LYALL and ALAN COWELL, NYTimes.com) — Seeking to free itself of crushing debt, the British government unveiled the country’s steepest public spending cuts in decades on Wednesday, sharply reducing welfare benefits, raising the retirement age earlier than planned and eliminating almost half a million public sector jobs over the next four years.

“Today is the day when Britain steps back from the brink,” George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, as Britain’s top finance minister is known, told Parliament as he laid out an ambitious and potentially risky plan to reduce debt.

The program is a center-piece of the coalition government, which blames the country’s economic malaise on its Labour predecessor under former Prime Minister Gordon Brown. The cuts are so momentous that they could determine the coalition’s fate as Britons face politically-charged austerity after years of growing prosperity before the financial meltdown in 2008.