国际英语新闻：Cameron warns of years of painful cuts as British economy in worse shape than thought

LONDON, June 6 (Xinhua) -- British new prime minister David Cameron said on Sunday that the country faced years of painful cuts as the economy was in far worse state than previously thought, and cuts would focus on welfare payments, public sector jobs and public sector pay.

Cameron came to power less than a month ago by forming a coalition between his Conservative party and the third force in British politics, the Liberal Democrats.

The principal task his coalition government has identified is tackling the record public sector deficit of 156 billion pounds ( 240 billion U.S. dollars).

One of the major differences between the economic policies of the former Labor government and the new coalition government was the speed at which the deficit should be tackled, with Labor urging caution for fear of damaging the emerging economic recovery.

Cameron underlined the coalition view, in an interview with the Sunday Times national newspaper, saying: "There is a huge amount of debt that has got to be dealt with. Crossing our fingers, waiting for growth and hoping it will go away is simply not an answer."

His right-hand man, chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne, is set to deliver an emergency budget on June 22 which will outline the level of cuts that will be made in public spending next year.

Osborne has already announced budget cuts of 6.25 billion pounds (about 10 billion U.S. dollars) in current spending. Cameron outlined where he wants cuts to come in the emergency budget -- public sector pay and public sector jobs.

"You have to address public sector pay bills. You have to address the size of the bureaucracy that has built up over the past decade," said Cameron.

He added, "otherwise you will have to make reductions across the board which you don't want to do. We need to address the areas where we have been living beyond our means."

Cameron said the outgoing government had been too optimistic in its assessment of the strength of the economic recovery, and there was going to be no "trampoline growth of 3 percent (in GDP) and above," and that a belief that interest rates would stay low was misplaced.

With Cameron talking about the pain to come, his deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, who is also leader of the left-of-center Liberal Democrats, gave an interview to the Observer newspaper saying that future cuts would be different to ones in the past.

Clegg said: "Fiscal retrenchment does not mean a repeat of the 1980s. We're going to do this differently. Our collective memory of difficult budget decisions harks back to the 1980s, the harshness of the 1980s, north-south divide, sink-or-swim economics. "

Clegg said the government needed to be sensitive to areas dependent on the public sector for jobs, "parts ... like my own part, south Yorkshire, which are very dependent on the public sector, so you don't just have a sink or swim approach to the north. We are not going to allow a great north/south divide to reappear like in the 1980s."

How the coalition government can carry out the cuts that Cameron wants with the sensitivity that Clegg demands will become clearer in Osborne's budget later this month.