Clegg: Government will not change course on austerity "My message is you can be very tough on the deficit and you can be restlessly creative about how, within those strictures, you do things to make the economy grow," said Mr Clegg, speaking to Sophie Raworth on the BBC's Andrew Marr Show. IMF chief economist Olivier Blanchard last week urged Chancellor George Osborne to put the brakes on spending cuts, saying he thought the March Budget would be a "good time to take stock." London mayor Boris Johnson weighed into the debate on Friday, saying "The hair shirt stuff, the Stafford Cripps agenda - that is not the way to get Britain motoring again.," speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Jim O'Neill, chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, said the GDP contraction signalled that "policy has been on the wrong path" and that fiscal policy had been "tightened too much" by the Chancellor. Mr Clegg told political magazine The House this week he is critical of how the coalition handled capital spending cuts when it first came to power, in comments that hinted at the need for more spending to spur the economy. He said: "If I'm going to be sort of self-critical, there was this reduction in capital spending when we came into the Coalition Government. I think we comforted ourselves at the time that it was actually no more than what [former Chancellor] Alistair Darling spelt out anyway, so in a sense everybody was predicting a significant drop off in capital investment. But I think we've all realised that you actually need, in order to foster a recovery, to try and mobilise as much public and private capital into infrastructure as possible. However he insisted new increases in capital spending would stem from private sector incentives and from savings elsewhere in government, while the coalition continued to tighten overall spend.