It saddens me to see a lot of the things that I value about being a citizen of this country being systematically denigrated, destroyed or underfunded to the point they are no longer capable of delivering what they should.

I think that the current Tory party are doing such damage to British society whilst apparently reveling in their ability to do so is appalling.

Still, someone will be along in a minute to say how lucky public sector workers are, don’t know they’re born, ‘work, call that work’ etc etc and how we don’t need all this state provided stuff like health care anyway as ‘hard working families’ will, somehow, save the day.

How many people in the private sector are earning the same as they were 10 years ago? Not in relative terms, but the same amount of take home?

All while doing more work, with less people and longer hours…….

Not many, I reckon……oh, and my pension has also been decimated.

According to R4 it’s day to day running costs rather than cap-ex, so things like the department of transport with a large capital spend aren’t quite as affected as the headline figure suggests.
No comfort for the people working in such departments though.

Show off! Mines gone down since 2009 😀

Painful but not unexpected.

Austerity George was light on austerity (sic) in the Coalition and planned more aggressive cuts during this term. The ring-fencing of certain department meant that 30-40% cuts elsewhere were inevitable.

Still labour market trends – employment and wages – all going in a better direction although public sector wages are lagging the private sector in this recovery. so hardly a destruction scenario…

race to the bottom…unless you are an MP

Why not? How will things change if you just keep taking it?

https://m.facebook.com/Hampshire-Risk-review-and-you-1489581798019630/

Cuts on the back of cuts are about to destroy Hampshire fire and rescue, make no bones about it residents of Hampshire will be left at a far greater risk.

No matter what ‘spin’ the dep chief looks to put on it.

Still they cut, cut, cut rather than going after the big corporate tax dodgders, non-doms, etc.

Might be a useful thread to bring up this:
No confidence vote

Not that I think it will make any difference – I doubt it will even get debated. But the more that keep signing the less likely it will go away.
I think if it reaches a million it has to be debated.

Sure no one likes cuts, much as like when we were kids being told we couldn’t go on holiday abroad this year because my folks were struggling to pay the mortgage. But can’t see what the alternative is? To keep borrowing to fund increasing public service, continue spending more than we earn and bankrupting the country – oh wait nearly been there.

As has been pointed out endless times, national economies don’t work like household finances. If the analogy were accurate, your pay packet would be influenced by how much you spend at Tesco’s.

To keep borrowing to fund increasing public service, continue spending more than we earn and bankrupting the country

Debt = Money.

If governments stop spending “the” money (raised either through taxation or borrowing at lower interests rates than you can) then it forces the people to fund spending “the” money as a greater portion of their wages, or borrowing at higher rates than govts.

which will make use poorer.

What I don’t get is the focus on opex, but capex is fine

When cashflow is crap, you need to reduce OPEX.

I understand about reducing operational expenses, but what they are actually doing is transferring the same tasks to private firms/contractors who the charge multiple times more than it would cost to manage internally. The actual “service” is still there, and now you are paying vastly more for it, but you can claim it is capex, so that is okay. Overall though the cost of the same “service” has now increased year on year, and you’ll have the expense of re tendering every 5 years.

Maybe my rudimentary understanding of accountancy is why I don’t get it….surely to save money you have to actually cut the service rather than transfer it to a private firm and pay more for it?

For Labour to have allowed the deficit to grow as they did and not to have cut spending. It cost them the 2010 and 2015 elections.

Government spending is far too high versus income, something has to change. The electorate wanted education protected and nhs spending increased, so bigger cuts elsewhere.

I’d be in favour of higher taxes, starting with copying the rest of Europe and adding a lower rate of VAT on food. Our taxes are too low vs the government spending we’d like but people won’t vote for that. I’d also abolish all the corporate tax deals with Luxembourg and Ireland etc but we’d have to leave the EU first.

Not if you used your credit card to take up the slack, you absolutely can make comparison between national economies and household finances. We’ve run the national credit card up close to a dangerous level where we risk the interest charge running out of control if/when interest rates rise also of course the risk that we’re told we are at max credit.

Greece just kept spending and bribing the electorate with ever more handouts, then the music stopped and the markets declined to lend any more money. Choices where an eu bailout or a default, two very unpleasant choices.

@Dave, you are sadly very much mistaken about potential economic pain. We can’t just keep printing money to service our debt, not without creating rampant inflation and massive currency devaluation which would likely bankrupt many of our companies and plunge us all into poverty as imports became much more expensive (eg oil, food, cars, clothes). Why would international investors buy ever increasing amounts of uk debt when it’s denominated in a currency in free fall ? So interest rates jump up massively (thus bankrupting businesses and mortgage holders) and the government debt becomes unserviceable as tax revenues plumit

It was pretty modest up until the 2008 crash e.g. less than under the Tories in the early 90s. It only went tits up when all the banks crashed. Post 2008 crash if they’d slashed spending, to reduce the deficit, we’d have gone into full scale depression and possibly total financial meltdown (if they’d let all the banks collapse rather than bailing them out).

I was only stating the misunderstanding that taxes/borrowing are used to fund spending. They aren’t. The government doesn’t need this money to spend.

And we haven’t reached a credit limit – There is no-one asking for the money back as it’s all GBP that is created by ourselves. This is where saying it’s like a household is incorrect.

And we have the choice of increasing interest rates – a key choice that Greece didn’t have. Saying “rampant inflation and massive currency devaluation” are scaremongering as inflation can be very useful for growing economies.

There are consequences of higher interest rates but it’s all policy – self imposed objectives. There is no need to have such austerity and make the policy decisions that the Conservatives have and they use analogies that are incorrect to try and justify them.