What Cuts?
That graph says it all really. The level of spiralling and unsustainable spending doom isn’t really changing at all.
Where were the real cuts today? It was all a bit wimpish in the end. One of these every year until 2014 might have made a difference but today’s CSR won’t. All the easy wins are there in theory, but not a huge amount more. A cash terms spending rise is a feeble effort and there is so much waste around we should have been able to cut 10% without trying, 15% with a moderate effort, and 20% if we were prepared to cause some small amount of pain.
The pain as foretold implied much more than we saw today, which is why even al-Beeb ended up blathering about the biggest cuts ’since the 1970s’ having started off the day using ’since the Second World War’. Nick Robinson even noted that statisticians have worked out Labour’s IMF debacle resulted in bigger cuts than we’ve had today. The BBC as a whole though, was a Labour Party Political Broadcast from start to finish.
Still, the CSR has produced some gems from the Guardian: “..Nearly half of all black Caribbean women, and 37% of Pakistani and Bangladeshi women, are employed in the public sector. I’m concerned that ethnic minority women will be hit very hard by the spending cuts..” implying that the cuts are ‘racist’ as well in the weird world of the Guardian pointy-heads. Awww.
Today the World Ended, Women and Minorities hit hardest…..LOL
A classic headline, and always funny.
And also true – come the zombie apocalypse or Martian invasion there will always be someone who thinks the biggest issue is that it harshly discriminates against minimum wage Latvian orange-pickers.
Now we see what the ethnic/gender quotas were for. Saving up race cards for – as it turned out – a somewhat overcast day but with little more than spits and spots.
Still, the Marxists wanted a big government and spent four decades shrieking for one. Now they’ve got one, and big governments have a tendency to do as they please.
There’s an incredible unity of stupidity about them all. As if to say “Don’t mention the banks! Don’t mention our increasing contributions and lost rebate with regards the EU! Don’t mention the debt! Let’s all focus on the far more easily corrected deficit so as to de-odourise the nature of the shit our lot really caused“.
There’s plenty in this to keep the blogosphere going for months.
It’s almost as though they provide the material deliberately CS. I’m beginning to wonder.
The silence on the EU is deafening, as you say. Tens of millions a day in direct payments to the EU, which will rise even more as Labour gave away chunks of the rebate in exchange for a promise from France to think about the CAP. That starts at an extra £900m from next year and grows.
Plus the extra maternity leave decision yesterday costing £3billion per year – which is more than the child benefit cuts which are apparently the end of the world.