Britain's finances are a mess. The U.K. has a debt of almost £1 trillion, with a budget deficit of £150 billion. Every day the country pays nearly £120 million in interest on this debt, roughly £40,000 per household. So as you can see, we have a problem. But what do we do about it? Quite obviously drastic spending cuts need to be made, along with a review of how we spend whats left. Quite obviously that is unless you have a beard, wear sandals and live in the 'village' of Islington.
All over the country unions are holding protests whenever local authorities announce how they plan to implement their budget cuts. On the 26th march The Trades Union Congress plan a mass demonstration against public spending cuts through the middle of London. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not anti-union, far from it, I'm a member of one of Britain's biggest, The Rail Maritime & Transport Union, which has over 80,000 members. I understand why union leaders are fighting the cuts, its their job to fight for their members. What I don't understand is why millions of seemingly intelligent people, fail to see that we can't continue to spend what we don't have. When the government recently announced it was scrapping the Education Maintenance Allowance - to people of an older generation, this was a part-time job in McDonald's - and the introduction of university tuition fees, thousands of people vandalised London under the pretence of the right to protest. Personally I think the socialist view that you can spend your way out of a recession is, to put it bluntly, utter nonsense.
The public sector employs more than six million people, just over half of all those working. When the financial downturn started in 2007 and reached crisis point in 2008 with the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the first thing private sector companies did was make redundancies and cut spending (I'm not going to comment on the rights and wrongs of the banking bailout as it would take too long) but strangely enough, when the private sector were making thousands redundant and implementing their own spending cuts, not once did I see a placard waving, sandal wearing, bearded man from Islington, or a posh student, whose family own half of Berkshire, wearing a hooded top telling us polar bears have rights too, standing outside a bank, law firm or high street store, demanding that everyone has the right to work.
Tony Blair, with his ideology of New Labour, almost gave us the perfect middle ground. In his book, Blair, while having many socialist beliefs also states his views on economics are very conservative. He says he understands aspirations, he likes people who want to succeed and admires those who do. It is something I can go along with one hundred percent, that's why I voted for him three times. Unfortunately New Labour can only work when times are good. When times are bad you have to be nasty, and no one does nasty quite like the Tories. I don't wish to see thousands of people lose their jobs, but the U.K must be led from recession by private sector investment and not by government spending, funded by borrowing.
Britain must be run as a business and David Cameron must lead it back into profit, because if he doesn't I fear I may have to change my postal addres from the 'U.K' to 'The European State of England'.
I'm pretty sure you'll have realised, seeing as you've cited the 26th of March, that the name of the demo is "March for the Alternative".
ReplyDeleteThere are very few people who'd say we can carry on spending as we are. However, what people are saying, and they are right, is that there certainly is an alternative to cuts.
Corporates evade £25bn in tax every year through legal loopholes, another £10bn of tax simply isn't paid when it should be. The government's response? Cut thousands of HMRC jobs.
We bail out banks to the tune of trillions of pounds, with the reasonable expectation that they should help clean up the mess they'd made. The government's response? Allow them to get away with billions of pounds of taxpayer funded bonuses, and impose a petty £2bn levy.
An conservative estimate of extra income from imposing just these two ideas (i.e. higher bank levy, and crackdown on tax avoidance/evasion) would raise around £80bn every year.
That's almost exactly the same amount as the government wants to cut this year. Which means that we could, even if we don't oppose cuts altogether, still cut back less and in much fairer places.
So don't pretend this is the only way. It's not.
That you voted Blair first time is understandable, a second time regretable and a 3rd unforgivable, I became totally dissillusioned with him after he started siding with the GW Bush and invading countries, he's a trained lawyer and therefore professional liar, I'm sure if the tories had been in power and decided to go to war he'd be a brilliant opponent the war, he was intelligent and charismatic but ultimately wrong, after Blair had repealed clause 4 thus eradicating socialism from the labour party and decided to go with a capitalist free market economy the only real difference between the 2 main parties was how much they'd spend on public services, Brown managed to convince people that he'd abolished the boom and bust business cycle (not unlike saying he'd abolished gravity) people despite mass immigration, wars and surrenders of soveriegnty to the EU voted for Blair because they thought that him saying he'd doubled education and health service spending mean't these things must be getting better and the greedy tories would spend less and this mean't services would get worse. At the moment government is spending way too much of our money it should leave the EU for a start, pull out of afganistan and deport foreign criminals/failed asylum seekers etc. but as we saw recently with Barclays there is mass tax evasion going on, OK so Barclays paid so little corporation tax might be down to legal if morally dubious tax smart arsery but what cannot be denied is the bank had 30 subsidiary companies in the Isle of Man, 38 in Jersey and 181 in the Cayman Islands can anyone tell of a reason for this other than to avoid paying tax to the UK treasury which needed to use tax revenue (yeah get it from the little people put up VAT) to prop up the whole banking sector? if they threaten to leave we should Let them go and when they eventually balls things up they can ask Honk Kong or switzerland or the Caymen Islands or wherever to bail them out, lets see how far they get then, as they government own shares in several banks they should keep a small stake so they can influence the banks to pay less bonuses ans more tax, in France the government owns stakes in several of Frances large corporations and make sure that they don't relocate production abroad infact when Kraft tried to by french yoghurt company Dannone and the government blocked it, contrast that with cadbury's fate.
ReplyDeleteSean - the demo is called "Mass demo against spending cuts" I've just received the latest RMT magazine. I won't be attending.
ReplyDeleteNV&B - Blair didn't take the country to war, Parliment did. A vote was held and members from all sides of the house backed military action.
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