These are huge numbers and come as soaring inflation is already eating away at departmental budgets and the Bank of England is jacking up interest rates to control rising prices against the background of a shrinking economy.
The government is playing it as a global phenomenon while its opponents are claiming it's all down to mismanagement by the Tories. As always, the truth is somewhere in between.
The Telegraph report that Francis Maude has been drafted in to find where departmental budgets can be cut further. A ‘war on waste’ is to be launched - this is after a decade of belt-tightening. Maude led several ‘efficiency reviews’ under Cameron and Osborne to uncover savings after the financial crash.
I am amazed that anybody thinks there are any more 'savings' to be wrung out. The Institute for Government looked at public service performance levels last month which began:
"Public services are in a fragile state. Some are in crisis. Patients are waiting half a day in A&E, weeks for GP appointments and a year or more for elective treatments. Few crimes result in charges, criminal courts are gummed up, and many prisoners are still stuck in their cells under more restrictive regimes without adequate access to training or education. Pupils have lost months of learning, with little prospect of catching up, social care providers are going out of business or handing back contracts, and neighbourhood amenities have been hollowed out.
"These are not isolated problems in individual services, but interconnected structural failures – particularly in the health and care and criminal justice systems. In many cases, there is too few staff, with excessive workloads, working on outdated equipment in run-down buildings."
There is, as they say, "no meaningful ‘fat’ to trim" - but this isn't going to stop the government from trying.
Hunt’s deputy at The Treasury, John Glen, said it was “outrageous” that taxpayers’ money was being “soaked up by the system when it could be put towards areas that really need it”.
Quite what that means is anybody’s guess. You can only despair.
The heavy lifting is going to be done by sleight of hand. Tax thresholds will not be increased in line with inflation, making more income taxable in future and pulling more people into higher tax brackets. This is known as fiscal drag.
Departmental spending will not increase until 2025, despite inflation running at over 10%. This is going to be very hard after 12 years of austerity. You can’t get a doctor’s appointment for love or money and if you need an ambulance, forget it. They’re all waiting outside A&E with patients inside. Nurses are about to go on strike.
Everywhere you look you see public services in crisis.
Let’s be honest, not all of these economic problems are down to Brexit, but they have all been made worse by it and some made much worse. Our terrible productivity predates Brexit by decades for instance. The difficulty for the Tories is that Brexit was forecast to shrink the economy by 4% (roughly £100 billion a year) below what it otherwise would have been.
In other words, if there is a global slow-down Brexit will make ours that worse, which is exactly what we're seeing.
For many people, including leave voters, it will be the first taste of what Brexit means in real terms.
A slowing economy results in fewer jobs and unemployment, which has held up well since 2016, better than many of us expected, will rise. Public services, not good at the moment, will only get worse. After Brexit and when Covid struck, it was clear we were all going to get poorer. Those of us who could afford it would have to pay more or forego income so that those at the bottom of the pile can survive.
But the government was never straight about it, as they haven’t been about Brexit. I think if you're straight with people, they are happy to roll up their sleeves and get on with things, but if you try to pull the wool over their eyes you simply won't bring them with you.
The Vote Leave video from 2016 is a prime example of the sheer dishonesty of it all. None of the pledges have come true and nor are they likely to:
This vote leave advert is interesting to watch back after 6 1/2 years of Brexit, surely those that lied should be held accountable pic.twitter.com/wch9oAoEXG
— Prime Liverpool (@footiestatto) November 6, 2022
The Tory party is facing an existential threat, many MPs will rebel against either the spending cuts or the tax rises or both, but this was always the inevitable consequence of Brexit, which they all supported in 2019. Avid Brexiteers won’t complain you can be sure. They are prepared to put the population through all kinds of hardship without a second thought. They are like the WW1 generals sending men over the top, aren't they? Willing to see plenty of suffering provided they themselves don't experience any hardship.
Just what a mess we've got ourselves into can be seen in an article in The Telegraph (no paywall) where a poll conducted by Public First suggests a quarter of the population would vote for a new party led by - wait for it - Nigel Farage.
The poll shows that 12 percent of the public would be "very interested" in backing a new venture if it were launched next year, while 16 percent would be "quite interested."
The chief architect of the disaster is thought by 28 percent of voters to be worthy of being given the chance to lead the country!!!
This is an amazing thing to me. There are millions of people who still think Brexit is far from the root cause of it all and actually remains likely to improve things if only we go at it hard enough. We have Johnson to blame for that, he did so much damage by convincing voters leaving the EU is beneficial when it clearly is not.
In the article by the way there is this immigration chart:
Brexit, eh? You couldn't make it up.
