Well, our new Mickey Mouse “government” has got a few people worried with its proposed plans to cut the deficit.
When you hear “your lives will never be the same again” and “these cuts will hit everyone”, you don’t automatically assume you are listening to an election manifesto, do you? That’s because you aren’t – and you weren’t told any of this before you wasted your vote on getting a joke-government into power.
But the best one has to be what I just heard on a BBC News bulletin. You can read more here – Public To Have A Say On Cuts.
The Treasury is to ask for the public’s views on which functions the government should perform and which could be done by other bodies to save money…
David Cameron said on Monday the country must prepare itself for painful and unavoidable cuts which will affect “our whole way of life”.
The Conservative-Lib Dem coalition government has already outlined plans for £6.2bn of cuts this financial year and is preparing for the Budget on 22 June and a departmental spending review in the autumn.
This gives me flashbacks to “brainstorming sessions” and flipcharts when I was in the rat race. Where if you had 100 people, you were assured of having 150 different ideas on a subject (140+ of which were totally ridiculous), and you’d come up with a diluted single idea that you had to pretend everyone agreed with, but they didn’t really.
Labour’s response to this was:
Labour says the government is wrong to focus on cuts not growth.
And this is exactly what I said in an earlier post. Labour is absolutely right – the growth in deficit is an automatic result of going into recession, and the reduction is an automatic result of moving out of recession. So you focus on moving out of it.
Rest assured that in spite of the wording of ministerial rhetoric, you don’t make £6.2bn savings by stopping a handful of ministers having long lunches. You tend to have to get some of the 55 million inhabitants of this country to chip in a few pennies, too.
All of this is having a disastrous effect on the pound, as well.