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UK Politics VII - Going down on Downing Street


MinDonner

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We've been thrown to the tender mercies of the licence fee-funded BBC, mostly so no-one responsible for our demise will still be in post to get the blame when it eventually happens. This presents us with numerous problems, the most important of which is that I can no longer tell my Daily Mail-reading step-father that I don't care what the Daily Mail says about wasting the licence fee, 'cause we aren't licence free funded.

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I'm not sure what exactly sacking hundreds of thousands of public sector workers is going to accomplish. The private sector is still too fragile to absorb them. Instead of paying public sector workers a wage, the government will be paying them unemployment benefits. Many will find employment but likely in a shop or supermarket or call centre, probably earning less than before and thus being vulnerable to losing their homes.

I don't see there being a lot of consumer confidence in December (Christmas) which will hurt the private sector even more.

ETA: There's been all sorts of bullish talk about forcing the 'professionally unemployed' into work, but who's going to hire them when qualified, experienced people are beign forced into menial jobs?

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I'm not sure what exactly sacking hundreds of thousands of public sector workers is going to accomplish. The private sector is still too fragile to absorb them. Instead of paying public sector workers a wage, the government will be paying them unemployment benefits. Many will find employment but likely in a shop or supermarket or call centre, probably earning less than before and thus being vulnerable to losing their homes.

The public sector does turnover a large number of jobs each year. My understanding is that the numbers involved here would actually not exceed the number that would usually be shed and then replaced, so here they could perhaps merely not replace them.

But god knows.

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They're screwing women. From 2020 the retirement age will rise to 66 (it's currently 60 for women, 65 for men) so women are getting a rougher deal. Plus the majority of public sector workers are women sot that gender are going to eb worse affected by the public sector redundancies.

I'm not sure triggering a double dip recession is considered fiscally conservative. According to the Metro newspaper, support for the Tories and Lib-Dems is dropping. I can see Labour getting in easily at the enxt election and Lib-dem leader Nick Clegg getting booted out, with a lot of Lib-dem supporters voting Labour.

ETA: Will we still be sharing the aircraft-les aircraft carriers with the French?

It's a bit surreal reading about all these cuts when at the same time Wayne Rooney will now be earning about 10 million a year for kicking a ball around a park.

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The retirement age was different for women than it was for men? Interesting.

My feeling is that right now is not the time for austerity, yet people are going for it. I guess I'm largely a believe in Keynesian stimulus. Government is the only entity spending a lot. I fear that you guys facing a serious threat of the proverbial "double-dip." We may be as well, but I'm less sure. We may not enact any great new fiscal stimulus, but I really doubt we're going to be enacting major cuts either as you guys are.

On the plus side, I do expect your deficit to plummet. "But at what cost?"

ETA: Paul Krugman has this column today:

Trisk, today I had a pasta salad for lunch. It was rather good, except for the part where they'd forgotten to put the actual pasta in.

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