Surely the first step post-election is to think about where you went wrong.

While I agree I wonder whether this looks too much like explaining, rather than clearly offering a completely different idea as to how we want Britain to be.

The advanced warning of average cuts of 25% from all Government departments follows rightist small-government-low-taxation dogma. Fine if you’re healthy and wealthy, crap for everyone else. This offers the chance to propose clear alternatives such as scandinavian models.

The problem Labour has had is that it has always tried to compromise on such ideas. At the same time successive governments have failed to encourage an economy based upon quality manufacturing rather than market-led service-based economics.

Couldn’t these ideas form the basis for a clear alternative offering from the Left?

I’m confused: part of your argument seems to rest on the idea that most people have bought the idea that the cuts are unavoidable (“the debate about the budget …. is useless”) but in other places you seem to want to argue the cuts are avoidable (points 2, 3).

Point 1. might sharpen anger against bankers and build support for reform of the financial system, but I’m not sure how it works in a plan of action against Tory cuts. They can say that because the banks blew up and caused a depression, we are forced to cut to get the public finances back in order. So while it’s a valid enough point in isolation, I don’t see it’s much of an argument against cuts.

Also a small point – not sure about PFI, If you “cut PFI” you just stop investment in hospitals etc., if you replace PFI with government-funded investment, you are increasing the deficit, not reducing it.

Personally, I like the idea of messages in the form: “they cut this, but they don’t cut that” and “they raises taxes on this but they don’t raise taxes on that”, where the “this” and “that”s are things that hurt lots of ordinary people and things that help the wealthy, respectively. Although I suspect my liking for that idea is mostly explained by me having this wicked Kia advertisement lodged in my brain

It would be a great mistake to think “not fair” is not a really central and defining test of this government. It is the central claim of Cameronism that you can have a smaller state and less inequality, and that this can be achieved in a time of spending retrenchment. And the central point of Nick Clegg joining the coalition is that he has told both his party and the public that he can guarantee that.

(1) The fair test is very important for anybody who cares about fairness and inequality, or claims to do so, which certainly includes me. It also includes a significant part of this Coalition, as well as its opponents.

(2) It also, at least in theory, that egalitarian consensus includes Cameron and Osborne. If that were prove to not be sincere, then being held to their own rhetoric is the tribute vice pays to virtue. And that has real political consequences: they might fall short of it, but it will be difficult to fail it egregiously without making an effort to look like you are trying to meet it. The salience of this public debate will affect decisions in the spending review.

That it is their test – not just ours – gives it an importance and salience in how the media will judge the record through the Parliament, as budget coverage shows.

This increased focus on fairness and distribution is not just a happy moment for wonks: it is a very important shift in the terms of trade of political discourse, (If that wasn’t the case, we would be trying to establish its importance).

So I just find it hard to see where the trade-off between “unavoidable” and “fair” advocacy is: they are very closely linked (given that the choice about the scale and speed of deficit elimination and the cuts/tax ratio strategy to do it would seem to make the government’s own fairness test all but impossible to meet).

I share the view that the government is having much the better of the first (unavoidable) argument, and much the worse of the second (fairness).

After all, it wouldn’t really matter whether it was avoidable/unavoidable unless it was failing the fairness test – on jobs, income/class distribution, regions.

Similarly (as you say) if it is unavoidable, then it is as fair as they could make it (with regrets, if they are being honest).

So the claims are inextricably linked, for both the Coalition and its opponents. And the fairness argument underpins the avoidability debate.

What I don’t agree with is stopping because we clearly won the first round on this. We have a consensus of leader writers, academics and of the political class (in private, across the parties) that the IFS was right about the budget, and that it gets much tougher when the cuts are part of the picture.

But all that provides is an opportunity to make that an important frame for public debate. It can’t be the moment to say “job done”. And keeping up evidence and analysis and advocacyon this ought to do something you want, which is to at the same time challenge the Coalition but also assist those LibDems who want to say “we can’t get away with fairness language, we actually need to have policy which survives IFS style scrutiny if we want to make these claims in public for the next few years”.

So it must now be the foundational test of the Spending Review, because the government maintains it has a strategy for fair austerity.

This really comes back to the old chestnut: is Labour part of the problem or part of the solution? To the extent that Darling was promising us loads of cuts if he got back in office, it’s clearly part of the problem and it’s little wonder that voters generally take a TINA-ish view of cuts. How long they will continue to do so depends in large part on what alternative political narratives are laid before them in the next few months and years.

We have however one bonus: however elegantly the likes of Evan Harris and Bob Russell might try to persuade us otherwise, we now know where the Lib Dems stand on this. They have voted for the slash and burn – they have accepted the white-flag waving of such left intellectuals as Slavoj Zizek (“resistance is surrender”) and John Gray who in the LRB’s post-election round up baldly stated: “social democracy is no longer possible”. If these Dismal Jimmies are to be confounded we shall, I fear, need rather more intellectual bottom than was on display in Shoreditch last Saturday (I know that wasn’t your primary purpose, Sunny, but I still think it is a task that needs to be done.)

In the short-term we need to support Diane’s campaign for the Labour leadership, not because of her race and gender – although these do usefully set her apart from the leaders both of the coalition and the other four aspirants to Brown’s old job – but because she is both a good communicator and is seen throughout the land as someone wholly untainted by the antics of Labour in office, from imperialist wars to regressive tax policies etc etc. We should do so for two reasons: positively because she can be an excellent transitional leader of the Kinnock type, while Labour works out what political space the coalition has left it able to occupy, and negatively because a strong vote for her, particularly among the Individual Members’ section, will demonstrate the disconnect between the grass roots and the ultra-right Parliamentary Party. One of them will then have to go – which one it is will determine the answer to the question with which I started this comment.

While I agree that Lisa Ansell’s story explains exactly what is wrong with these Conservative attacks on the poor, I do not think stories like hers will be affective. Why? For the very reason that it pulls on my heart strings. My politics are on the left and my opinions and priorities are different to those of the centre and centre-right. There is little point attracting me to oppose this government – I am already doing that.

What we must do is bring about that cold realisation, the “oh fuck, did I really vote for them to do that?”, of the centre. You have to find that cause célèbre and it won’t be welfare reform. (New Labour was moving in the same direction as IDS, and at the election they were even trying to out right-wing the Tories on this subject.) The cause that will get middle England to realise that they made one helluva mistake is the NHS. We will have hospital closures.

Lansley announced his hatred for NHS hospitals at the NHS Confederation conference last week when he said “Patients don’t want to go to hospital”, No Andrew, what you mean is that you do not want people to go to NHS hospitals.

We should use the NHS as our gold standard public service because across the country it is regarded with such high regard and yet Lansley is intending to privatise the majority of it.

[6] Yes indeed, Sunder. I daresay someone is already pitching “Political Rhetoric and Reality – a study of Fairness in the UK Coalition government” as a PhD thesis.

It was very interesting to see the political distance between Osborne and Duncan Smith on this with reference to Incapacity Benefit yesterday. It suggested that this is not only a coalition between two parties, but between ideologically opposed sections of the Tories… FWIW I don’t expect IDS to be in office come Xmas – he clearly hasn’t got the stomach for the measures Osborne considers the markets need to be taken. IDS as one of the good guys? Jeez, that old Chinese curse is so true…

Immediate cuts to reduce the deficit could have been made in several areas: including defence spending, cutting big government IT projects, PFI projects [this needs some work].

Maybe just a little work… It is, for example, hard simultaneously to argue that the Govt should cut back the defence budget by enough to make a difference, and that Britain should stay at war in Afghanistan for the foreseeable future, and should indeed turn away from any possibility of timed withdrawal. To do so with the background of the Chilcot inquiry – which has already highlighted how the last Labour Govt penny-pinched on defence while in office looks more than a little, um, courageous.

PFI projects? The ones that are off-balance sheet spending? How would that work?

And there, really is Labour’s problem in a nutshell – they went into the election promising cuts more savage than Thatcher’s (not hard, of course, as she increased spending…). Obviously these cuts were never identified, but we know how big they were – £44bn. It’s a bit useless now to say that all cuts are awful and avoidable except, um, PFI spending and all that useless bodyarmour and helicopters that soldiers don’t really need in that war that we sent them off to fight in.

Ordinary people are being forced to pay for mis-management and light regulation within the City of London

No, ordinary people are having to pay for mismanagement of the public finances in Downing Street. To the extent that ‘light regulation’ had any impact, blame Ed Balls and Gordon Brown, who designed the inadequate Tripartite regime.

Even now, nothing is being done to address that problem.

The Bank of England is back in the driving seat. The FSA is being revamped. Concerted international action is being planned. However, there is a danger to too much regulatory tightening coinciding with fiscal tightening. Even Obama recognized that at the G8 and G20 meetings.

These huge cuts in the public sector were largely avoidable.

Yep, if Labour had run surpluses or balanced budgets between 2002-7, we wouldn’t need them.

the government should have waited until the recovery was a lot stronger and tax revenues had recovered, before cutting back spending growth …

The recovery would not have got stronger if the government had announced that it was insouciantly going to keep on borrowing in the middle of a Europe-wide sovereign debt panic. Nor would we have been able to borrow the money to fund that spending growth at a manageable rate.

The Office for Budget Responsibility later pointed out that the economy was not in the dire straits Osborne was pretending it was in.

Nope. The good news from the OBR was that borrowing would be a tad less than previously thought. But Darling had erred on the optimistic side on growth. Also, the previous government had raided the last sacks of gold to fund a series of ‘bribes’ in Labour marginals in the run up to the election.

The VAT rise will depress spending.

Did January’s VAT rise depress spending significantly? 43% of retailers reported that sales in early April were higher than a year ago, while 30% reported a fall. This gives a net balance of +13, the same as March but less than the +23 recorded in February. The VAT rise announced in the budget, which starts in Jan 2010 is the same (2.5 p in the pound) as Labour’s VAT hike of January 2010.

Immediate cuts to reduce the deficit could have been made in several areas: including defence spending, cutting big government IT projects, PFI projects [this needs some work].

You bet it needs some work. These are precisely the areas where penalty clauses make cuts next to impossible.

This approach won’t fly. Back to the drawing board…….

that should have said….starts in Jan 2011.

[6] Here is Lansley’s turgid speech to the NHS conference – it contains all the usual gibberish one associates with egomaniacs who make pronouncements far away from the bed side;
http://healthpolicyinsight.com/?q=node/583

At one point Lansley claims, “The £20 billion of savings that David Nicholson has identified is NOT A CUT in our budget – it’s not about doing less or worse – it’s a £20 billion efficiency saving; it’s about doing more for less”.

Is this an exciting new mathematical principle identified by Lansley – taking £20 BILLION out of the pot then denying it is actually a cut?

I’m sure the likes of Redwood will be nodding approvingly in the background at this sort of bizarre logic – what next denying that health contracts awarded to private firms is a form of de-nationalisation by stealth?

Sunny

The problem with such a cuts focused narrative is that it completely unravels once the public realizes that, even with the cuts, the Tory/LibDem government will actually be spending as much, if not more, in both real terms and as a %age of GDP as Labour were through most of their time in office.

Between now and 2013, total managed expenditure as a percentage of GDP will actually be HIGHER than in any year between 1997 and 2009. In real terms, average spending per annum between now and 2014 will be much higher than the averages for any comparable period while Labour was in government. Hugely higher than Labour’s first 8 years and higher even than the last four.

In that sense, there aren’t really going to be any ‘cuts’ in the sense that the Tories spending record could be compared badly against Labour’s.

There appears to be some logical confusion.

New Labour may well have been a terrible government (as I believe it was) but technocratic arguments against Osborne’s budget of 22 June and the failure, so far, to tighten regulation of the financial system are all separate issues.

The IFS and the Telegraph have both made the point that the budget hits the poor harder than the well-off. The FT and The Economist have both commented on whether the fast pace set in the budget of reining back the fiscal deficit could risk recovery from the recession. It is a lie to claim, as Cameron and Osborne have, that there is no alternative to the policy course set out in the budget.

“5) Immediate cuts to reduce the deficit could have been made in several areas: including defence spending, cutting big government IT projects, PFI projects [this needs some work].”

I’m not sure if we’re making the argument that deficit spending is good for the economy, at least while it is depressed and monetary policy is at the zero lower bound, that we should be arguing for where the deficit can be reduced. IT technicians, soldiers and PFI consultants all spend money, after all.

Its contradictory.

We shouldn’t mix up policy changes, less wasteful IT databases and profligate defence spending, with macroeconomic policy. It just confuses the message.

So that’s why I don’t think we need to address point 5 in the terms you outline. Much better to discuss it in the terms Luis Enrique offers.

“They are cutting incapacity benefits but not consultants in their IT ivory towers or contracts for their friends at BAE systems. We aren’t all in it together.” etc.

That would discredit the Tories and LibDems while not blurring the macroeconomic message that these cuts are damaging.

@11 thanks for the link. This is interesting:

Therefore, we want to give GPs control of commissioning, creating a direct relationship between the management of care and the management of resources.

My fundamental objection to GP commissioning is that care must be based on clinical reasons and clinical reasons only. There should be no link between care and resources. That is the whole point of NICE: they approve care from clinical and a resource point of view and then clinicians can make a clinical decision whether you need NICE approved care. Linking management of care and management of resources (which basically means that GPs will hold the purse strings not only for primary care in the community – themselves – but also in hospitals) means that there will be an overwhelming temptation for GPs to simply commission themselves to do the work.

Here’s an anecdote. At a diabetes self-help group earlier this year I asked how many people attended a hospital clinic and how many attended a GP clinic. It was about half-and-half. Then I asked each group if at their clinics they saw a doctor. All of those who attended hospital clinics saw a doctor, only a quarter of those who attended GP clinics saw a doctor. GP clinics are the cut price version, yet the business will be paid the same as the hospital clinic (payments by results ensures that there is a standard tariff). As a doctor-lead treatment the hospital is doing more, as a practice nurse-lead clinic GPs are actually doing less. Yet this is the model that Lansley is offering. GP fundholding in the 90s showed that fund holding GPs referred fewer patients to hospital specialists than non-fundholding practices.

As to Lansley’s mathematics. Well my local PCT in 2010/11 will get a rise of 1.9% compared to 2009/2010. That is not a “real term increase”, inflation is more than 1.9%. Sure, that budget was set by New Labour, but don’t you think that Lansley’s first act in the Dept of Health should be to honour the “real term increase” election pledge? No of course not, he’s not interested in doing the right thing.

I wonder how much this notion of ‘pain’ and ‘sharing the pain’ is unhelpful. There’s a strong ‘temporary’ element to pain. When we talk of ‘pain’, the implication is we can just ‘grin and bear’ it, which doesn’t equate to what will actually happen in many areas where families and communities will be permanently blighted, possibly for generations. Similarly, ‘pain’ sounds like something we all experience equally, when in reality that’s also not going to be the case. Might it be worth considering using terms like ‘damage’, ‘harm’ or even ‘abandonment’ (which I think sums up the Tory mentality well). When someone super-rich says they will equally suffer the pain of the cuts, there’s a (weak) element of plausibility. If they were to try to claim they were harmed, or damaged equally – this would look suitably ridiculous.

[16] Absolutely on the button, Rich. How do I know? Because the right-wing media use your very argument. That’s what the demonisation of immigrants and welfare “scroungers” (etc) is all about – it’s saying that such people deserve to be harmed.

Sunny,

I think this approach is based on the assumption there is a large pool of voters waiting to be convinced of your points. I am not sure of this – unless we can suggest there is a lot of people who chose not to vote at the last election (I would say not) then people already made their minds up about the defecit and the need for cuts last time. How your pitch here will attract votes from the centerists who went back to the Conservatives (mostly middle class, tax payers, not service users) or from the core supporters of the Liberals Democrats (who you always forget do not trust big government) I am not sure. As Richard says, it appears to be preaching to the converted, and if I was opposing it I would start by pointing out all the wasteful spending you seemed to want to keep (easy enough once you are in government) or by portraying you as working for the scroungers rather than the workers – which might chime with much of the population at the moment.

Rich @ 16

families and communities will be permanently blighted, possibly for generations

This is just the sort of OTT stuff that will prove counter productive. The public aren’t idiots. Spending on public services in each of the next four years will be HIGHER than in in 2008, and a lot higher than in any year between Blair getting in in 1997.

Once you start talking about so-called ‘cuts’ blighting people’s lives, they’ll naturally ask why things didn’t feel so blighted 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 years ago when public expenditure was in real terms much lower.

The Left is falling into Osborne’s trap in making “cuts” the centrepiece of its strategy. The Tories are happy to talk up cuts now for the markets, but they know these are not really cuts at all. And they’ll already have a strategy to show how year on year they are resourcing key services better than Labour did.
When are you guys going to wake up to the fact that Total Managed Expenditure in two years time will still be around £100bn MORE than back in 2004?

If you reduce the whole political debate to a ‘who’s got the bigger dick in terms of pending on public services’, the Tories will win.

[19] Jerry

I don’t doubt your figures but a link to the analysis would be great. Your points are very pertinent because it fits in with what I was saying above. The “cuts agenda” is not about saving money, it is about changing the balance of how much taxpayers money goes into the public rather than the private sector. The NHS (and education) shows this in action. The infamous ring fence has been misunderstood by the electorate who look at their local hospital and thing “you’re safe”. It’s not, because it is a publicly owned facility. Lansley’s changes will direct NHS money to private providers, whether that is GPs (who are private businesses) or the new healthcare providers that Lansley has promised.

It is not the deficit that the Tories are attacking, it is the whole concept of public provision of services.

“They are cutting incapacity benefits but not consultants in their IT ivory towers or contracts for their friends at BAE systems. We aren’t all in it together.” etc.

That would discredit the Tories and LibDems while not blurring the macroeconomic message that these cuts are damaging.

I think the two arguments can be rolled into one. You could argue that this is an ideological assault on the weakest in our society… and the deficit could have been cut via these measures but instead they’re focusing on the most marginalised in society. No?

Also, a point made well by Left Foot Forward just now – cuts won’t reduce the deficit, investment will. That is also a good talking point.

Flowerpower – I’m sorry you must be under the misapprehension that anyone listens to you.

Richard: We should use the NHS as our gold standard public service because across the country it is regarded with such high regard and yet Lansley is intending to privatise the majority of it.

I agree that focusing on welfare generally isn’t that attractive a message… but my point is merely that the spending cuts are ideologically driven.

I think the broader point should be about the damage to the economy and rising unemployment. No?

Sunny,

I think the broader point should be about the damage to the economy and rising unemployment. No?

Risky, in that if you make a play of this and the economy continues to recover with an improving trend in unemployment (apparently this lags the economy, so will go up for a bit anyway?) then you begin to look very bad at managing the economy.

Tim J

With you on PFI projects. There were a couple of letter in the Indy last weekend which talked about other ways to reduce the deficit that are far less painless, as private profiteering in the public sector most definitely came out. Private market behaviour over public sector contracts is inflating the cost by billions.

According to one letter, as well as tax avoidance by the richest people in the Uk costing the state £35 billion a year, interest payments on off-the-balance-sheet, privately financed PFI projects is costing the Exchequer £25 billion per year in interest payments. Within the life of the coalition parliament, that amounts to cutting £125 billion off the deficit! Contract law is not something I am an expert on, but is there any way that Mervyn King can exercise his new powers and call for a 5 year interest payment “holiday” on these privately funded assets? It is the taxpayer that is paying for this profligacy and, while a lot of unnecessary cost needs to be cut from govt departments, the poorest will suffer far more than the hedge-fund or investment bank creaming interest & profit from the loans for those shiny hospitals and (sadly) weapons systems.

[19] Jerry – Like Richard, i’d also like to see your figures, and i’d similarly question whether this net spending actually represented a continuation in the quality and scale of public services.

And I don’t think anyone is advancing the line that it is purely the scale of cuts which matters. The whole starting premiss of this topic is that the cuts are ideological, and that this needs to be illustrated and highlighted. With regards to cutting and privatising employment support services, you see exactly an example of ideologically driven policy, with very real consequences. It’s not clear to me how large scale, long-term, regionally clustered unemployment, coupled with cuts in benefits and the privatisation of local services would not constitute a blight on the lives of those who suffer it. This may not be sufficient to form an oppositional narrative by itself, but it is not something we should ignore either – not least as it evokes strong memories of a Thatcherite era that remains broadly discredited.

@Rich and @Richard B

The figures are in the budget docs but – as if on cue – those right wingers at the Spectator have reproduced them in impactful, graphic form, so you can bet they’re going to feature bigtime in the Tory/coalition playbook.

The key lesson is that the next 4 years will be four out of five of the highest spending years in history in terms of real total managed spending on public services.

Is that a time to be running a cuts narrative such as Sunny lays out? How is that different from a climate change denialist running a ‘there’s no global warming’ campaign through four out of five of the hottest recorded years?

Also, although I agree that the privatisation/outsourcing is ideological, it isn’t exactly a huge change from New Labour ideology. And I’m not sure that will have much traction. I work in a quasi private/quasi public sort of public sector org myself and neither my colleagues nor the people we serve really givet wo hoots about our status.

Better to work out a better offer in terms of the good life and common good.

here’s that link:

http://www.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/6109243/different-miliband-similar-deceit.thtml

I agree with comments two and three. There is a sense that the public has ‘accepted’ the budget but only because the people who had been galvanised by the pre-election hype have now been disengaged again by the farce that’s followed. And note to those saying we’re getting what we voted for; we’re not. Tories were first but Labour was in second; there was no overall majority and there wasn’t an option on who we’d like in coalition on the ballot paper. This budget is not what people were voting for or elected on either; if Dave wants a more responsive, progressive government etc then we should be consulted on what we want to happen to our country’s finances before the measures are implemented – not just have them foist upon us.

@Jerry,

I think that’s a fair point – the most effective opposition to cuts will come in the form of illustrating how an alternative would provide for a better standard of living and opportunity. I don’t think these two approaches (anti-cuts vs pro-alternative) are necessarily in tension – but perhaps they both need to be present for a message to be fully effective.

Hi – I think this is the most useful discussion I’ve seen on how to react to the Tory cuts agenda. Not to mention the car ads. But I think one central issue is crucial: public attitudes to the public sector. This has fundamentally changed since the last time there was a confrontation – under Thatcher, when the public sector employees were still recognisably part of a homogenous ‘working class’. This no longer exists, and not just because of the decline in manual trades. It is an issue of solidarity. There is now a fundamental difference between the life chances of private sector and public sector employees. While salaries, pensions and benefits have continued to rise for most public sector employees, majority of ordinary working people have been crucified by the economic recession – lost wages, lost benefits, lost pensions, lost job security. The public sector, on the basis of their ability to extract value from the ordinary working class, who pay through their taxes, almost constitute a distinct social class. No successful challenge to the Tory cuts agenda can be based on protecting the privileges of this social grouping. Unfortunately, in the forthcoming public sector strikes, Liberal Democrats are going to have to make difficult choices. Just say no.

Contract law is not something I am an expert on, but is there any way that Mervyn King can exercise his new powers and call for a 5 year interest payment “holiday” on these privately funded assets?

No. It’s a long, long way out of the BoE’s remit to be altering the terms of contracts signed between contractors and HMG! FRom what I have heard regarding the negotiating of these contracts (and bear in mind that this is a necessarily self-serving view…) there was a massive disparity of competence and experience between the teams instructed by the large contractors, and the civil servants of HMG. PFI contracts are, or certainly used to be, remarkably generous to the contractors in almost every way.

Bearing that in mind, I’d be amazed if they were anything other than watertight when it comes to holding the Government to the terms of the contract. HMG could of course just pass legislation retrospectively amending the terms of the contracts, or even just disapply them and take control of the related assets. The costs of such a policy would, I suspect, outweight the savings…

Sunny,
The points you raise are incontrovertible, but in my opinion if the British Public are to be truly swayed against such a regressiev budget, the catching details of the budget which have not been raised must be – otherwise all the Public hears is Labour rhetoric – as true as it is – which they immediately switch off to.

Such examples are:
The way in which, as The Independent recently illustrated in their article, (WHICH I RECOMMEND FOR YOUR RESEARCH): ‘Osborne’s Budget? It’s Wrong, wrong, wrong!’ with special, and very pertinent guest Joseph Stiglitz, lower-earners would lose 2.5% of their income to the 1% lost by the high-earners.

I do not believe the Public switch off to details and on to rhetoric, I think that many may be caught by such unexpected detail and the Tories ambushed.

@29 ian Macwhirter

I’ve heard such assertions about public sector workers a lot recently and in the run up to the election. I dismissed them as propaganda. Do you know of any properly conducted comparisons that illustrate your point?

Its worth a substitution test: Instead of “(fat cat) public sector worker,” try, “Nurse.”

[32] Neither a nurse nor a train driver are likely to go into work to-morrow to be given a P45 because someone, somewhere in Asia is prepared to do their job for £1.50/hour (or by a burly Russian who is happy to live in a bunkhouse) – there are private sector jobs of which this is also true, of course; nevertheless it is arguable that the majority of jobs insulated from these global market realities are either in the public sector or are provided by public sector contractors.

This is why the government is now insisting that such workers undertake voluntary work (probably in the care sector) in their own time as an employment condition – to overcome the widespread perception that they are featherbedded.

Mike, you say, “…global market realities…” but what about the reality of the importance of the jobs done by public sector workers? There seems to be an assumption that everyone in the public sector is well paid, has a huge secure pension and does nothing. Its rubbish!

Let’s talk about another global reality: Wages vs GDP have progressively fallen since the 1960s. There is PLENTY of money around to make a fairer society if we decide to. Of course there will be consequences, but there are consequences for any choice we make. The notion that there is only one way for an economy to work is rubbish, but we should be clear about the costs and benefits of the choices we make.

The LibCon choices are to fuck everyone over so the rich can get richer. I disagree with them. I think plenty of others do too.

[34] I was merely describing. I agree with every word you say, Yurzzem!

This does not alter the fact that the only successful popular politics since 1945 were the miners’ strikes of 1972 and 1973-4 and that was due the government’s failure to stockpile coal (as Maggie did later).

All other left action, parliamentary or extra-parliamentary, has resulted in failure. Three generations of defeat…

The cause that will get middle England to realise that they made one helluva mistake is the NHS. We will have hospital closures.

6. This is why Osbourne is planning to increase spending on the NHS. This is why the rest of the public sector is being sacrificed.

Yurrzem!

Nurses are not badly paid these days. A band six theatre nurse in London will get over £40,000 and that’s by no means top of the line. Band 9 nurse consultants get over £100,000 http://www.nhscareers.nhs.uk/details/Default.aspx?Id=766

Also, they generally retire after thirty years service and get index linked pensions of two thirds salary. This is worth 26% of salary. And they can’t be sacked – at least not in Scotland where there is no compulsory redundancy agreement.

As for public private pay relativities, look at ONS http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=285 Median full time earnings in public sector £539 a week, median full time earnings in private sector: £465 a week.

Compared with the six million workers on the public payroll, private sector workers have fewer holidays, work longer hours, have virtually no final salary pensions and no job security.

Need I go on…

@37

Ta!

@36

Well, maybe. Although if far-right Tory freak Nadine Dorris gets her way things might look different: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/politics/10428278.stm

@39 Mr S Pill

Of course, PFI payments will be protected at the expense of other NHS finances. Thanks Gordon!