Even the most zealous small-stater would surely agree that after 14 years of tight spending there is little in the way of fat to cut.
Arts Council, foreign aid, anything with diversity in it, equity, the CCC, OBR, really, quite a list to go and I’ve not had my second coffee yet.
after 14 years of tight spending
UK national debt in 2010: £1,524 Bn
UK national debt after 14 years of “tight spending”: £2,685 Bn
But they’ll keep saying we’ve been through 14 years of “austerity”. Sometimes stupidity is an advantage in winning arguments.
You have reminded me of how the Oz government sent Penny Wong on a trip to Israel to piss away A$21 000 000 odd of our money. I of course felt we should leave the locals alone to mismanage their affairs as they see fit.
The only thing we really needed to do was send a ship to the Red Sea to help the Yanks stop interference with trade. We naturally sent six staff to help administer things.
The NHS – all spending, all spending on Net Zero, reduce civil service by at least 50%, cut subsidies to local authorities, cut welfare by 50%.
Plenty to cut.
A certain newly elected president in a certain South-American nation has conclusively shown there is always plenty of things to cut…
Seems to work as well..
They must be getting really, really worried at the Guardian..
House of Lords in its current form can go as well as half MPs, although I’d be happy to bring back the hereditary peers.
Independence for Scotland, Wales and NI would save us a fair bit as well.
BiND has a good idea there. Just imagine if a future government just declared that Scotland, NI and Wales were victims of colonialism, racism and other isms and were therefore released from English hegemony on their own recognizance, free at last.
Imagine the screaming.
Imagine the screaming.
Certainly make me scream. Being overrun with loony left Shinners and their hangers on would royally fuck my future plans.
But the rest of the suggestions are fine.
They could halve per-capita public spending and still piss more up the wall than back in the 80s. And that’s inflation-adjusted.
https://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/spending_chart_1900_2023UKd_17c1li011lcn_F0t
Oh, and look at the big jump upwards there in 2020, the year we all died of Covid. “14 years of tight spending” my flabby arse. You can draw a perfectly straight line from 1988/89 to the present. The post-2010 “austerity” (actually more like post-2012, and such as it was) might as well never have happened. It’s been totally wiped out.
Sack 60% of all civil servants, but double the salary of those remaining, with the proviso that they are entirely “Employable at Will”. Pensions to be as in the private sector.
With that Singaporean solution we might actually get competence and accountability. Might.
Might work, if every year we also fire the worst-performing 10% at mid-manager level and above. And the department with the most 10%ers gets its entire senior management fired. Performance metrics to be customer-focussed, so harder to fudge.
Incentives matter…
@Sam
That’s a great site. Have been fond of using it in the past to illustrate those “savage cuts” in NHS spending:
https://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/spending_chart_2006_2025UKb_17c1li111lcn_10t