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Savage cuts for all! Well, not quite...
BillieTheBot
Posts: 8,721 Bot
According to various sources, the Chancellor has ordered cuts of 25% across almost all Whitehall departments over the next few years. There's only two areas that are exempt - the NHS and foreign aid.
Can anyone explain to me why those two should be exempt from being cut? Because I'm struggling to find any coherent explanation of it anywhere, especially on the foreign aid one. Enlighten me if you can...
I'll come back to this a little later to see what you've come up with.
UPDATE: Just to clarify, the second is indeed a reference to the Department for International Development.
Can anyone explain to me why those two should be exempt from being cut? Because I'm struggling to find any coherent explanation of it anywhere, especially on the foreign aid one. Enlighten me if you can...
I'll come back to this a little later to see what you've come up with.
UPDATE: Just to clarify, the second is indeed a reference to the Department for International Development.
Beep boop. I'm a bot.
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Comments
The NHS is facing a series of huge cuts.
The other is not aid.
Yes.
For the NHS there's a pretty simple explanation. It's the one issues affecting the country which directly related to how people vote. If you look at the levels of public satisfaction in the NHS and compare it to the Govt satisfaction levels it will be pretty similar. The NHS is an issue which loses elections.
It's also worth noting that whilst the budget will not be cut, saving are expected to be made. 20% over the next few years, including a 46% cut in management costs. To put figures on that, £20bn saving, £1bn management costs.
For "aid", you should note that it's actually "Development". We don't just give other countries money and say "spend it how you like". We task the funds against specific projects, oh and then add a caveat that tey use British firms to build/design etc. So it's actually investment in our own economy.
It usually means the U.K makes a profit ...gets mineral rights or whatever.
Every single Pound spent on foreign aid saves lives. Not just 'improves the lives of people'- it actually saves many lives. While that doesn't mean we should sell all our assets and become homeless so as much money as possible is sent to the Third World, any cuts in the current budget would directly lead to the death of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands in the long term. I can think of a million other places to make cuts beforehand.
What obligation do we have to feed the rest of the world? You may be surprised to know that I think we do have such an obligation, as one of the richest countries in the world. But I think foreign aid is a poor way of doing it. Why have we given £2billion to India in the last few years in aid? They've been spending a fortune on building spaceships rather than dealing with the extreme poverty in the slums, as shown so brilliantly on Channel 4's slumdog season a while ago. I'm glad this is being stopped. Typical of the way the missing monocular one* used to piss around with public money? Almost certainly, but I'm pleased this will end.
Open up trade barriers and give the likes of Africa a chance to get themselves out of poverty - and give less control to corrupt dictators whilst at it.
* I wonder if these rumours are true? I'm not convinced myself.
I wouldn't. Neither would this Govt, neither would the last.
That doesn't equate to cutting the budget though, does it?
So, what would you cut? What do you think of as waste?
We're all in this together?
A Network Rail chief executive takes his latest bonus to the bank today.
What I'm asking is why the NHS and international development should be exempt from cuts that have to happen elsewhere. Why no outrage that education isn't exempt, for instance? Why no disgust about changes to disability allowances?
This government is just like its predecessor - it gives to the poor with one hand and takes it away again with another. And people wonder why I already despise them!
Like I say, the NHS one I can understand. People value it very highly and it's an election loser. Major lost the election partly because of the 2 year waits for surgery and 36 hours in A&E.
The Aid one is, as Rolly mentions, about UK rights to minerals and protecting UK businesses. It's not an act of alturism.
NB There is and there will be, outrage at cuts that follow. Reality is that people tend not to organise marches against reducing budgets in Education.
We?
Exactly the opposite of what Clegg and his wimps were saying only weeks ago.
A whole campaign spent saying the opposite.
He gets a little power with the big boys ...finds the country is actually ten billion quid better off than even Labour knew ...and then goes down the Tory right wing road.
From centre left to right wing soooo quickly.
Well ...the grass roots are stirring ...Liberal MP's are stirring.
The people are mightily pissed off with fat cats and bankers who aren't in it all together with the peasants.
There was not only one way to approach this as many economists have been saying.
I'm off to the bookies in the morning to see what odds I can get that the coalition doesn't last twelve months.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEqi0cs-Crw
Hospitals and schools with rain pouring in them and the government refusing to spend any money to put them right.
Schools with not enough books or other equipment.
Crumbling roads decimated police force and on and on.
This time round ...it is going to be far far worse than the eighties.
At the end of five years ...there will be no party who will be able to raise any amount of money to repair the devastation.
People are waking up to this fact ...the coalition is doomed.
and they were wrong then, but right now.
Though the £6bn they opposed cutting this year was peanuts, less than 1% of Govt spend and like all parties they were looking to make cuts in 10/11.
The coalition will be fine though. Despite Labour propoganda Libs and Tories work well together if local authorities are any guide - there's more Lib/Tory coalitions than Lib/Lab and they're much closer to each other on many fundamentals than either is to Labour. True a few members may be hacked off and leave, but they'll continue (or risk an even bigger kicking at the ballot box for bringing down the Govt or joining with Labour).
Eh? You moan about no cuts to the NHS in the same breath as moaning about changes to disability allowances?
Pardon me for being slightly Old Labour in this sense, but the way a society treats its vulnerable is a good indication of what society we're in. A society which is going to make the most disabled of its citizens face demeaning means tests is one which I feel sick thinking about.
WARNING: The next part of this post contains critical comments about the banking industry. If you are Thunderstruck, go and burn some kittens for heat or something.
A picture of Noel Edmonds - entirely unconnected with this thread - inserted randomly into a thread on a forum today.
Why aren't the bankers - those who got this country into so much of a mess - being let off so lightly, yet the most vulnerable in society are being hit time and time again?
I get very angry about these issues, yet most of the time, all people complain about on the board is that I use the word "cunt" too much. Strange priorities.
I wouldn't be too ready to let yourself believe that. What I take exception to a lot of the time is not your use of language, but your deliberate over-simplification and selective recall of a topic for rhetorical purposes. You're also too fond of the hyperbole-shotgun approach: 'X is a sell-out cunt, Y is a fucking weak-willed fuckwit, and the country's going down the pisser'. It takes time to address each topic properly and when I start trying to write a measured response I mostly end up thinking 'why the fuck I am bothering, he's clearly not properly bothered enough about the issue to tackle it with due care and attention'. Then I get frustrated and my use my potty-mouth, which makes me somewhat of a hypocrite.
ETA: I do actually think you care about these topics, and you clearly care enough about them to read about and around the issue, but you rarely drop the front when presenting your thoughts to P&D.
Fucking hell, SG. With that comment and the Prisons thread you're starting to sound a little socialist.
I agree, in the main. There is a roll for assessing what someone is capable to doing, work wise, rather than assuming that their disability rules them out of the jobs market completely.
Apart from that, you're pretty much bang on.
Besides, if we spent our time trying to understand the world, most of us would never be able to write anything about it, given how bloody complicated a place it is. I think socialists have a few decent ideas about what they want for the world. The old Labour Party did, for example. They cared about the poorest in society, the elderly, the disabled, the most vulnerable. Unfortunately, their solutions to these problems have often been proved repeatedly to not work - but Labour sticks by most of these solutions, even today. Socialists could be described using the Chinese proverb* "Insanity is doing the same thing in the same way and expecting a different outcome.".
*It may well have been Einstein who popularised this one.
I've got an alibi guv.
That's quite alarming!
Their entire belief system was wrong and has been corrected over a few weeks and you trust these people to hold power!!!!
I think that was Einstein ...he didn't look very Chinese.