Death, Taxes and Public Spending Cuts

I popped to Barcelona last week, and had a lovely time thank you very much. There will, I suspect, be a blog appearing shortly covering my musings on the differences I found between here and there (probably a sort of 'grass is greener' type of thing).

However, more pressing on my mind is the fervour I find upon my return in the news media. It appears that all the political parties have reached a consensus on how to fix our financial woes which will help make it easier for us to select a box for our cross at the forthcoming election. The race is now on to cut public spending as savagely and drastically as possible all in the name of fiscal prudence (and I thought prudence was faithful to Gordon).

I understand that in supporting the needs of shareholders of financial institutions and companies, we rightly spent many a billion (and we've become American for the purposes of such calculations now) to keep things moving a little. I note that as the country has become massively indebted, most of the large banks are happy plodding on making profits, carrying on as they were and moaning about the paltry controls on their practices currently being discussed by governments around the world.

In the meantime, the last week has brought proposals to cut back in education and health, although these cuts are apparently only of spending that has absolutely no impact on the quality of services (handy, that!). It's early days, but expect a rash of other proposed cuts from each party to show how tough they are prepared to be on cutting the deficit - certainly tougher than the other parties.

Now I'm not dim, I understand that we are in a pretty large financial hole at the moment. However, I do question the consensus that appears to have formed that we basically need to get the economy back to where it was a couple of years ago and carry on as normal. I'm not sure that a massive reliance on financial services, an ever reducing focus on manufacturing and the philosophy that low taxation and hence public spending is the way forwards. The increases in public spending seen over the last ten or so years have still not brought us up to the levels seen in some European countries and there still exists a massive disparity in the services available to those using state services and those paying for private. Perhaps a little less focus on "year on year growth" and a little more on improving our society as a whole would pay dividends. It may be worth a try.

So, being the lefty type that I am, I propose that through fair means or foul, we recoup some of our deficit from the banks that we have saved (directly and indirectly). Nationalisation would have been best, but we appear to have missed that particular boat. Then focus rather more on the benefits of well-funded and well-run public services. Education, health, social care and all the rest are not charity but have a host of benefits to our society as a whole (tangible and less so) which mean that the poor, the rich and those in between feel more secure and happy. I think we exclude a large group of people from employment (and so from broader society) when we remove a whole level of job role requiring low levels of skills. I think it's better to have well maintained parks, clean streets and a person rather than a machine serving me at my local supermarket than have a chunk of our population thinking that Jeremy Kyle and Murder She Wrote are a productive way of spending the day.

I think that's it for this particular rant...I suspect another will follow shortly! :)