I am also a faceless mandarin doing my damndest to stand in the way of those private-sector individuals striving to earn a crust and laughing as I look forward to my gold plated pension. Or rather, all my 'stakeholders'or let's even call them customers are lawyers who are now worried in case the service we provide at the Land Register is going to become worse due to fewer staff, outsourcing and so on. And guess what? I like my job, I like the people I work with, I strive to do it as efficiently as I can.
I used to love putting my money into the private sector - for example, local independent record shops and my local independent bike repair guy, but as the pay freeze bites that's going to have to go (partially) by the wayside. It's not just about the public sector jobs....

Cameron, Osbourne and their public school friends (yes, I have a working class chip on my shoulder for which I will never apologize so get fucked) are cunts of the very highest order! However, i'm reserving my pity for the real victims in this Tory drive to roll back 50 years of the Welfare State, the poor. Although I have sympathy for the public sector, and have several friends in peril of losing their jobs, as Kenny states above with 'gold plated pensions' pretty much the norm I'll not lose too much sleep when the worse happens. But that's how the cunts win isn't it? Divide and conquer. God, I fucking well hate 'em.

...to hear if funding for PGCEs in priority subjects will be cut.

I'm starting a PGCE in Physics next year, and the bursary and 'golden hello' are essential for me to do the course and still pay the mortgage. If they go, I probably will too; back to the private sector. Leaving science teaching to bright-eyed volunteers coming into faith-based academies to "teach the controversy", no doubt.

my social work registration; such a good time to be looking for a job as a NQSW :-(

Oh. You have already gone...

How many years has it been since a TUC Conference has had top billing on the BBC News? Winter of discontent coming in some form or other.

You can either see this as a Tory agenda to trim the state or as a response, echoed across Europe, to a super-massive budget deficit. I'm not equipped to argue the pros and cons either way, but surely borrowing more is not a good idea, either?

... one of the problems with the last Labour government - speaking as someone who held his nose after the Iraq war was so utterly ineptly prosecuted (and sidestepping the morality of it the incompetence and cruelty was appalling) and voted Labour -

- was that they shovelled money into the private sector by the back door in such vast quantities -consultancy, outsourcing, PFI - installed vastly overpaid local chief execs and quango bosses - all of whom have been in my fairly wide work experience, pretty shoddy and incompetent. (I work in the private sector doing something arcane in IT). All I can think is that it was some sort of cynical Labour attempt to buy off the City while Labour pursued their social agenda, after previous Labour governments had spent all their time dealing with foreign exchange/balance of payments crises.

(I almost hope it was that cynical otherwise if that sort of thing happened by accident we really are in trouble).

The point being there really is a lot of fat in the public sector but it won't be the management of private company recipients of public largesse who suffer. The public sector spending inflated enormously under Labour but the money still went to the City in the end. Rail privatisation is the model you should have in mind - everything vastly more expensive, everything by some miracle more heavily subsidised at the same time, services by and large worse (except you can now buy a reasonable sandwich for £4.50). The cuts will fall where services are delivered not where the money is extracted.

London will be alright - London always is. Mr Hepworth has dismissed the rest of the country as an irrelevant sideshow in the current issue and I know from decades living darn sarf in London and my native South East how widespread that opinion is.

Meantime the City beggars us all by continuing to borrow money from the BoE at 0.5% and lend it back to the government at 3% (gilts) - £6 billion a year thanks very much - and the corporations lean on George to ensure they are let off tax. Vodaphone will probably avoid a £5.5 billion bill this year. The HMRC boss thinks his staff are too hard on corporations.

(You may have noticed recently that the banks are a little less forgiving with their own debtors ).

Bankers muscle their way into government to ensure there's no nonsense about 'oversight' or 'governance'. The City and the banks extract money -ours - they don't create wealth. You need to understand what's going on at the moment, its the biggest smash and grab raid by the ruling classes since they started building castles and ravaging the countryside.

Can't comment about the hardships or uncertainty of the public sector but some of us have been ducking and diving for years followed around by the "Bottom Line Gazers." Left retail 10 years ago because even then you would have your job delisted and then have to reapply for the new title on the Monday when there were less positions to cut costs. Moved into manufacturing working agency never knowing if I would get a full weeks work so had to work overtime when on offer cos next week there might be no orders so you'd be laid off. Had to leave there because International firm that it was - the production was moved to Poland because it was cheaper.
Nephew and Niece - too young to vote - campaigned with many others in Teesside to save the Corus plant - it was only after all was lost that I took them to one side and pointed out that we are all complicit in such closures because we buy foreign cars. Simplistic I know but everytime you complain about the cost of something think about the person making it for minimum wage or for a wage you wouldn't get out of bed for.

I am in the same position, I know people who have already taken voluntary severance, and also five people who have been forced to apply for their own job when only only one was left to fill. So one of the most depressing things I have heard for a while was Evan Davis's Radio 4 program on tax yesterday (still on the iplayer here) . It is clear that the vast majority of people, and particularly under-thirty-five-year-olds, are dead-set against ANY increase in income tax. The old saw that the UK public wants a Scandinavian welfare state with a US tax structure was never so true. I think this has something to do with the slow erosion of the concept of community. It struck me that in this environment, it doesn't matter who governs; taxes will stay down and "choice" (choice = "you want something better? pay for it") will continue to grow.

Btw, I am not rising to DH's bait!

Undoubtedly sometimes times are good economically and sometimes times are bad. At the minute, things aren't great.

Beyond this simplistic assessment though, I have a huge problem with the masses dancing to the constant banging drum of "spending cuts, spending cuts." The government has done a very good job in making the general population feel that the sky is falling, and I find that frustrating.

I learnt about the Vodafone tax avoidance issue (mentioned above by FakeGeordie) in the latest Private Eye and read the story with huge annoyance. Meanwhile, the increasingly odious Nick Robertson is on the BBC 10 O'Clock news driving a car up and down the country that says "Spending Cuts" on its roof and asking various pensioners and so forth to speak their brains on where the axe should fall. I don't think that's reporting, Nick, you're just being a mouthpiece. The parroting of all the news outlets of "spending cuts, what will they cut, countdown to the big announcement" without any investigation of where the big money really is, is a disgrace.

I wrote a blog on this about a month ago. Fraser, if it's off form to reproduce it here, I'll delete it, just let me know.

“It’s the old quote. “You campaign in poetry, you govern in prose”. This is the most unglamorous, prosaic part of government. But I love it, and why? Because it is where the money is”. Francis Maude - let's call him Fraude for short - Minister for the Cabinet Office, quoted in The Guardian on July 31st 2010.

Leaving aside the fact that there was nothing poetic nor uplifting about the way in which the Conservatives campaigned at the last election – had there been, they might not have required the Liberal Democrats to prop them up like a disorientated, dysfunctional drunk at the newly appointed closing time – this quote gets right to the nub of why the Tories were so swift to accept that coalition. Because Conservatives understand far better than the Labour Party that there is no point in a political party existing if it isn’t in power, for without power, they can do nothing.

Already, just a few months in, the thinking of the likes of Maude and Letwin in ushering the Tories into bed with the Lib-Dems is becoming increasingly obvious. The doe-eyed performance of Nick Clegg in the BBC documentary “Five Days That Shook Britain” will be a piece of television that is perpetually shown back to him again and again in the years to come when, following the next election, his party has disappeared up its own fundament.

As soon as the Tory high command saw what they would be working with, their glee must have been unrestrained. The forthcoming decimation of Clegg’s clowns means an opportunity to return to the two party system they love so much had fallen into their laps. Not only that, but the Lib Dems, so hell bent on suicide, would first ensure that their death throes would last a full five years ensuring that, however desperate it gets under the Tory cuts, Parliament cannot possibly issue a vote of no confidence if the new 55% rule passes. Greater love hath no Clegg than that he lay down his party for the Tories.

Which is all the Tories wanted, because they’re well aware that the loathing of the nation is but a sheaf of redundancy notices and police station closures away. No wonder Fraude boasts that this Tory party “hit the ground running”. Critically, he adds, “I would say one of the things that Lady Thatcher regretted was not pushing ahead vigorously enough in terms of reform”.

This lot are so radical, so regressive, so desperate to smash the concept of the welfare state which they have always loathed – even their beloved Churchill, champion of sterilising the "feeble minded" at one point in his career, campaigned devoutly against it – that they have no time to lose. They’ve got five years to dismantle it and brainwash – ie bribe – enough people into thinking that we need no public sector so that they can reach their real endgame, a top rate of tax at around 30% or less, so Fraude and co can have more and more disposable income to lavish on private health, private education and their secure gated communities.

After years of Cameron in opposition pretending that ideology was dead, what we actually have is the Old Etonian letting the slip the dogs of gore, ready to gorge themselves upon the jobs, the benefits and the hopes of those in no position to look after themselves.

Behind the lie that the deficit must not only be reduced or obliterated, and not soon, but now, they have been able to give credence to a second, even bigger lie, that the deficit is due to the wickedness of public spending. Those evil people not only earning vast fortunes for filling in a few forms, but who will then bleed us dry with their monumental pensions.

Divide and rule, the classic tactic that woman used through the 1980s, though even then she needed a Great Patriotic War to help her win a second term given that in 1981 her popularity ranked with the bubonic plague. Which, on reflection, might have been better for us than her. Divide and rule is back. Turn the working classes in on themselves, make them fight each other, looks for scapegoats within their own communities. It’s not the government’s fault, it’s the benefit scrounger, the administrator, the bad teacher who can’t ever be sacked, the pensioner.

It’s not though is it? What’s wicked about getting your bins emptied? Having burglars arrested? Having your hip operation properly planned, and the correct paperwork filled in so the surgeon doesn’t amputate your foot instead?

This is not the public sector’s deficit, certainly not all of it. It’s far more the financial services’ deficit, both in terms of the money they were given direct in order to save them and the costs to the economy of the ongoing recession they induced. But as the profits roll in once again, there’s no rush to take our money back is there? Because, as Maude has it, that’s also where the money is. And who’d know better than him? After all, according to a piece in the New Statesman in October 2009, “Francis Maude, a former director of Morgan Stanley, juggles an array of non-executive financial positions. These bring him £68,600 a year, but luckily don't require too many hours - Barclays pays him £36,700 for six days' work. Maude, who has railed against the irresponsibility of mortgage lenders, banked £100,000-plus as director of a financial services group that profited from sub-prime mortgages. Despite owning four properties, he claimed almost £35,000 in two years for interest payments on a London flat just yards from his house”.

So when we begin to think about those who make too much money from the public sector, why don’t we start with Maude? After all, somebody making that kind of return hardly needs to worry about picking up his MP salary does he? A saving straight away.

Except of course, what the government means when it talks about making a sacrifice in the coming years is that we are going to make it, you and me, the ordinary. Will Maude, Gove, Osborne, Cameron or the well heeled be sacrificing anything? I think not, which is hardly fair since at least Clegg’s Clowns have made a sacrifice.

Still, principles come cheap this year.

More to follow on a new thread. There's lots to say and I don't want it getting lost.