Benefit claimants to cut deeply into Coalition cuts
New figures released today by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show very clearly that the private sector is failing to find employment for those made redundant by cuts in the public sector.
The good news for the Chancellor – whose reputation is staked upon cutting public expenditure – is that across all regions of the UK, public sector employment fell….by an average of 4.4%. Further good news is that private sector employment levels have risen: but only by an average of 1.25%.
One can’t extrapolate a direct swap between the two raw numbers involved in the dataset, but what must be worrying for both the major occupants of Downing Street is that, very probably, only at best 1 in 3 redundant civil servants have been absorbed into the private sector.
It’s worrying for two reasons. Firstly because it suggests again, as blogged endlessly here, that the private sector as currently configured simply cannot take up the slack created by cuts. And second, because by the time newer unemployment claimants start getting the dole, around 25% of the net cuts made per annum will almost certainly be wiped out. (This calculation is based on net employment losses at an unemployment benefit annual average as defined in the latest survey from the Institute for Fiscal Studies. )
The bottom line is that, while Osborne’s approach has stood us in good stead on the global credit markets to date, economically it has been self-defeating. And if you think the markets will now mark us as untouchable, then you’re probably a bit odd. Or Polly Toynbee.
George Osborne set himself an impossible task from Day One of being in office. The cuts started too late in historical terms, and were undermined every step of the way by Mandarin jiggery-pokery. In turn, a manufacturing sector at under 13% could never have coped with the cuts…especially when our old friends the swankers refused to lend the SME sector anything – breaking most promises and missing most targets.
So then, the Chancellor has been turned over by bankers and mandarins. Odd bedfellows? Not really: mandarin self-awarded pension emolument liabilities are just under £1 trillion of our National Debt. And the responsibilities left in our laps by the MoUs are slight under that amount.
No, Gideon is undone, as the Bard might have written. But by a deady combo of personal hubris, the greed of the privileged, the spending incontinence of the previous Government, and overpopulation.
Not difficult to see what we need to get rid of, then.
The Slog 