UK Debt and the Cuts that have to be made!

When it comes the politics i am a realist I dont vote for the same party every election and I tend to go with the party I think is the most realistic.

At the last general election that meant that the best of a very bad bunch was the Conservative party. I know that this country is skint like a student on bender, we have mountains of debt and things are getting worse the only solution. Our total debt stands at about £900 Billion or about 90% of our GDP that moron George Osborne today said that the government needs to save 50p in ever £100 spent or cut spending by about 0.5%.

So ecconomically things are pretty crap and like I said i am a realist if cuts have to be made then fair enough, if my tax's have to go up fair enough my attitude is that we are all in this together and we all have to take our fair share of the burden.

HOWEVER!!!!

This government in my view is making the wrong cuts.

The independent recently had a interesting article on this they stated that:

More than 1,000 police community support officer (PCSO) jobs have been cut in England each year since 2010, a total of 4,430 positions, according to Home Office statistics analysed by Unison. PCSOs make up 75 per cent of neighbourhood policing teams. The BBC reports the number of police officers currently employed across England and Wales is 127,000 – the lowest since September 2001

and that they done the same to the fire-fighters

By 2011 more than 1,000 jobs had been cut across England, Scotland and Wales according to the Fire Brigades Union. By 2014, 10 firestations in London alone were forced to close, causing 552 jobs to be lost, as part of £45m worth of savings needed to be made across the capital’s service by 2016.

Now I could link to all the cuts they have made, cutting out the NHS Student nurse bursary, messing around with the NHS to make as many back door cuts as they can really (junior doc's contracts) then we could look at the cuts in welfare for the disabled, the massive closure of domestic abuse centres, library, post offices, children centres, mental health facilities the list goes on and on.

Other than cutting child benefits for those earning over 50K a year along with defence budget cuts i can't find much that i agree with cutting.

You see the problem i have is that they are cutting the wrong things, rather than cutting on the number of police and firefighters how about the government just scrap trident. Some estimates state the replacing Tri dent could cost as much as £160 billion in addition to the £250 million it costs to maintain a year. You see that right away i have found billions that the government could save on getting rid of its big guns. We have no need for trident, we could even adopt a latent nuclear deterrent like Japan if we really need them so much. I can't help but feel like in todays world spending billions on nuclear weapons we don't need when we can't afford to keep 11 fire stations open that something is seriously wrong with how the government spends our tax's

And on the topic of Trident how about we face up to the fact that we also dont' really need to pretend to be a military super power, sure we have a awesome armed forces our capabilities for a country our size is really quite spectacular. But again, when we are facing such economic austerity do we really need to spend over £65 billion on defence, can we not cut that down a bit? I fail to see a need for the UK to be spending this much on defence.

What about the almost £16 billion on foreign aid, hell lets take a couple of billion off that and spend it on keeping some of those domestic abuse shelters and post offices open.

Like i said at the start, I have no problem with cuts in principle, what i do however have a huge problem with is cutting public services before you make huge cuts to nuclear weapons, defence and how much money you give out in aid to countries who will probably use it to build a few more palaces.

a reply to: OtherSideOfTheCoin we will end up cutting so much that there will be nothing left for trident to defend

I agree with everyword you posted there , friends of mine with Autistic children will no longer get the help they need yet the Government can hand away billions to other countries .

A 86 year old neighbour of mine was told to fix her own close line that had fallen over


While councils all over the U.K are paying of thousands of staff and even the red button news on our remote controls may get the axe to save 40 million .

We really need that 2nd aircraft carrier / sarc

a reply to: stonerwilliam

those new carriers are costing a couple of billion

Think about how many council workers they could have kept in a job

a reply to: OtherSideOfTheCoin

The lunatics are running the asylum it seems and have been for a long long while , they lie ,cheat and steal

Whitehall is covering up the shocking figure ahead of EU poll, say MPs

www.dailymail.co.uk...
www.telegraph.co.uk...
The world has gone mad

a reply to: stonerwilliam

A 86 year old neighbour of mine was told to fix her own close line that had fallen over

Clothesline? By whom? Your government normally fixes clotheslines?

I don't suppose you could have lended a hand?

It's totally insane now. You pay the councils £1200/year in council tax. 25% of that goes straight to the public sector pension funds, and you don't have a pension yourself. The remaining 75% seems to go on "social integration" and not essential services like police, fire or even fixing potholes in the roads.

Homes in new housing estates have roads so narrow that the brightly painted Argos delivery vans have to park perilously on the pavements, keeling over like drunk parrots. I try and take the bus service to and from work to save money, but the council removed the traffic lights from the four lane roads to save money and to improve traffic flow. What are they going to do in another few years7?

originally posted by: Phage
a reply to: stonerwilliam

A 86 year old neighbour of mine was told to fix her own close line that had fallen over

Clothesline? By whom? Your government normally fixes clotheslines?

I don't suppose you could have lended a hand?

That's not the point the point is that the can spend billions on big guns but can no longer pay to help out a old lady

a reply to: Phage

I did phage , i also decorated a friend with Dementias home that he was shifted to and handed $55 to decorate and it was a crap hole needing about a week + of work , when they as landlords are responsable for the work

a reply to: OtherSideOfTheCoin

The cuts are a fallacy - we can never, ever pay off the debt. Imho, I can't see how the global economy is going to ever recover, and I really believe in the next 10 years there'll be a complete collapse.

You've only got to look at the EBC's recent 20
Billion injection to see they're running out of ideas. No cuts of any kind are going to save things now.

Totally agree with you, we don't need trident. As a weapon the only real use is to do a pre-emptive strike. It has the deterrance element but what use is a deterrant when everyone has agreed everyone is signing kumbaya if anyone decides to go nuclear.

The trident submarines and missiles in my eyes is akin to putting nukes in space. It's all good and well having that upper hand and people will scream bloody murder yet it still won't affect the MAD pact all that much.

Yeah we should scrap trident, use some of the money in other naval assets such as food or energy production... One can dream right?

originally posted by: youcanttellthepeople
a reply to: OtherSideOfTheCoin

The cuts are a fallacy - we can never, ever pay off the debt. Imho, I can't see how the global economy is going to ever recover, and I really believe in the next 10 years there'll be a complete collapse.

You've only got to look at the EBC's recent 20
Billion injection to see they're running out of ideas. No cuts of any kind are going to save things now.

ohhh yes i could not agree more,

I honestly believe that our entire economic system is going to crash in a spectacular fashion in the next few years, so yes cuts are in the long term pointless.

That actually makes it all the worse, if things are going to collapse lets keep the public services we need in place as long as possible rather than cutting them out before pointless nukes.

a reply to: OtherSideOfTheCoin

Does anyone actually know who the debt is owed to ?

And also where did that debt come from ? How did it amass ? Why are we, the general public required to be held responsible for a debt none of us had any part in creating ?

a reply to: Discotech

If it's anything like the US, the debt is owed to a variety of entities. Mostly in the the form of bonds.
In the US, greatest portion is domestic.
www.systemswiki.org...

I would imagine that the UK would be similar.

a reply to: Phage

Oh dear Lord, we are owned by the same people!!

Nice owing you.

a reply to: OtherSideOfTheCoin
What you have said sounds like you should be voting UKIP not Conservatives.

Our current debt is over £1.5 trillion, not £900 billion.
Our deficit last year was £88 billion.
Our forecast deficit for this year is £70 billion.

We spend more per year on just the interest payment of our debt than we do on Defence...
www.economicshelp.org...

We sell off our industry like Royal Mail to help bring the debt down, yet it doesn't even scratch the surface.

I personally think we should keep trident as the world is very unpredictable at the moment, but we could save lots of money by leaving the EU, cutting foreign aid and getting the big corporations to pay their fair share of corporation tax.

originally posted by: Cobaltic1978
a reply to: Phage

Oh dear Lord, we are owned by the same people!!

Nice owing you.

That all depends on who owns what. At the moment, 70% percent of the bond-age is domestic debt, that's 'straightforward' gilt-edge debt, the rest is overseas. That debt is not to do with trade balance of payments.

The biggest holders of the domestic gilts are insurance and pensions groups with around 50% and the Bank of England much of the rest.

The most stable years percentage wise as far as overseas debt was around 1995 to 2006 at around 20%, rose sharply, then started to fall.

originally posted by: 83Liberty

Our current debt is over £1.5 trillion, not £900 billion.
Our deficit last year was £88 billion.

I personally think we should keep trident as the world is very unpredictable at the moment, but we could save lots of money by leaving the EU, cutting foreign aid and getting the big corporations to pay their fair share of corporation tax.

I don't know about Trident, I'm not even sure why OSOTC would make the suggestion of cutting Trident since the Americans would prefer we kept Trident, or rather the nuevo Trident..whatever, (for some reason OSOTC always sounds more American than from, The United Kingdom of Great Britain. :lol
It seems to me, since it's all fiat money the UK is still pretty strong, despite the tiny size of The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, with plenty of foreign investors in the nuts and bolt stuff in manufacturing and infrastructure. However, I do think that many of the cuts may well be due to a continuance of the Trident programme.
Any hammering in the areas of disability is not likely to get too far though since government has some direct responsibilities there.
I would say again, that overall and especially since the monetary crisis, the UK is not doing too bad, you could even say that some parts of the US are far worse off, but shusss about that.

a reply to: Phage
If it is the line ( as in rope) that is down, the line is the responsibility of the tenant, It could be that what is being referred to here may be the actual pole the line / rope is attached to, which is cemented into the ground, in that case it is the responsibility of the housing department of the council when it is a council property.

a reply to: CthulhuMythos
Thanks. I am unfamiliar with that sort of arrangement.
Seems odd to complain about government debt when the government is responsible for clotheslines though. Maybe there should be a clotheslinepole tax to cover it?