cuts are pushing us into a double-dip recession

[darleneconnor]

www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5ijzMRzu10jnYoqIb69_R0hrzgnoQ?docId=4c0373e5575c4481ba144f9b11dd5e83

This isn't good news.

We've been cutting back massively and not because of the snow.

The fact is, at a time when inflation is soaring, wages are stagnating and massive reundancies, everything costs more, even food.

We used to spend around £4-500 a month at Sainsburys. I'm now shopping at Lidls and saving around £250 a month.

DH would buy his lunch at work, now he's taking sandwiches and homemade soup.

We used to get the odd takeaway and the occassional bottle of wine. Now everything is made from scratch and we're drinking up our gin reserves.

No holiday this year, not even a week in a caravan like we managed last year.

Plans to redecorate our bedroom, put on hold indefinitely. Same with replacing carpets.

Every little bit we save is being paid off the little debt we have, so we can clear them before things get any worse. After that, it will be saved because, we're worried quite honestly. They did a great job of scaring the shit out of us all before the GE.

we all complain about how much government cuts are affecting us all,especially those less priviledged, but we simply can not live above our means any longer!

I can see so much money wasted by central and local governments. We've all head about rediculously expensive new council offices, 6 figures salary for Spin doctors or Strategy directors, and milions spent on quangos doing nothig more than social research / political lobbying.

I was suprised to find out that Home-Start gets a total of £34 milions (!!!!!!!!!!!!!) from government, while the service is run by volunteers! Where does this money go? Not to the famil living in inadequate housing, not to the mothers havings 3 or more toddlers, so find it hard to cope / do housework / take the kids to activities, not on further training / adequate and cheap childminding for those with no qualification to get a job, not on cheap and quality activities for young kids, not on educational programs for young kids.
I can not understan where this money isspent when unpd volunteers help struggling families on a confidential / non-judgmental basis. What do the paid employees do?

I always find it reassuring when we can just blame the weather for everything.

Atomic Homestart uses volunteers but have salaried people too. Sorry I had a Homestart volunteer when I had 3 under 2 ,couldn't fault them. Totally amazing service worth every penny. They train up the volunteers,run courses,hold creches etc,etc. They have rents/expenses/wages to pay too like everybody else.

I had a volunteer 2X weekly,was sent on valuable courses and was stopped from hurtling into PND.

I met a broad section of families during my Homestart days and believe me if it wasn't for organisations like Homestart many families would be costing the nation an awful lot more.

MilaMae,

Totally agree with you, that's why i joined home-start.

the training was not really great; and i'm sure your supr volunteers used her own parenting experience rather than the training!

our scheme does not organise courses; sure-start does. We only signpost thoe courses.

agree with you on the social networking side.

it just seem a lot of money for work caried by unpaid volunteers. your volunteer woul have helped you without thebacking of home-sstart if she could have being put in touch with you!

Who exactly are these people/companies snowed in for 3 months?

I do a lot of online shopping and every single thing turned up on time. All companies had a very generous guaranteed final deadline delivery date and none said they couldn't take orders.

I don't know anybody feeling flush because they couldn't spend money at Christmas. I know plenty however who are feeling the pinch due to the cuts and decided to spend less at Christmas for fear of more Tory slash and burn cuts.

There is another factor driving us into recession apart from cuts.

Wages are not rising as quickly as prices of basic goods and services and that means everyone is being forced to cut back on the amount of non essential things they buy in order to be able to buy the basics (eg food and fuel).

In the old says (ie just 3 years ago) people would have just stuck the extra cost on the credit card but they cant do that now or are unwilling to do so. Hence as people can afford to buy less non essential items the underlying economy shrinks in real terms.

In the 1970s this phenomenon was called stagflation. It means a low growth or shrinking economy even as prices of goods and services continue to rise. Unlike the 1970s though, where people tended to still get inflationary pay rises to keep up with rising prices, workers now have very little power to negotiate higher wages.

yeap, did online shoping round Xmas too and evrything was fine!

gosh, I'm short of cash too now!

I'm very good friends with my volunteer to this day and she seemed to have a very different experience to yours.

Her training got her started onto further ed and she eventually got a degree as a mature student. Our local Surestart lady who manages a team and oversees the volunteers is highly qualified and truely inspirational.

Not everybody working for Surestart is unpaid.

~Do you enjoy it Automic,tinkering with the idea of doing it myself but worried I'd get too involved iykwim.

MilaMae,

Surestart is not the same as home-start! and they are real good.

Lots of volunteer around me kept th families they were supporting as friends

Yes sorry continuously get the names muddled,have used Homestart and Surestart, both are fantastic resources.

"Who exactly are these people/companies snowed in for 3 months?"

It's not me either....

But the facts are that the biggest Shopping Day of the Christmas Period is usually right before Christmas. In 2009 for Barclaycard it was, for example the 23rd of December.

The effect of travel problems hitting the biggest spending days of the Christmas shopping period shouldn't take that much imagination.

"I do a lot of online shopping and every single thing turned up on time."

Because you ordered in time.

The mass of people, whoever they are, who generate those massive sales figures in the final days before Christmas had left things too late for their spending to be shifted to online retailers when they decided that it wasn't good to go travelling and might looked online instead.

swc:"I'm really wondering how Ladyblahblah thinks a sector that was destroyed managed to grow by 1.4%. Allowing anger to get in the way of comprehension of basic English, perhaps"

I don't get your point because it is just a crappy personal insult. Thatcher was in power in the 80s. She destroyed manufacturing. But that is totally irrelevant to the growth that is seen now. Destroy does not mean obliterate and have nothing left, it means to crush or to spoil. What were you saying about basic English?

To be fair, I did spend less at xmas than planned because of the snow.

Things ordered on line didn't come and I didn't go to the shops for replacements. I jsut figured we had enough.

So I guess the shops lost out pn my usual unneccessary pre xmas splurge.
Plus lots of social engagements were cancelled so I didn't panic buy new clothes or get my hair done.

I don't if my experience is common.

LadyBlahBlah - not sure if you saw my earlier post of 13:28, but our manufacturing actually declined more rapidly under Labour.

I spent a lot less at christmas because we didn't have it to spend.

I got everything on my (limited) list despite 3 weeks of snow.

I actually spent just £25 in my online Sainsburys christmas shop.

Yes, Maisie and this growth we are seeing also started when Labour were in power

atomicdust where did you get the £34 million figure from? Homestart website quotes £5million in 2005/6. see here. According to the Guardian 70 branches have had their funding cut since the coalition came to power and a quarter of those are facing closure Guardian article so if that is true they must be getting a lot less than that now.

Pinkteddy (BTW, like your nickname),

go onto the charity commission web site and do a search for home-start UK, then look at the last Accounts. The £34M is made of £3M from the department of education and grants fom charitable trusts. this money solely for headquartes (buildings, staff like PR, marketing, lobbying). The rest comes from local county councils to the local schemes.

yes, most local schemes had cuts lat year, but paid employees still get a lot of taxpayer money!

You appeared to be under the impression that it was the Tories who decimated our manufacturing...now, what growth is this that is solely down to the last Labour administration?

If I'd been saving up to pay my child's university fees, I'd be cutting my spending down to the bone now that the disgraceful tuition fees hike has been voted through by parliament.

Probably most parents who enjoyed and benefited from a free university education themselves, feel angered that the government plans on dropping their kids in the financial shit - and are now looking to do all they can to help them.

Therefore they're cutting back on luxuries and squirrelling their money away to pass on to their children to help them out when the time comes.

That'll account for part of the reduction in consumer spending, I betcha.

Own goal for Lord Snooty?

Firstly, the figure of -0.5% growth doesn't include consumer spending, which is the most likely area to be affected by the snow. When this is included, the figure could be worse.

Manufacturing - it was destroyed under Thatcher. This does not mean growth is incompatible, it means that the manufacturing sector is much smaller as a proportion of the UK economy than it used to be, so whilst growth is good, it doesn't have a lot of significance for the economy as a whole. Although listen to Gideon and you would think it was going to save us all.

They are a bunch of clowns. Decisions are made for purely political reasons, not sound economic ones. What sort of economic mind cancels a loan to a steel factory, that would have enabled it to make highly specialist parts for nuclear power stations, shortly before announcing 8-10 NEW nuclear power stations, meaning we now have to import the parts from the Far East? Bonkers.

And Gideon still hasn't grasped that if you cut, cut, cut, but get no growth, or a contraction, the DEFICIT WILL GET BIGGER. The art is in balancing the two. The head of the CBI says 'there is no plan for growth'. Too true.

Anyone who is feeling bad (we certainly are) - every time you can't afford something, or decide not to buy something because of money, think of Gideon and say TAKE THAT YOU BASTARD. Because he needs us to continue spending, but is making it impossible.

"Firstly, the figure of -0.5% growth doesn't include consumer spending, which is the most likely area to be affected by the snow. When this is included, the figure could be worse."

GDP does include wholesale and retail trade, but the actual ONS report (www.statistics.gov.uk/pdfdir/gdp0111.pdf doesn't explicitly mention retail. So I'm a bit unclear as to whether they're included in that -0.5% or not.

However some of the quotes included when people cover the story, e.g. "This is a horrendous figure. An absolute disaster for the economy. We knew that retail sales were heavily affected and that services output would be weak, but the collapse in construction was a major contributor to the downside surprise," do suggest that retail is included.

The ONS report does highlight Recreation, Hotels and Restaurants as being major contributors to the contraction and that is exactly what you would expect from bad weather and is relatively predictable based upon previous economic patterns.

"They are a bunch of clowns"

And so were the previous set who managed to let public spending grow to such an extent that it was unsupportable in the good years let alone the bad.

And so were the Tories who came before them who managed to balance the books even fewer times.

"The head of the CBI says 'there is no plan for growth'."

The British Chambers of Commerce says that the UK's deficit was still "unacceptably high". That's too true as well.