The way the Conservatives transformed a crisis of the banks into a crisis of public spending was a stroke of political genius. This year, bankers got away with awarding themselves nearly £14bn

[Tortington]

"The way the Conservatives transformed a crisis of the banks into a crisis of public spending was a stroke of political genius. This year, bankers got away with awarding themselves nearly £14bn of bonuses with barely a word of complaint. Meanwhile, the Tories have carefully constructed the image of a public sector workforce made up of idle, pampered pen-pushers who can easily be disposed of."

Guardian link below

am also liking 't's also classic Tory divide-and-rule politics. Make low-paid call centre and supermarket workers resent nurses and firefighters, and you will destroy any potential unity on issues such as cuts, pensions and rights in the workplace.'

its ok working class people, the rich people still get richer

i am getting all my information from here and newspapers, i haven't heard a peep from the labour party.

i really feel deserted. is it that they want to keep their head down until the next election?

The Guardian article seems to want to connect two unrelated topics. I also don't really why banker's bonuses have a bearing on the public sector. Banker bonuses may be obscene (or not) but does that mean that the public sector can't be held to account?

Also the numbers in the Guardian article are not even accurate. If you check the actual report www.statistics.gov.uk/articles/nojournal/bonuses-2010.pdf the £14bn refers to all financial and insurance activities in the UK, not only banks as the Guardian suggests. That includes banks but also insurance, fund management, hedge funds, mutuals etc.

From other reports, see www.financemarkets.co.uk/2010/10/05/city-bankers-to-receive-7bn-bonuses-this-year/, bank bonuses are around £7bn, down from £11bn in 2007.

I don't see what business it is for the public to complain about what asset managers or hedge funds pay their people as they didn't take any public money (then again neither did many banks but whatever).

a little thing called a global crisis which the govt informs us means that we have to cut cut cut, had a little bit to do with those pesky banking types who get 7bn in bonuses.

yes yes, there is actually a huge effing link here.

ofcourse the public sector needs to be held to account. but this isn't even the point of the cuts. this is the smokescreen to privatising services and allowing the friends in high places to make even more billions from out tax money - all in the name of bollocks efficiency - when it clearly isn't - its jobs for the boys ....still riding off the bollocks premise that its all becuase labour ran the world the world and the global economy into the ground

Do you not think the economic boom that paid for all the increases in public spending had something to do with the "pesky banking types" as well?

I don't agree with the OPs opening point. At the end of the last financial year the Government had a budget deficit of £155 billion, in that particular financial year there were no bailouts to the banks from the Government. The truth is the Government had been running a deficit in times of strong economic growth and once the hard times hit this was excerbated to the point now when we have an eye-watering deficit between Government spending and tax revenue. The banks were of course partly responsible for this but this country has not had a responsible fiscal position for some time and the Government is thankfully adressing this, it is painful but the Government cannot endlessly live beyond its means

Some people just aren't prepared to listen to reason because it's easier just to blame everything on the "evil tories" and the "evil bankers" rather than face the reality that we as a country have been living beyond our means for well over a decade. There are a lot of people living middle-class lifestyles on working-class incomes that are going to have to reevaluate how they see themselves in coming years.

True SWC, those who suggest only halving the deficit are choosing to play russian roulette with the bond market

Fuck the fucking Tories. Bastards of the highest order. I swear people voted for them because they though they would get rid of the foreigners whilst not realising that the fucking Tories would destroy you if you did not have a pot to piss in.

Fuck the Tories and all that they stand for. Fuck all that vote for the Tories. I can't stand you people, so do not care to make/be friends with you.

HATE the bastard Tories.

Off to bed. Night all.

Bond vigilantes again, is it?

Yes, must keep those imaginary bogey men appeased at all costs.

"it's not us guvnor, it's the markets. They are forcing us to follow policies that lead to high unemployment. Stimulate demand? The BVs would never let us do that. We have no choice but to fuck the poor and middle classes while we attempt to cut our way out of a recession, all the while making the problem worse."

Please excuse my total ignorance. Money is boring, it's not even real. If we are in debt who do we owe money to? Who does America owe money to? Who does the rest of the work owe money to? We can't all be owing money. It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. But the answer is always waffle waffle waffle that makes no sense whatsoever. Please someone explain it to me in a simple way because I'm obviously a bit stupid.

Labour Party head office is really sending the troops into MN at the moment aren't they? Can't be bothered reading the Politics Board any more for the wall-to-wall anti-government propaganda

We know the financial crisis was caused by worldwide failure (except Germany) to keep the banks under control. Shareholders rule the world, but only if governments let them.

I don't think any self-respecting human being that actually USES public services and perhaps reads a local paper etc, would accuse them of being spendthrift, greedy and lazy. The Guardian likes to think the public think that but the Guardian has low expectations of the public.

Public spending needs to be balanced, but cutting it hard is a disaster because public sector workers, unlike bankers, don't take their money abroad or spend it on fabulously expensive houses - they spend it on the normal things that keep our country's economy going.

In the end something needs to be cut - how about everyone with over £1M in capital giving some of their additional capital assets and investments? Not income- that always disappears. I can think of a few ideas.

I think the bizarre assumption that the PUBLIC make (not the Guardian) is that somehow people should never need support, or even deserve what they get. If their life is in the doghouse, it's their fault and they shouldn't be expecting handouts. I am always horrified by the lack of empathy you find for people who can't cope for whatever reason. Work ethic is good, but not being able to accept people's failure to cope seems to have become the subtle new public face of toryism.

'Handouts' (typical nasty media word for support) is what we pay tax for. For those times when we need help. It's a part of every society - often families help each other out, but in this country we choose to support each other through tax, because we tried the other way 100 years ago and it didn't work.

It would also help if public sector workers leaked information to the press about the cuts, they knew about them a much longer time ago but aren't able to leak information because they would lose their jobs if they did that. As nana says, it has taken far too long for the public to twig this is going on.

Another bash the Tories/bankers thread.

It's all the nasty Tories fault, they are the devil incarnate. Fancy trying to make us live within our means eh? The bastards!

Cue lots of posts which basically say:

• Well everyone else was overspending so where's the problem?
• Our friends all borrowed more than us so where's the problem? (erm they're all cutting back too)
• It's all the rich bankers fault! (Erm...naive to think they did it single handly but a grain of truth)

barbie Germany did not keep their banks under control.

Far from it.

Irish citizens are expected to pay off the debts of Irish private banks because German banks (among others) thought it sensible to lend tens of billions of pounds to mad outfits like Anglo Irish Bank.

The German economy has been doing OK because the Euro was set up in such a fashion as to massively advantage the centre at the expense of the periphery (see the recent decision to raise interest rates despite the pain this would inflict on several peripheral countries), but their banks are no better than ours. Which is dangerously out of control and about to cause another crisis that won't affect them but will fuck the rest of us.

Back to the OP, two separate issues, the banking crisis and public spending have been linked because cutting public spending is the government's preferred way of dealing with the crisis (whatever its causes). It prefers to cut public spending (rather than raise taxes) because it wants to privatise services. It wants to privatise services because it wants to cut the costs for government while boosting the private sector.

I've tried to put this as neutrally as possible (to get it clear in my own mind). What is so sad imo is that parts of the media and the government seem to be trying to make everyone hate the public sector (in order to gain support for the government cuts). Meanwhile the rest of us are furious at having to bear the brunt of a crisis that we blame the banks for creating.

I think our society is becoming dangerously fragmented - and we are all to blame for that. We've got to stop playing their game.

But niceguy, there is always a deficit, we never live within our means, its not new!

Why do people not understand this?

Quite so amberleaf. See this chart for the historical picture on public borrowing. And note also that the steep spike recently happens as the result of the financial crisis, not as the result of profligate public spending by the Labour party.

I have no respect for the Tory party making cuts based on ideology then trying to dress them up as being The Only Way. Don't be ridiculous.

They ignore evidence of what works (eg the NHS being incredibly efficient and competition does no good in improving the health service), telling half-truths (I pisses myself when Gideon was asked how he'd be affected by the cut in child benefit, oh like he'd even notice).

At least have the balls to call it like it is.

I really despair about what the Tories are doing to this country, I really do.

Meanwhile this explains bank bonuses to us very well, I think.

sprog that debtris thing is beautiful

The country has a budget deficit of about £150 billion last year so it is very much a crisis of public spending. The banks played a large role in causing the recession (they'd also played a large role in the boom we had before the recession also) and the recession did cause the budget deficit to get much worse. However it was ridiculous for the Government to be running a deficit the when the economy was growing strongly like what happened in the early to mid 2000s, we should have been running a surplus to prepare for bad times but Labour believed they had abolished boom and bust and so made no preperation for a downturn. Labour weren't the only ones doing this though, it's a mistake that was repeated across Europe and in US which is why we are all in such a mess with shocking fiscal positions and are all debtor nations. The amounts of debt will be a drag on growth for the foreseeable future and I expect emerging markets will benefit and prosper as they are not weighed down by debt and are net creditor nations.

But niceguy, there is always a deficit, we never live within our means, its not new!

And that's where the problem is. A deficit is just another word for overspend and the ugly truth is you cannot overspend forever. Conventional economic wisdom is that if you run a deficit, then it's ok because at some point you run a surplus which out of which you pay for your deficit.

Except most western economies have been running deficits for 30+ years. Small percentage maybe. Affordable...depends on your definition. But there will come a crunchtime when it's no longer possible to keep running a deficit. You can't do it indefinitely and anyone who thinks you can is simply deluded. So the problem wasn't IF or WHAT caused the crisis but simply WHEN.

In layman's terms if we earn £1000 per year and overspend by £10 then noone really cares. It's not a big deal. But thirty years later, that becomes a big deal!

"Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery."