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

From the mad commies at the IMF:

?If the economy appears likely to experience prolonged weak growth and lower inflation, fiscal automatic stabilizers should operate freely and monetary policy should be kept loose for an extended period. To prevent a downturn from becoming entrenched, additional stimulus may be required from BoE asset purchases and temporary targeted tax cuts, combined with deeper long-run entitlement reform to safeguard fiscal sustainability and market confidence.?

If a country wants decent healthcare, education, welfare and infrastructure then it needs decent taxes to pay for it. I think it was a mistake cutting the basic rate from 30% years back. It would be too hard to put it back up now. P,us house prices are out of control and no longer anywhere near 3x average salary = average house or rent.

You makes your choices. Decent services then you pay tax.

Riven, i agree. The only thing I'd add is it's not the tax rate which matters but the tax revenue generated. The two do not necessarily go hand in hand. Ie. The bigger the rate, the more money taken. Those who think it does are simply naive.

As someone (i can't remember who) said. We want Scandinavian type welfare services without their tax system. It doesn't work that way. We'd not only need to adopt that tax regime, we'd need a wholesale culture change to boot.

Labour used to be tax & spend but then realised they can't do the first bit anymore so just did the latter. The Tories generally are focussed on cuts to make ends meet rather than taxes as well. The lib dems? Well god only knows what they stand for now. So then, who represents the Scandinavian model? No-one.

But the bottom line is most of us want better services but given the choice of paying an extra 10-20% in tax we'd reject it. In other words, we want it....but not that much.

Absolutely agree riven

If we've been spending beyond our means on public services, and the country's economy requires massive cuts, how does bailing out the banks to the tune of £850 billion fit into the scheme of things ?

'but then there's nowt so queer as a guardian reader with an idee fixe'

apart from a Guardian writer

Cos the Guardian got it soooo wrong with the phone hacking story eh ?

What did Johnson say ? It was all codswhallop ?

'What did Johnson say ? It was all codswhallop ?'

was that Alan Johnson? Most of what he said seemed to be codswallop. There was once talk of him becoming Labour leader.

'its readership maybe about 2 years behind'

sounds like they are catching up fast from where they were when I last read it.

claig so funny

norty claig, you know she was talking about Boris...

And niceguy, that's amazing effrontery, mis-using Dickens to try to support the Tories. One of the most striking things about his writing is the social conscience. He was arguing for reform to stop poor people being forced to exist in terrible conditions. Arguing against the workhouse, not for it, FFS!

If we've been spending beyond our means on public services, and the country's economy requires massive cuts, how does bailing out the banks to the tune of £850 billion fit into the scheme of things ?

Fact 1: Even without the banking crash, we were spending more than we took in taxes. Now you can argue oh we only overspent by a little but the fact is that "little" was effectively since WW2. So at some point it has to stop and you have to pay back what you owe. I suggest you read this site which written in a non political way Debtbombshell.com

Fact 2: There has been no £850 billion found magically and given to the banks. Most of this notional money has simply been "support" via the government's asset protection scheme. In effect this is/was a giant insurance scheme. It's only £850 billion if every bank's bad debts were realised and they had to claim on the government's scheme. Which obviously is doomsday scenario and about as likely to happen as every Directline customer crashing at the same time and claiming against their car insurance. The fact is that the taxpayer is expected to turn a profit on the APS to the tune of £5-6billion.

Fact 3: The most direct support we've given banks is in the form of nationalising banks which again over the medium term we're expected to make a profit from the sale of the shares.

Fact 4: @Alice. The 1% tax Barclays paid which you quoted was a very clear case of ignoring the truth and outright lies. I've no love for tax dodgers but the author of that article was widely criticised for his misleading article.

@Edam, thanks for pointing that out but I'd argue that the way to help the poor is not to spend money we don't have.

yeah, that's the kind of attitude Dickens was attacking. The workhouse overseer in Oliver Twist who wouldn't let the poor lad have a second helping of gruel, for instance.

'We' do have the money to help the poor. 'We' choose to spend it on other things. Bailing out the banks, part of which then gets spent on bringing in KPMG to teach all the bankers about the latest wheezes for hiding their bonuses. On breaking up the NHS for the delectation of Capita, G4S and that ilk (the costs just so far of the Tory's 'reform' programme are massive and will run into billions). Or on making youth workers redundant, so the kids they would have diverted from crime, homelessness and misery end up in the criminal justice system, costing the rest of us far more in the long run, especially when you factor in the next generation after that.

Britain is virtually bankrupt like most of the developed world, the Government has been living beyond its means for too long and now we're all going to have face the consequences with lower standards of living for most. The BRICS will be the prosperous nations with high growth rates in the global economy for the foreseeable future.

If we were virtually bankrupt, we wouldn't spend money reorganising the NHS at a cost of billions, or throwing out schemes and bringing in new, wasting money on e-petitions, farming out things to the private sector who add a profit margin to prices, enter into wars etc. What a load of crock.

If we spent as much money on the public sector as some would want us to, we'd be properly bankrupt, not just virtually bankrupt.

Privatising doesn't always lead to raising prices. Look at phone calls for just one example. A lot of the public sector is still essentially following the same procedures that existed in the 1970s because there is absolutely no incentive to modernise.

On what basis do you make that judgement Tarty, about the 70s?! I don't think you know what you're on about.

Also wrt to privatisation, I catch a train. Oh look I pay high prices to sit on a dirty train that might be on time, provided I get a seat. Energy prices - well we all know how much profit those companies make. Dentistry - bloody fortune to have teeth done privately. How do you think private companies make a profit? They don't give away their services

trains were the first thing that came to my mind too.

Why don't we just accept that the global crisis of what some dinosaurs of us call 'capitalism' is caused by Gordon Brown employing too many Teaching Assistants. Quick, call Obama!

There's no guarantees that privatisation will produce world class service/goods anymore than there is that there will be if it was publicly owned.

However, history shows though that private companies tend to do better (aka make more profit) because there is an incentive to do so.

And Alice, yes the crisis is/was global. But that's not to say the UK did not play it's share in the crisis. The way out is also for us to accept we cannot continue to run a deficit indefinitely. A fact many other western countries, even the USA are slowly realising.

Cuts are being made because we can no longer afford the public services we do have. You can argue til the cows come home as to why this is, but it doesn't change the fact that we cant afford it.