20% VAT wow!

[bacon]

Didnt think this would happen.

With running our own business more people will want to pay cash for jobs to avoid this tax - going to be a battle as need the money to go throu the business.

The welfare state will have to pay out a lot more when 25% of public sector workers are made unemployed. There won't suddenly be more jobs out there for them in the private sector. Instead of them doing a service for the public, they will be stuck at home, suffering depression and stress from financial dificulties, and still a drain on the public purse.

Many of these people aren't much better off working than on benefits in a financial sense, anyway, myself included as a TA. But, as I said already, at least I am doing something for my money, whereas, if they lay me off, I will just be another welfare scrounger.

It's largely the unions that are making 25% cost savings equate to 25% job cuts at the moment. Which suggests that 'wages' makes up 100% of the budget. They've rubbished the e-mail that's gone out asking public sector workers where savings could be made and are clearly not planning to be cooperative - which is a pity

When a friend worked for the housing department at her local council she was surprised to be offered a nearly-new laptop for next to nothing. "There's nothing wrong with them but we had to buy new ones just to use up the IT budget before the year end," was the explanation. 50 new but unnecessary computers at £1000 a pop is a few people's wages... Can't be the only example.

Chil, yes, Labour were happy to have capital gains tax at 18% weren't they - they put up income tax to 50% so it would look good, but were happy to leave the back door for their friends open at 18%...

Hypocrisy was rife in the last government and it certainly finished off Brown. Mandelson, Blair, all the Millibands and the rest of those totally ordinary blokes looked like they'd have needed a bath in Hibiscrub if they'd ever been forced into contact with a 'hard working family'.

What annoys me most is that they chipped away at the middle-income earners to finance their vision of Utopia whilst being successfully love-bombed by the banking sector and the uber-wealthy to 'leave us to it'. They should have had genuine Labour types like Prescott breathing down bankers' necks over the RBS Fred Goodwin payoff rather than Lord "Sixteen Mil Sounds Pretty Reasonable To Me" Myners.

And the rest....

"we had to buy new ones just to use up the IT budget before the year end"

Yes, that "use it or lose it" problem with budgets needs an overhaul. There should be some form of recognition that if part of the budget is saved, that organisation / department is allowed to ask for it in a future year, and it goes into some sort of interest-growing account.

Encourage a department to save a portion, if it can be done, and after a number of years, when some new technology would really benefit them, they have 'earned' the opportunity to reclaim that which had been saved for it, over and above any current budget they are working in.

well, there's the much-touted Danish model, easy-hire easy-fire but with handsome benefits that hopefully you're not on for long... epeople say it wouldn't work here, though, I can't remember why.

NetworkGuy, can you imagine how much better things would be now if that were allowed... I suspect the "use it or lose it" mentality would still remain ingrained, though ("don't save it, because they WILL cut it")

Yes, probably too difficult a habit to kick. It was certainly in place 25+ years ago in local government and I bet it is rife in every government department.

I wonder how many staff are employed in central government departments ? Maybe they should build a set of offices and carry on parliament remotely from say Milton Keynes (fairly fast rail link) so all the support staff are out of London, along with the government ministries, and all that 'London Weighting' money can be saved !