Public Finances and other Thoughts
Having halted for review all school building not yet signed off to start, the government is now signalling that public sector pensions and employment terms are going to brought closer to the private sector, which pays for them in taxation, gaining no benefit other than the knowledge that civil servants are happy.
The exposure of more and more of what has actually been done to run up this vast structural overspend is, in a perverse way, encouraging. Had everything already been cut to the bone, the task would have been much more difficult. Meanwhile public sector workers, except those in the lower income scale, will have to become used to two things.
The first is that many will discover their jobs will no longer exist. The second is that those who remain will find themselves working for less generous pay packages to higher standards of outcome. The golden age of the public sector is over. Its end will bring pain. To coin a phrase from the Macmillan era , they had never had it so good. Well, its over now.
It is a pity that the resolution which this new coalition government is bringing to getting the country’s financial house in order is not yet apparent everywhere in its operations. Foreign policy needs more than a slightly revised nuance and it ceases to be morally defensible to sacrifice British troops in Afghanistan in a war that cannot be won. Shifting them to another part of that country is no substitute for a clear timetable to bring them back to this one.