For better or for worse?

During the past year we have spoken with clients in the public sector about their effective and courageous responses to the original emergency budget, the 2010 Comprehensive Spending Review and everything that followed from then on. The highly cogent commentary from economic experts then, that highlighted the unfeasibly high economic growth expectations that underpinned the government's economic strategy and its demands on the public sector, have now been proven beyond doubt. 


We have been suggesting to clients across this period that those growth targets would not be met and that the government would be back to raid public spending again sooner rather than later. The "sooner" arrived today unfortunately in the form of further public sector pay restraint, phrased in such a way that to suggest public sector workers do not pay income tax to boot! The pension changes are also from the same school of blunt-instrument trauma to prove the Government is up for the fight.


The infrastructure announcements seem to be little more than bringing forward plans already in the pipeline from previously constrained and reduced programmes in any event. The jobs that flow from those plans take far longer to get to 'shovel-ready' than politicians allow for or hope. 


The obvious and publicly supported option to tax financial transactions was dismissed as being 'anti-pension' (you'll really have to explain that one further please) and banks again were let off the hook, again, with a tiny increase in the annual levy. 


The previous week's announcement about assistance to get 16-24 years olds into temporary work was almost laughable in its blunt-ended simplicity and a too-late acknowledgement that the Future Jobs Fund was better supported and if necessary amended, rather than peremptorily binned as part of its "bonfire of the quangos" and all things Labour. This bonfire is more one of government's critical faculties and it betrays many in a race to the bottom of the employment and education prospects of that age group. 


So it goes across society, the rhetoric of Big Society becoming ever more sharply defined by closure after closure of successful local projects, schemes and initiatives that cost relatively little yet bind together challenged communities and interest groups. Only multi-millionaires with little if any direct experience of the context and application of these schemes would dare to continue to exhort the poorest and least able to keep taking the medicine, whilst the richest 1% remain insulated. 


Latest figures now show corporate UK, i.e. UK PLC, avoids corporation tax to the tune of £70b per annum - seventy billion pounds per annum. Yep, we'll keep taking the medicine but it becomes ever more bitter.