One could be forgiven for checking that yesterday wasn’t April 1st after waking up to the news that private equity tycoon and asset-stripper extraordinaire Philip Green has been appointed by David Cameron to head a Whitehall spending review.
George Osborne used his emergency Budget to cut public spending by an additional £32 billion by 2014-15. The growing list of cuts underway makes for painful reading.
The British Medical Association in Scotland has told finance secretary, John Swinney to stop being naive and admit that cuts will have to be made to the NHS north of the border.
The abolition of the UK Film Council a curious decision; indeed, the government’s decision to scrap the UKFC is not just an act of artistic philistinism – it’s a case of economic vandalism too.
We heard the shriek of ‘Noooooooooo!’ in the North East. The Government’s ideological decision to renege on support for Forgemasters in Sheffield triggered anger but also bewilderment among people I know in Yorkshire.
About one in ten children in the UK suffer abuse or neglect, according to figures by charity Kids Company, who work to protect the capital’s homeless, abused, and vulnerable children.
Whether they express their views in the élite language of economic or fiscal ‘unsustainability’ or the demotic of ‘welfare scoungers’, everyone apart from a handful of unreconstructed egalitarians seems to agree that welfare spending is too high.
The Junior Lawyers Division, Young Legal Aid Lawyers and the shadow legal aid minister Lord William Bach joined forces yesterday to condemn the Government for scrapping the legal aid training contract grants scheme.
The Scottish Government’s Chief Economic Adviser, Andrew Goudie, has warned that following the UK government’s emergency budget, the funding squeeze facing Scotland is now much larger than was previously thought. In April, Dr Goudie reported that Scottish expenditure would betest
The G8 and G20 summits may have seemed a damp squib, but the final communiqué, always drafted so that everybody can go away saying that they’ve won, only masks the fundamentally different approaches to economic policy by the US and by European countries.
