and the just announced massive infrastructure investment isn't Keynsian then?
Well no it isn't, but that's because it's the Tory party that are doing it, in any other language it would be. Eighteen odd months ago there was "Plan A" and that what to reduce spending in the expectation that the private sector would take up the slack. Quelle surpeise, it didn't, Osborne and Cameron fundamentally didn't understand that people invest when they see that the forecasts for a decent ROI are there, however when there's uncertainty they tend to sit on their cash. So after 18 months of sneering at spending/investing and denying the need for a Plan B the coalition government have more-or-less admitted that Labour's spending plans were what they should have stuck with. The latest plans are to spend more than Labour forecast at the last election - the Tory party were happy to deride that as economic lunacy, so now we have Keynesian economics and we've lost 18 months. By the way the UK economy was growing at 1.1% in GDP terms when Labour left office, the latest plan (as of yesterday) suggests that growth next year will be 0.9%, and that looks fanciful.
I noticed that too, plus the austerity is now going to take as long if not longer than Labours plans were - perhaps only the Tories could have got away with that though, as Labour had lost/never had much credibility? I'm not necessarily saying either plan will work though, although less chance now its been left a while
I heard an example figure today where a public worker paying contributions into their employment pension would pay over their working life £27,000 and receive an annual pension of £9,000. To achieve an annual pension of £9,000 in a private personal pension plan, given current actuarial (life expectancy tables), that person would need to have paid in contributions of around £250,000. Put another way by making a £27,000 contribution to a private personal pension arrangement would yield an annual pension of £900.
Its not the first time I have heard this.
Whether or not you think that £9K is or isn't a reasonable sum of money as a pension, it is not hard to see why those who are not in generous pension arrangements, and that includes the millions of people who are self-employed or in SMEs, feel that Public Worker pensions are "gold plated". Yes there are private sector pension arrangements for larger corporate pension schemes that deliver a better pension that individual private pension plans but the true value of the Public Pension, in my view borne out by the financial facts, is completely misunderstood, taken for granted and played down by those who are currently in receipt of it.
We need to borrow to invest, not to pay bills, that is the basis of Keynsianism.
Get people working, earning and through that paying into the economy again by buying stuff and paying tax etc. What Cameron/Osborne haven't understood is the psychological knock-on effects of austerity. If people think they might lose their jobs they reduce spending and companies in turn reduce their investment, it all becomes a self-fulfiling prophecy. We tried this in the '80s when they cut their political teeth as Thatcher's children what we failed to understand as a nation then and they are failing understand now is that she only made her brand of economic lunacy work by plundering North Sea oil revenues. Unfortunately we blew that once in a lifetime opportunity on monetarist economics and have been suffering ever since. You don't achieve growth by cutting investment.
It's really quite simple, if teachers and public sector workers want a fair pension then the government withdraws hugely generous contributions. What part of the equation do you not fucking understand? You pay in 6% contribution, we pay in 14%. You only have a surfeit of money as we pay almost double in percentage terms your contribution: even including top rate tax back it's around double contributions in real terms, and more than double in real terms for a starting teacher.
Experienced teacher's contributions would go up by £341 a year! And that's bloody net of tax relief. Teachers will not have to retire at 67 to get the same pot as at 60, it's 62 for a teacher mid-career. If they retire at 67 as an average pay teacher they will get more. Yes a starting teacher will be different, but still given a pension virtually unseen elsewhere.
Strange how every teacher I know were never able to get a decent job in the private sector. OK so I know from talking to my friends, that they're enthusiasm and adaptability is far superior to that of most of my teachers at a Grammar school. This clearly is personal experience. I regularly pay in 15-20% of my salary to my pension. You have no sympathy from me on your excellent pension terms, being slightly modified. Go out and see what you can do in the private sector, and see how many hours you'll need to work for a commensurate pay packet. Yes I know some teachers work incredibly hard, strange how all my hard working teacher friends are always down the pub inviting me whilst I'm still at work, even stranger how when I meet them on the rare time I pop out on the weekend they tell me how hard they work. Personal experience again. But it'll be your personal experience whereby if you don't negotiate, in a few years time they'll be a much worse deal on the table. Just wait for the market conditions in a year or so. You're on the wrong side of history.
I wonder if the middle of a down turn is the right time to be rebalancing the economy too, its kind of a double whammy - or perhaps that is effectively what you are saying?
We need to borrow to invest, not to pay bills, that is the basis of Keynsianism.
Get people working, earning and through that paying into the economy again by buying stuff and paying tax etc. What Cameron/Osborne haven't understood is the psychological knock-on effects of austerity. If people think they might lose their jobs they reduce spending and companies in turn reduce their investment, it all becomes a self-fulfiling prophecy. We tried this in the '80s when they cut their political teeth as Thatcher's children what we failed to understand as a nation then and they are failing understand now is that she only made her brand of economic lunacy work by plundering North Sea oil revenues. Unfortunately we blew that once in a lifetime opportunity on monetarist economics and have been suffering ever since. You don't achieve growth by cutting investment.
It could just as easily be argued that the Keynsian economic approach that characterised the post war consensus resulted in the slow and inexorable decline in economic performance of the UK and led to the Thatcher years. The country never fully recovered from the debt mountain it accumulated during and after WW2.
Keynes of course negotiated the loan in 1946(?) with the USA that was finally paid off a few years back.
I think all economists and virtually all politicians recognise the need to stimulate the economy. The trick is how you do that with a huge mountain of structural debt, without spooking the markets and with an economic hurricane in your major markets threatening to blow you off course.
The Balls line that he would have cut less far and over a longer period and thus we wouldn't now see recovery choked off is frankly convenient fantasy from a man who was one of the architects of Gordon Browns economic policy which saw an over-reliance on the financial sector, failed to regulate it properly/at all, broke/rewrote their own golden economic rules about PSBR over the economic cycle and told us they had banished boom and bust in the way that Keynes thought he had done with his brand of economics.
The problem with economic ideology is that it tends to produce a one trick solution - borrow to invest, to stimulate growth, or control money by raising or lowering interest rates. They deal with the symptoms whilst ignoring the structural imbalances that they create and sustain, namely: too many people employed in the state sector or drawing money as pensions from current taxation, not enough real jobs and too much reliance on financial market chicanery which created a massive bubble of illusiary value not truly backed by real assets.
That situation has to tackled and it ain't going to be quick, painless or easy. Tackled though it will have to be in order to re-balance the economy.
Blackforest - on first read a well considered peice, but what I am not so sure about is that you claim your views on the subject are unpopular then claim the strikers can't win because the public won't support them!
BFR I'm not sure what you mean by re-capitalisation? How can you transfer equity to debt, when they're is no viable equity in a country but huge mountains of debt? I believe that's either default on your bonds/gilts, or collapse. Like most areas it will be structured default and buying your own bonds until you admit it. True inflationing away debt in real terms will be part of the way out. But in no way can I see there being an effective re-capitalisation.
Whether you're Autrianist or Monetarist, it will be Keynesian policies that take us out of this. When will be when the Monetarists are torn apart by their perfect pricing markets.
It could just as easily be argued that the Keynsian economic approach that characterised the post war consensus resulted in the slow and inexorable decline in economic performance of the UK and led to the Thatcher years. The country never fully recovered from the debt mountain it accumulated during and after WW2. ..................
I'm not sure I agree with that, there were many other reasons why the UK declined, before 1939 a great deal of our economy was built on heavy industries - shipbuilding for example as we had at that time the biggest navy in the world (by design). However other nations caught up and inefficient manufacturing saw too many yards get shut down in order to maintain production at profitable yards.
After 1945 Germany and Japan caught up and over-took us, the role of Marshall Plan aid in that cannot be under-estimated and what was that if it wasn't a gigantic bit of Keynesian economics? They took that money and invested in modern manufacturing with economies of scale, coincidentally they invested heavily in education and gave the workers good pensions. So how is that Germany which pays far better pensions than the UK isn't and doesn't have the same history of turbulent labour relations? The answer is long but essentially they made sure that everyone got something - the industrialists were able to benefit from investment and access to markets and could develop industries of scale to give them access to international markets and the clout to compete, the workers got good earnings, pensions and everyone got an education system that aimed to turn out people with the right sort of skills that suited the needs of both the individual and the economy.
Nothing outrageous there, just sensible planning and foresight.
how much of the current national debt is down to the bank bail outs, and how much of that are we likely to get back?
we have a deficit of course but how much of that is due to recession, and large scale unemployment and its impacts
Balls argument i guess is that under them unemployment wouldn't be as high, and wouldn't have hit high street spending, and tax revenues as badly
Problem with Balls argument is that it doesn't stack up with what they planned to do in the current year. They planned to cut £17 for every £18 the government is cutting. It is very convenient and opportunistic for him to pretend that they weren't going to do this now because he can then use that as a stick to beat the government with. What he also doesn't have to say is how they would have had to react to the Greek debt crisis that arose on the eve of the general election.
I think he means debt financing to kick start things into functioning again -but for this to happen markets would presumuably need to be suspended first to avoid meltdown. A drastic option amongst other drastic options but this crisis if not solved globaly could take us to drastic options.
As for Ball's policy -the labour party did always state the need to be flexible and make growth your target and driver and they did predict the real risk of a double dip which people chose to forget now.
It could just as easily be argued that the Keynsian economic approach that characterised the post war consensus resulted in the slow and inexorable decline in economic performance of the UK and led to the Thatcher years. The country never fully recovered from the debt mountain it accumulated during and after WW2. ..................
I'm not sure I agree with that, there were many other reasons why the UK declined, before 1939 a great deal of our economy was built on heavy industries - shipbuilding for example as we had at that time the biggest navy in the world (by design). However other nations caught up and inefficient manufacturing saw too many yards get shut down in order to maintain production at profitable yards.
After 1945 Germany and Japan caught up and over-took us, the role of Marshall Plan aid in that cannot be under-estimated and what was that if it wasn't a gigantic bit of Keynesian economics? They took that money and invested in modern manufacturing with economies of scale, coincidentally they invested heavily in education and gave the workers good pensions. So how is that Germany which pays far better pensions than the UK isn't and doesn't have the same history of turbulent labour relations? The answer is long but essentially they made sure that everyone got something - the industrialists were able to benefit from investment and access to markets and could develop industries of scale to give them access to international markets and the clout to compete, the workers got good earnings, pensions and everyone got an education system that aimed to turn out people with the right sort of skills that suited the needs of both the individual and the economy.
Nothing outrageous there, just sensible planning and foresight.
Well I can agree with a lot of that as well, I was just putting the counter argument.
The key to Marshall plan though which, I would argue wasn't as Keynsian as you claim, is that it wasn't a loan so didn't saddle Germany and Japan with debt burdens that dragged us down. As you know Keynes tried to get the Yanks to gift us the money we needed. They refused and that resulted in a loan of about half of what we needed.
What is needed now for the world economy is another Marshall plan not based around loans but gifted. Realisically that can only come from non-indebted nations like China. I can see them doing it only if they, like the USA post 1945, saw their political and economic well being sustained and enhanced by such a gift.
as Larry Elliott said in the Guardian, the markets are now starting to realise that austerity everywhere isn't really working, and are starting to look for growth in economies.
how much of the current national debt is down to the bank bail outs, and how much of that are we likely to get back?
we have a deficit of course but how much of that is due to recession, and large scale unemployment and its impacts
Balls argument i guess is that under them unemployment wouldn't be as high, and wouldn't have hit high street spending, and tax revenues as badly
Problem with Balls argument is that it doesn't stack up with what they planned to do in the current year. They planned to cut £17 for every £18 the government is cutting. It is very convenient and opportunistic for him to pretend that they weren't going to do this now because he can then use that as a stick to beat the government with. What he also doesn't have to say is how they would have had to react to the Greek debt crisis that arose on the eve of the general election.
No one denies the needs for cuts - well I hope not and those cuts were never going to be popular, but that's only half the equation, you need to invest as well. That was the approach taken by Darling in 2009/2010 and it was working. You'd expect a bounce after a recession, which we were getting, but Osborne frittered that away by cutting Darling's spending plans just as they were having some effect.
I think he means debt financing to kick start things into functioning again -but for this to happen markets would presumuably need to be suspended first to avoid meltdown. A drastic option amongst other drastic options but this crisis if not solved globaly could take us to drastic options.
As for Ball's policy -the labour party did always state the need to be flexible and make growth your target and driver and they did predict the real risk of a double dip which people chose to forget now.
Well I saw economic forecasts well before the last GE which foretold of a double dip recession. Many economists and financial soothsayers saw this ahead. My view is that Balls saw it as well, and not being in charge, could stick his tattered flag into the "don't cut too deep" hill of opportunism so that he could claim that high ground when the inevitable occured.
As BFR said, the economy the Conservative led government got was coming off life support, the growth figures were going in the right direction, but then it couldn't handle the levels of austerity, and the constant talking down of the British economy by Osbourne and Cameron, we were, and have never been anything like Greece, but people brought it, and stopped spending/investing.
In response to Bing, Which is what will happen if we start threatening approaches that would exclude their influence going forwards. But some of these are protectionist and some would say 'unthinkable'. Its a bit like the nukes though - have them and be willing to use them so they never have to be used.
The key to Marshall plan though which, I would argue wasn't as Keynsian as you claim, is that it wasn't a loan so didn't saddle Germany and Japan with debt burdens that dragged us down. As you know Keynes tried to get the Yanks to gift us the money we needed. They refused and that resulted in a loan of about half of what we needed.
............
Whether they were loans or gifts is irrelevant - they worked by investing in the respective nation's economies and that is the effect that I was referring to, it'd be interesting to compare where both nations are now if they didn't have Marshall Aid. Perhaps an unfair question as it involves unknowns, but you can compare Germany's post WWII economic performance with their post WWI economy when any hope of an economic revival was snuffed out by having to fork out large amounts of money in war reparations. That in itself is as good an example of the practical consequences of austerity v Keynesianism as you will ever find.
MA also had two further objectives, it was designed not just to rebuild German/Japanese economies but to in so doing to provide an effective bulwark against Soviet expansionism into western Europe and Asia, that worked and also it gave the US two massive markets to flog their wares to just as millions of men were returning to work after being demobbed. It's a feature of most wars that they leave a recession in their wake as the economy transitions back to peacetime production. MA therefore acted as a stimulus on the US as well and was the basis of US global economic dominance from then on.
Other than for about two years of my working life (pre kids etc), i've not been able to afford to add to the 5% of my salary my firm pay into a pension so my pension will be utter pants but I still support what the public sector unions are doing. When all is said and done, the tories are just using this financial situation to vindictively reduce the public sector. Put a super tax on the bankers, pay off your mortgage Cameron instead of using your cheap governmental mortgage rate to maximise your finances whilst collecting rent and then we can start looking at making savings further down the tree. 'We're all in this together' - utter guff. The Tories have made a complete balls up of getting us out of this recession and until we stop relying on the city, we can't stop relying on borrowing in order to stimulate growth. Put a stop to the immoral earnings and financial confidence tricks in the city and get back to the real world. Then, we may all have a bit more faith that we're all in this together.
Well said Dan - the system we had worked as long as people didn't get too greedy but that is one thing you can't stop human beings being! We need an alternative as the people responsible for breaking it are still awarding themselves obscene pay rises and bonuses. Blackforest was right about Germany -they made it work because the made sure everybody got something -this country has been run on the principle of the haves and the have nots- remember the have nots are a useful source of cheap labour! A rebalancing is needed and the tories are not the party to make that happen. not sure labour are either to be fair but the people in the country can make them.
Other than for about two years of my working life (pre kids etc), i've not been able to afford to add to the 5% of my salary my firm pay into a pension so my pension will be utter pants but I still support what the public sector unions are doing. When all is said and done, the tories are just using this financial situation to vindictively reduce the public sector. Put a super tax on the bankers, pay off your mortgage Cameron instead of using your cheap governmental mortgage rate to maximise your finances whilst collecting rent and then we can start looking at making savings further down the tree. 'We're all in this together' - utter guff. The Tories have made a complete balls up of getting us out of this recession and until we stop relying on the city, we can't stop relying on borrowing in order to stimulate growth. Put a stop to the immoral earnings and financial confidence tricks in the city and get back to the real world. Then, we may all have a bit more faith that we're all in this together.
But if you over tax the bankers until they leave the UK and cause hundreds of thousands of job losses and reduce the tax revenue by, literally, billions of pounds each year.
The only way we can replace the banking sector is to manufacture, and in order to be able to compete with China and India we would need to find employees that will do a 60 hour week for about £20. Either that or we'd need to devalue the pound to the point that we couldn't import anything.
Blimey - this is getting complicated. I didn't realise we had so many members of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee signed up to CL.
On reflection, some of the fault lies right at the BoE's door. If they'd concentrated on keeping inflation low by raising interest rates, savers could have spent more, (there are more savers than mortgagors), the value of the pound would have risen because overseas investors would have been attracted to the higher interest rates and the price of everything we buy including fuel would be less, so growth would have improved. Still the Governor of the BoE is a Villa supporter so what do you expect?
I suppose we will all have different views and there are different paths you can follow. A lot are multi national decisions and won't be made until we face total oblivion. It is good to liken the country's situation to football -something we can all relate to - there was a lot of talk on here last season about having a plan B and that is something this government hasn't got. That is because it has come out and told everybody its tactics in advance of the game and said it would not be changing them whatever happened. So we were 3-0 down at half time when they brought on McCormack! Now with 15 minutes to go, they are introducing Anyinsah for Benson. BWP has been kept on the bench!
Good luck to all hardworking employees who are sacrificing a days pay for a cause they full understand and believe in.
Personally, I dont agree with taxpayers funding pension schemes for one section of society.
The cost paying approx. 2 million pensioners belonging to the various public sector schemes was £19.3bn in 2008/09.
of this amount £14.9bn was funded by the taxpayer and around £4.4 by employees.
Just like i dont agree with taxpayers bailing out banks or governments forcing businesses to take over debt ridden carcasses.
Very worried about the euro and how much its possible demise could cost the country. (not pro or for euro. Just know this could be expensive to all)
Very worried about the lack of credit/support for many viable small businesses and their employees.
Delighted CAFC are top at christmas.
Regards TWAT
I also presume you deduct an appropriate % from every other bill you ever get or is it okay to contribute to the pensions available in the private sector? Maybe knock 10% off your energy bill or only pay 95% when you fill the car up as we can't have Shell employees getting a pension can we?
It's called paying for the services you get but for some reason a large part of the UK public cannot grasp that point.
An example was grammar schools. Rather than try and improve other schools to aspire to the level of grammar schools Red Labour, Blue Labour and Yellow Labour got rid of them in most areas.
Private health works very well for those who can afford it or haven't had an illness previously yet Red and Yellow Labour say abolish private health rather than work to raise the NHS to those standards.
Bit off the point but Margaret Thatcher closed more grammar schools than any other education secretary. It's precisely the selection process for grammar school that caused the other schools to be less successful. Grammars have zilch support among the teachers I meet as a governor in the primary and secondary sector. But I accept they are fine if you only care about a quarter of the kids.
A little bit disingenuous Airman if you don't mind my saying!
You know as well as I do that when Thatcher was Education Secretary Local Authorities (eg ILEA) had far more autonomy than subsequently. Labour authorities abolished the grammars whereas (some) Tory authorities in areas like Kent, Buckinghamshire and Gloucestershire kept them and they survive today although Cameron has threatened them.
I am no defender of the Conservative Party. In my opinion we live in a one party state beholden to the diktakts of the EU which periodically rebrands itself red, blue or blue and yellow to convince the sheeple that they still have democratic rights. Hence my use of terms like Red, Blue and Yellow Labour.
There is some truth in your point about local discretion within LEAs, but my understanding is that the 1970-74 Conservative government did intervene to prevent the Labour-controlled Bexley council of the time abolishing Bexley's remaining grammar schools. This was down to Heath, as local MP as well as PM, rather than Thatcher, but the point is that local discretion only existed because central government allowed it. Later governments removed it.
ILEA was a different kind of animal but it did not include the outer London authorities, where the LEA was the local council.
I understand your views on the EU but I think you are mistaken about the extent of its jurisdiction, which is why it is not a defining issue for most voters. The EU doesn't determine our income tax rates, oversee our health service, determine our education system, control our transport infrastructure, local government or, to get back to the point, decide our pensions, among other things. Indeed, I would argue the bankers and credit rating agencies having more influence and they are even less accountable.
That isn't to say the EU is wonderful, that domestic politicians have always been straightforward about it or that what it is becoming is what it was presented as initially. But I think it is too convenient a scapegoat.
Comments
We need to borrow to invest, not to pay bills, that is the basis of Keynsianism.
Get people working, earning and through that paying into the economy again by buying stuff and paying tax etc. What Cameron/Osborne haven't understood is the psychological knock-on effects of austerity. If people think they might lose their jobs they reduce spending and companies in turn reduce their investment, it all becomes a self-fulfiling prophecy. We tried this in the '80s when they cut their political teeth as Thatcher's children what we failed to understand as a nation then and they are failing understand now is that she only made her brand of economic lunacy work by plundering North Sea oil revenues. Unfortunately we blew that once in a lifetime opportunity on monetarist economics and have been suffering ever since. You don't achieve growth by cutting investment.
how much of the current national debt is down to the bank bail outs, and how much of that are we likely to get back?
we have a deficit of course but how much of that is due to recession, and large scale unemployment and its impacts
Balls argument i guess is that under them unemployment wouldn't be as high, and wouldn't have hit high street spending, and tax revenues as badly
..................
I'm not sure I agree with that, there were many other reasons why the UK declined, before 1939 a great deal of our economy was built on heavy industries - shipbuilding for example as we had at that time the biggest navy in the world (by design). However other nations caught up and inefficient manufacturing saw too many yards get shut down in order to maintain production at profitable yards.
After 1945 Germany and Japan caught up and over-took us, the role of Marshall Plan aid in that cannot be under-estimated and what was that if it wasn't a gigantic bit of Keynesian economics? They took that money and invested in modern manufacturing with economies of scale, coincidentally they invested heavily in education and gave the workers good pensions. So how is that Germany which pays far better pensions than the UK isn't and doesn't have the same history of turbulent labour relations? The answer is long but essentially they made sure that everyone got something - the industrialists were able to benefit from investment and access to markets and could develop industries of scale to give them access to international markets and the clout to compete, the workers got good earnings, pensions and everyone got an education system that aimed to turn out people with the right sort of skills that suited the needs of both the individual and the economy.
Nothing outrageous there, just sensible planning and foresight.
As for Ball's policy -the labour party did always state the need to be flexible and make growth your target and driver and they did predict the real risk of a double dip which people chose to forget now.
No one denies the needs for cuts - well I hope not and those cuts were never going to be popular, but that's only half the equation, you need to invest as well. That was the approach taken by Darling in 2009/2010 and it was working. You'd expect a bounce after a recession, which we were getting, but Osborne frittered that away by cutting Darling's spending plans just as they were having some effect.
The key to Marshall plan though which, I would argue wasn't as Keynsian as you claim, is that it wasn't a loan so didn't saddle Germany and Japan with debt burdens that dragged us down. As you know Keynes tried to get the Yanks to gift us the money we needed. They refused and that resulted in a loan of about half of what we needed.
............
Whether they were loans or gifts is irrelevant - they worked by investing in the respective nation's economies and that is the effect that I was referring to, it'd be interesting to compare where both nations are now if they didn't have Marshall Aid. Perhaps an unfair question as it involves unknowns, but you can compare Germany's post WWII economic performance with their post WWI economy when any hope of an economic revival was snuffed out by having to fork out large amounts of money in war reparations. That in itself is as good an example of the practical consequences of austerity v Keynesianism as you will ever find.
MA also had two further objectives, it was designed not just to rebuild German/Japanese economies but to in so doing to provide an effective bulwark against Soviet expansionism into western Europe and Asia, that worked and also it gave the US two massive markets to flog their wares to just as millions of men were returning to work after being demobbed. It's a feature of most wars that they leave a recession in their wake as the economy transitions back to peacetime production. MA therefore acted as a stimulus on the US as well and was the basis of US global economic dominance from then on.
Insulting comment to millions of hardworking people. Twat.
Blimey - this is getting complicated. I didn't realise we had so many members of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee signed up to CL.
On reflection, some of the fault lies right at the BoE's door. If they'd concentrated on keeping inflation low by raising interest rates, savers could have spent more, (there are more savers than mortgagors), the value of the pound would have risen because overseas investors would have been attracted to the higher interest rates and the price of everything we buy including fuel would be less, so growth would have improved. Still the Governor of the BoE is a Villa supporter so what do you expect?
Good luck to all hardworking employees who are sacrificing a days pay for a cause they full understand and believe in.
Personally, I dont agree with taxpayers funding pension schemes for one section of society.
The cost paying approx. 2 million pensioners belonging to the various public sector schemes was £19.3bn in 2008/09.
of this amount £14.9bn was funded by the taxpayer and around £4.4 by employees.
Just like i dont agree with taxpayers bailing out banks or governments forcing businesses to take over debt ridden carcasses.
Very worried about the euro and how much its possible demise could cost the country. (not pro or for euro. Just know this could be expensive to all)
Very worried about the lack of credit/support for many viable small businesses and their employees.
Delighted CAFC are top at christmas.
Regards TWAT
I also presume you deduct an appropriate % from every other bill you ever get or is it okay to contribute to the pensions available in the private sector? Maybe knock 10% off your energy bill or only pay 95% when you fill the car up as we can't have Shell employees getting a pension can we?
It's called paying for the services you get but for some reason a large part of the UK public cannot grasp that point.
There is some truth in your point about local discretion within LEAs, but my understanding is that the 1970-74 Conservative government did intervene to prevent the Labour-controlled Bexley council of the time abolishing Bexley's remaining grammar schools. This was down to Heath, as local MP as well as PM, rather than Thatcher, but the point is that local discretion only existed because central government allowed it. Later governments removed it.