Monthly Archives: May 2010

The latest polls reveal a muddle. By a large margin now people do not want a hung Parliament. They seem to accept that the UK needs a government which can get to work on sorting out the many problems which are obvious to most observers. Yet those same polls suggest a hung Parliament is a [...]

Roughly Labour has aded a million extra employees to the public payroll since taking power. Overall it employs around 6 million state employees. To be able to pay all the wages without ending up in a Greek type mess, we need to reduce these numbers in a sensible way. Let us assume 1 million of [...]

As I have often mentioned on this website, the biggest single current budget in Whitehall is the welfare budget. (£200 billion). It’s the one Labour rarely talks about, and does little to manage downwards. I am all in favour of generous treatment of the very ill, the disabled and the disadvantaged. I also wish to [...]

So far the UK appears to have come off lightly compared to Greece. This is owing to the huge devaluation in the UK currency, which means a lot of the hit on living standards which Greece is now taking from wage cuts is happening in the UK from surging import prices and a rate of [...]

Yesterday I wrote about the scope to save billions on the capital budget. A few wrote in to say it was not enough. Of course it isn’t enough. I am writing another series of pieces on the actions a new government could take to get us out of huge deficit. Just read it day by [...]

In the next few days I am going to seek to fill the blackhole in Labour and Lib Dem spending plans by reviewing again what needs to be done to bring public spending more into line with revenue. There is one area were Labour has proposed large cuts in public spending where I agree – [...]