Another Cameron bungle – on spending cuts
Money: David Cameron’s tool of oppression.
David Cameron can’t get anything right, can he?
The Guardian has announced that he has been trying to mislead the public on the proportion of his planned austerity-led spending cuts that he has already enacted, in order to make it seem that the worst is over.
The newspaper put it a little more diplomatically than that, saying he “got his sums wrong” (and this is the party that most people trust to look after the economy? People are strange) – but we know that Cameron is perfectly aware of where his cuts programme stands and what it is doing, don’t we?
The report has it that Cameron reckons he’ll have imposed four-fifths of the cuts on us by the general election – but the Institute for Fiscal Studies, having examined the figures, said he has not imposed even half of what he has planned.
Cameron said he’ll have made £100 billion worth of “savings” – the IFS says this is hugely inaccurate, and it is more likely that just £23 billion has been cut.
More interestingly, Cameron said the next Parliament (if the Tories are elected) will see a further £25 billion of “savings”. In fact, according to the IFS, he means a further £28 billion of cuts.
Let’s pause for a moment to get our terminology right. Cameron wants us to think he is making “savings” because that implies that services are unaffected – but we know that this is not true. The more accurate description is “cuts”, because he is reducing the services provided using taxpayers’ money wherever he can. Look at your local council and the cuts it is making; those are being dictated by David Cameron. Look at the restrictions that have been imposed on taxpayer-funded social security benefits – both in terms of eligibility and the amount being provided; they are also being dictated by Cameron. He is cutting – not saving.
Now consider the drastic effects of the cuts that have been imposed so far – the way social housing tenants have been terrorised with the Bedroom Tax; the persecution of the physically and mentally ill with the humiliating work capability assessment; the humbling of the English health service that has fallen from its highest satisfaction ratings ever to closed Accident & Emergency departments, inaccessible GPs and faceless Clinical Commissioning Groups who refuse to fund basic medicines for patients.
Tens of thousands of people are dead now, who would have been alive if David Cameron had never become prime minister.
And he wants to increase the agony by more than double.
Oh, but look – here’s why it’s all right: He has cut income tax by £10.5 billion! So we’re all better-off, then. Right?
Wrong. The national debt has nearly doubled since Cameron came to office and the deficit is rising, due to the Tories’ incompetent mishandling of the economy.
Most people are £1,600 worse-off per year. It is only the very rich who are better-off. Their incomes have doubled since Cameron came to office. Does anybody remember him saying he would spread the burden of austerity equally? Another lie.
If you take the average income as £26,000, then £1,600 is around 6.1 per cent of it. That’s what we have lost, every year, on average. The richest one per cent of the population has enjoyed an income increase of 50 per cent.
To my way of thinking, that means these people owe the UK 56.1 per cent of their incomes over the past five years, to bring them into line with the rest of us.
Is Cameron going to make them pay? The proposition seems doubtful. Is he going to make up the shortfall from his own fortune, then?
As British citizens, we are owed that money. It won’t bring back the dead, but it might help stop any more money-driven fatalities.
And we need it now.
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It’s funny how cuts for the better off mean lower taxes but cuts for the rest of us means a reduction in the services our taxes still fund.
I have tried my up most! To believe in the power that is suppose to be in our “Heavens” above’ Yet knowing? dose a god exist. I have prayed and prayed’ and again; to no avail; The Tory mantra are still alive’ to plunder and steal. Maybe i need to re-read the bible again’ to see if i have missed something on “Equality” and treating your fellow man as “Equals. Tory Scum.
The Tories are copying the EU and what it has done to Greece, to destroy its economy and leave its people penniless. Not even 80 per cent of austerity cuts have yet hit UK.
Resurrect Guy Fawkes we need him!!! This time he wouldn’t be fitted up!!
Cameron really is a huge idiot. He is Bungle, with George as his side kick, and Jeffery so we need to find a zippy – how about zipping up IDS and then we have the whole of Rainbow.
I’m sick and tired of the lot of them and May 2015 can’t come quick enough for me!
All this government seems to care about is putting as much money into rich people’s hands as possible, whilst impoverishing everybody else and ruining or even ending disabled people’s lives and stoking prejudice.
The coalition also unfairly taxed the poor in round-about ways. For example the coalition first gave councils the right to raise money more independently, then cut their central grant before encouraging local authorities to make everybody liable to pay a portion of the local Council Tax, even those who beforehand had been exempted because they were too poor to meet such costs, e.g., the unemployed. So the poorest citizens living on the lowest of low benefits suddenly began to get billed for 25% of their local Council Tax which they have to meet from devaluing benefits (increasing by a below inflation 1% and so suffering a large real-terms cut year on year) which were never designed or had been adjusted to meet such costs.
It’s the rich what gets the pleasure and the poor what gets the pain.
The man is totally deluded corrupt and essentially evil, what the hell is he doing in the top seat of power. How has the British public allowed this to happen I thought this could only happen in third world countries like Nigeria or Rwanda what has gone so badly wrong with the UK? Are the British population so blind to what is actually going on? They are selling off everything our parents fought for and the poor are being left destitute and dying by the day are we so blind as to what is happening under our noses? If we don’t wake up to this soon we will be controlled by the US financial giants.
The infamous cuts have led directly to thousands of disabled people losing their benefits, then clogging up the courts with their appeals; many have finally won and had their benefits repaid. The amount of clerical time at DWP and its agents, at local council housing benefit and council tax departments, the amount of time for doctors and others to provide reports and evidence to back up each disabled person’s appeal means that most of the “savings” are swallowed up in massively increased bureaucratic and legal costs. This is a government of buffle-headed dandiprats: tick-box bureaucratic buffoons who decide people’s state by a tick in a box. To a bureaucrat a tick leads to an action and the job is done and money saved. Bureaucrats, like Vogons, don’t care about the consequences of their actions, they tick the box and all is well.
But when the result of tick-box mentality leads to 11,000 deaths, and when survivors appeal and their costs rise to undermine the “savings”, normal people can see there is a problem – but our bureacrats, especially a thick public school bully like Camoron, are convinced that all is well, and carry on with their PR and dogma.
Unfortunately the one party, Labour, that could make a start on redressing the balance here is notably silent. In fact they have indicated that they intend to continue with the Tories policy with one or two minor exceptions.
Sadly the Tory propaganda machine is in overdrive and even those most affected are, like turkeys at Christmas, it seems prepared to vote for wore of the same.
What I would like to know is what is the target for the bottom so that we will know that the race to it over and we can all take a rest?
Dammit, Chris, Labour does NOT intend to continue Tory policy! Stop regurgitating that old misreading!
Labour plans to enact its own policies while keeping within the spending limits – that’s all – that the Coalition government has set for itself. This is in order to disprove Tory claims that Labour is the party of overspending.
The Tory propaganda machine is in overdrive and you have just helped it along.
The cuts have lead to underfunded hospitals downgrading of services closures of A/E departments, now given that you need a healthy workforce where is the sense in that?
Cameron is a pathological liar, there is no lie big enough that he won’t tell.
They are asset srtipping Britain, they are also trying to sell off the Forest of Dean again after they vowed they wouldn’t.
I find it particularly repugnant the way he always uses his dead son as a defence against attacks for his treatment of the disabled.
Remember the way he trotted his son out to the cameras, saying how he loved the NHS, Nye Bevan never said a truer word than to describe Tories like this as lower than vermin.
Don’t get angry Mike. He is only doing the same thing you do to UKIP
Who says I’m angry?